The Gen(d)eration Gap.

Imagine being in an institution that believes all males are out to get every other female in the vicinity and the only way they could stop them is by being a not-so-co-ed anymore college. Yes, this is the dismal state of a score of engineering colleges in and around the city. My college does no such thing. The men and women are already at loggerheads. Blasphemous as the principle may sound, the measures they adopt to keep this strategy going will give you a taste of how extraordinarily clever the faculty here is like. Oh, so that's how they cut down on the count of all those love marriages in the city. Nip it in the bud. Kudos! Difference is, now men seem to have begun to look for women in other 'normal' colleges or sadly grown to become icons of singularity. Here's how they go about it. Women : The supposedly delicate fragile souls made of glass and rose petals, who just got teleported from Heaven's north end. Men : Hideous heartless women-loving, correction women-Only loving greyhounds who are ready to risk anything to woo a woman. I cannot deny the fact that there are men of that category, the ones with stunted brain growth, compensated by the size of their mustaches and who sit on low-lying walls and whistle at every woman who walks by and thinking one would actually reciprocate, walk up to them and express their undying love. Unfortunately their cheeks go red by then, and they become bait to a host of swear words and they eventually give up on their Machiavellian exercise.

Here's a quick list of the measures they adopt to pull down boy-girl interaction in the campus.

1. Reduce the number of breaks you get during the day. If one class is done, make sure you keep screwing the children before you see the next teacher waiting outside. Now Re-screw!

2. If a boy and a girl are found talking, call them for a disciplinary meeting. Warn them that if this happens again, their parents will be called. (Yes yes, I know you're rolling on the floor now, but we do have parent-teacher meetings in colleges here. This is to bridge the gap between the student and the teacher. Oh damn you, if that were your ambition, spare the darned women for us!)

3. Make sure that there are regular patrols to check for cross-gender interaction during class hours. If found, Attack!

4. Always have club meetings and cultural fests supervised by teachers. Put boys at the far back, so they can hoot. Put women in the front end. Faculty sit in the middle. No no, it cannot be the other way round. Because the boys will be able to turn around and see the women then. They should only be able to see their backs and that too beyond the drum sizes of their teachers if they try.

5. Men and women walk in separate files. Sit separately. Eat separately. Bathrooms are placed at either ends or on different floors. Most importantly, staff rooms should be placed at crucial locations between bathrooms. There is no sparing anyone here. This is war.

If this is not enough there are various other small-scale methods done to make sure men and women feel that its wiser they plot methods to rob the World Bank than try conversing in institutional premises. After all, we are not being observed, we are being Tracked! Fighting this killing spree, there were groups of men and women who got together in the weekends in places far far away from college and planned ways to converse in college. They found the bus-stand a probable spot because the staff concentration there was low. (My college did that only now.) Unfortunately for them, drivers were spies. Meet the parents! Again! They thought they could speak during their sports hours. Men and women were assigned different grounds. What could the children do? They did the one thing they could do best. Panicked. They tried to rise to the occasion and get back at the semi-barbaric staff members. One Guevara got suspended. The rest of them were never found again.

The Great Wall of Chennai
This is a famous story in the south. If you haven't heard of it yet, you're missing something. A college down here went to the very extreme by putting up a wall between the corridor and classified the left side for men and right side for women. This is so because they believed the men might step on the dupattas of the women and make fun of them. For the love of God, if the men were this jobless, they would have passed. Thus it so became that men and women go to the same class, traversing different paths and under the supervision of different teachers and so discipline and decorum prevailed and all was well again and all the teachers lived happily ever after. The students on the other hand, grew longer hair and formed rebel groups to fight back. Maybe they are still fighting to this day. My heart goes out to them.

-Supermur.