The day is still etched in memory. The year was 1998. As an enthusiastic fresher to college, I had stayed back to attend the last class in economics, curbing my hunger for another hour. Midway through the class, we heard a gunshot. Within seconds, a group of boys entered the classroom and dragged one of my classmates outside. I didn’t know him well, but the sudden violence terrified me. Our professor did not flinch, even a bit. He just continued with the class.The next day’s newspapers reported the murder. The police raided the sprawling campus of the 144-year old Patna College, one of the oldest colleges in the country, and recovered a few locally made firearms from one of its hostels. I slowly came to terms with this shock. The 144-year-old Patna College had an illustrious history and is housed in a 17th-century red-brick building, built by the Dutch. The very fact that my favourite Hindi poet, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, had once attended this very institution was a great attraction for me. Grandfather, a founder member of one of the oldest law colleges in the state, had even said that he would be very proud if I could secure my honours degree in literature from here. So when I got admission into Patna College, I was thrilled — although dad was not. Once in the college, I quickly learnt to live with a few uncomfortable constraints: for instance, one should never, even accidentally, wander near the hostels. The Kali temple premises by the Ganges were out of bounds once afternoon set in. And, most certainly, if one ever chose to sit on the promenades built alongside the century-old passage, with its innumerable dome-shaped mini-porches leading to the playgrounds, one stood in danger of being labelled truants.The recent murder on the campus of Aligarh Muslim University brought the memory of Patna College back to me. It came as a reminder of what degeneration in great old institutions of learning can really mean.
