By Sneha Rajaram
Bangaloreans have known for a while about the bizarre “separate staircases” for boys and girls in MES college. But Farook college in Kozhikode has outclassed us by light years: as of this month, only boys are allowed to sit on the college’s spiffy new outdoor benches. They even carry a sign saying “Only Boys Can Sit Here”. Needless to say, the students aren’t happy.
But what is it about girls sitting on benches that’s so obscene? We all know that for the Mumbai police, private indecency is public indecency, so we have to figure that the world has changed its definition of public indecency and left us far behind.
Ooh wait. Maybe it’s not the girls sitting on benches, maybe it’s the girls sitting with boys on benches. I remember this one time in my KG or LKG class – I must’ve been three or four years old – when I started a game with the boy next to me on my bench: he’d sit on my lap, then get off, then I’d sit on his, then get off, and then he’d sit on mine again, ad nauseam. We thought it was screamingly funny and went on at lightning speed until the teacher wordlessly plucked him off my lap and carried him off to sit on her desk.
I suppose it is this kind of behaviour that colleges must be terrified of. Can’t pluck a 19 year old off another 19 year old’s lap without a crane – and where’s the room for a crane in the college budget? Besides, where would the crane deposit said 19 year old? There’s only one set of benches, after all. It would all be too complicated. Better to keep the girls indoors or make them leave campus, rather than the pure anarchy that would result from them sitting around. Apparently sitting on benches is the new spearhead of The Revolution.