citygritty

Home safe homeHave you switched off the lights, turned off the tap and the gas? These are simple precautions that you need to take before...

Home safe home
Have you switched off the lights, turned off the tap and the gas? These are simple precautions that you need to take before you leave home. Yet how often in our busy lives do we forget to follow them. To ensure that you do remember them, the Vidya Sahakari Bank has come up with the novel idea of distributing stickers with the simple instructions entitled Gharabaher janyapurvi (Before you leave home).

Says Chief Executive Officer, Vinod Sadhu, “The stickers are a form of social service. We hope these stickers which we have been distributing to our clients, staffers and others will prove useful to them. This sticker if put up on the inside of the front door will serve as a quick reminder to people in a hurry to leave home.” Now these are instructions you can bank upon, right?

Light their fir
eIf there’s no smoke without fire, what was the uproar at the Symbiosis College on July 14 all about ? On that day around 50 activists of the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS) stormed into the Symbiosis college canteen around noon. The ire of the BVS, a student outfit of the Shiv Sena, was directed against the college canteen which stocked cigarettes.“Selling cigarettes in the college canteen and smoking them on the campus is illegal.

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When we found that cigarettes were being openly sold in the canteen and students smoking in the the canteen we apprised the college authorities of it in August last year and again in January this year. The college authorities assured us that they would look into the matter but nothing was done.” Finally on July 14, the BVS decided that it was time to take action.

Members of the BVS headed by Shedge went to the Symbiosis college canteen and seized cigarettes being sold loose and in packets and proceeded to the Symbiosis director’s office.“Although he was away at the time we informed him on telephone of our decision to burn the cigarettes to which he had no objection,” says Shedge. Cigarettes worth about Rs 1000 went up in smoke in front of the office and in the presence of the registrar, Arun Mudbidri.

“We were joined by the registrar in exhorting the students to give up smoking which is injurious to health. The college authorities have assured us that henceforth cigarettes will not be sold in the college canteen,” he says. Dr S B Mujumdar, director, Symbiosis college concurred with the action taken by the BVS. “I agree with the stand of the BVS. We had already made our buildings smoke-free zones. However, although smoking cigarettes is injurious to health I am not aware of any rule which says that selling them in the college canteen is illegal. If we stoppedthe sale of cigarettes at our college canteen, students would go to the nearby NCC canteen ” he says. The exercise seems to have borne results after all, with the director confirming that cigarettes will not be sold in the college canteen.

Starting young
With a spate of beauty contests hitting town these days it seems that catching ’em young seems to be the catch word. With every celebrity in town seen zipping around to college campuses to meet awe-struck teenagers promoting some product or the other it seems that Pune just might prove to be the next fashion capital of India. Lymraina D’Souza, Miss India Universe 1998 seems to have met this challenge head on – she distributed headbands and invitations for the Pepsi-Black Cadillac Queen ’98 at a city college recently.