Temple of Learning: St. Stephen

St. Stephen's college, New Delhi, India: Here it’s all sparkling & emerald red bricked structure, with English speaking folks, supposed to be India’s best, established in 1881 by the Cambridge Mission in response to Government policy promoting education. St.Stephen college is one of the nation’s very best institute. Getting admittance into this college is some task
with cut-off percentage increasing every year.

Doorway to the chapel: Here you may assume you are in a century-old English garrison. Not factual, the construction is as new as New Delhi, constructed during the 40s. Don't be disillusioned. Continue hovering aimlessly. At St Stephen's, distinct to other Delhi colleges, anyone can go in, amble around, and lounge down on the grass. Yes, even stroll down the hallway. No predicament. But don't ogle at the classroom aperture. Harangue may be taking place. Studious & snobbish folks: Nonetheless, if nearby is a vacant hall, tread in. The unfilled bench and the portrayal of dead professors make the environs as hushed as a... well,
tomb If that's not spooky enough, try this: at the ground is an old well, now safe and sound inside a rounded construction. Gaze through the filthy casement and you will locate stairway going downstairs.

Corridor of wisdom: Having produced from Presidents (Fakhrudiin Al Ahmed, Zia-ul-Haq) to top journalists (Barkha Dutt, Sagarika Ghose), from sports person (Jaspal Rana, Kirti Azad) to writers (Khuswant Singh, Shashi Tharoor) it still continues to give gives India some of its best citizens. (See wikipedia LIST of famous Stephen’s alumni)Play time: I fully revere the stringent selection criteria employed by the college, which makes sure the high quality of our student intake

At the same time, I recognize that St. Stephen's has always understood that some of the most important elements of our edification occur in college outside the classroom, and that the remarkable young all-rounder with 92% marks is often a worthier Stephanian than the swat with 95 per cent. The Principal himself had authored an article titled `Marks Can't Be the Sole Indicator of Merit' on the St. Stephen's College web site (www.ststephens.edu). Someone St. Stephen's should be proud to admit; to turn him down over a few percentage points was folly indeed. At the same time St. Stephen's was, astoundingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a extraordinary extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what version of religious faith you espoused. But at St. Stephen's, religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were "in residence" or a "dayski" (day-scholar), a "science type" or a "ShakSoc type", a sportsman or a univ topper (or best of all, both). Caste and creed was no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian knowledge.

Some fun : College's snobbery was still elitism in an Indian context, although one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Cam side to the dry dust plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj.

The bright red brick structure: St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, staged avant-garde plays and wrote execrable poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned Practical Joke Competition (in memory of P.G. Warehouse’s irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the "Winter Festival" of collegiate cultural competition which was imitated at universities across the country

Harmony- college feast: Invariably reached the annual inter-college cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabridgian "gyps" to serve their meals and make their beds.

Fashion parade in Harmony: And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (whose typing mistakes, under the impish editorship of Ramu Damodaran, were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious.)