| |
I reached Cambridge on Sunday, 1st August 2004, full of awe, initial
apprehension, aspiration and excitement. After registering at Lady Mitchell
Hall, collecting the itinerary for the following two weeks and my student
identity card, I heaved my suitcase all the way up the road to Harvey Court,
my place of residence. There I got my swipe card from the porter, who also
very kindly gave me an extra map of Sidgwick site, which would help me find
my way to all the classes. I slid my card through the swipe lock at the
entrance of Harvey Court, Block A. The big wooden door swung open, and as I
reached out to grasp the handle, I couldn’t help but inhale sharply, as my
heartbeat quickened…I was actually finally at Cambridge... Cambridge!
Something I had never imagined in my wildest dreams to be a possibility.
I entered my room, A14, and loved it
instantly. It was very, very spacious. The walls gave off a gentle glow of
light yellow which combined with cream coloured curtains and tastefully
chosen wooden furniture, would make any interior decorator agree that the
job was one well done. The bed was pushed against the wall, with a lovely
big desk opposite it, probably mirroring the routine of the regular students
at Cambridge, who hit their books as soon as they woke up or staggered
straight into bed, exhausted, after burning the midnight oil. Well
thankfully, my tenure turned out far less stressful and far more refreshing
and enriching than that.
As I pulled open the curtains, they revealed
two glass sliding doors, right across the width of my room and a gorgeous
brick red private balcony that beckoned enticingly. I didn’t even bother
resisting the temptation of immediately pulling out a chair from my room and
onto the balcony. I sat there and gazed at the pristine beauty of the
massive gardens beyond, laced with flowers (if I’d taken a summer course in
botany, or on ‘How to Maintain an English Garden’, which was an option, then
I might’ve been able to name some!) and sat there with a smile transfixed on
my face.
Our introductory lecture was supposed to be
the next day. After I had unpacked all my belongings into the walk–in
closet, I sauntered out to see if any other students had checked in. Many
hadn’t, and so I acquainted myself with people from other courses like
Medieval Studies and English Literature, whose courses were still
continuing. Rebecca, an American girl, was kind enough to show me where to
do my laundry, where the internet centres were and where we assembled to go
for dinner. We then went for a quick walk in town to try and catch some good
bargains, as there were many sales on then.
At first, feeling a bit fatigued after a day
long travel, I didn’t feel upto going into town, which I thought would be
the quintessential ‘noisy, riddled with overflowing traffic and pollution’
town. But I was greatly mistaken. As we cut across the sprawling meadows of
King’s College, crossed the arched bridge over the river Cam dotted with
individual kayaks and with people punting, clusters of students laughing or
just quietly reading, I felt suddenly energised and recharged in such an
atmosphere. What I loved the most about Cambridge and perhaps what I could
never get enough of was the architecture. As we wound our way towards the
town, through the tiny cobbled lanes, I looked around me in amazement at the
towering church spires, the mammoth concrete spread of the various colleges,
aggrandized with Gothic carvings, the palatial structure of the University
library, when I was told to my further amazement that we had reached the
town centre.
There were quaint little shops in the recesses
of the surrounding architectural splendour, and delightful bookshops with
little cafes, where you could spend the entire day, whisked away from
reality, lost in the clutches of absorbing books. Apart from the ubiquitous
Marks and Spencers and Tescos, there were many designer stores as well, like
Laura Ashley and Hidesign, and lines of little self-owned shops which
sold everything from music to aromatic soaps and creams made locally, to
khadi clothes and bedcovers and junk jewellery, lending an incomparable
vitality to the town.
We headed back quickly, after Becca bought a
few clothes. I was still suffering from price-conversion shocks, which
thankfully wore off after a day, as I realised that I wouldn’t be able to
buy or enjoy anything if I kept doing quick mental calculations into rupees.
We made it just in time for dinner, which was in Gonville and Caius College.
The dining halls were huge domed rooms with the bleak sunlight filtering
through stained glass windows, which had the emblems of all the various
colleges in Cambridge. All along the walls were pictures of the great minds
that this prestigious university had churned out, right from Stephen Hawking
to J.J.Thompson.
Dinner was a three-course affair. As starters,
we got different kinds of bread and butter, with a soup or a mixed salad.
The main meal could be anything from roast duck, to chicken to various kinds
of fish. But what everyone looked forward to were the desserts. On all 14
days of my stay there, the desserts were without exception, delicious. From
Russian Cheesecake, to raisin biscuit pies to flapjacks with warm berry
sauce to crepes with cream, each dessert when placed in front of us did the
disappearing act in a few seconds.
Lest everyone think that my stay there was
just a visual and culinary delight, I will now begin with my academic
experience. The next day before our classes started, we had an introductory
lecture, given by Ms. Susan Ormrod. After being given a few guidelines we
rushed off to class. I had chosen the following courses:
1.) Introducing Psychology: Mind, Mental
Processes and Behaviour.
This was our first class of the day, from 9.00
am till 10.30am.
It was held in the History Faculty and the
course director was Mr. John Lawson.
Like the other two courses, this was also a
very interactive session. We often had to pair up in small groups and
conduct experiments on each other, just to validate the prior established
outcome. It focussed on the various ramifications of human behaviour, and
how mainstream psychology had evolved over the last few decades. More
generally, a number of different perspectives have been developed and their
emphasis on a specific set of concerns and how we now recognise perspectives
such as social psychology, various aberrations of behaviourism, cognitive
psychology, abnormal and developmental psychology were studied. Together
with these approaches we explored a multitude if issues such as
relationships, persuasion, psychobiological processes, sensation and
perception, consciousness, learning, memory, intelligence, motivation,
psychological disorders, therapy, social cognition and social influence.
This course used these different perspectives as a framework within which to
examine the main topic areas within psychology, and was designed to assume
little or no prior knowledge in the subject whatsoever.
2.) Love Among Ruins-Literature and
Psychoanalysis
This was held in the Faculty of Divinity, from
11am –12.30pm.The course director was a very erudite professor, Trudi Tate,
who brought alive each text studied with a great deal of zeal and clever
insight into the subtext of the apparent, surface meaning.
This course looked at the way in which we
interpret written texts, focussing primarily on literary works from the 19th
and 20th centuries along with two Freud case histories. The
authors discussed included Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, D H
Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Tim o’ Brien.
The second half of the lecture would always
entail some group activity be it in terms of drawing logical conclusions to
what the text implied, or play-acting certain parts of the text.
The authors I enjoyed most were Alfred
Tennyson and Katherine Mansfield. A group of us enjoyed the poem, ‘Maud’ by
Tennyson so much that we actually set up a small informal discussion group,
which would congregate every evening at Harvey Gardens, and put a section of
the 30 odd page poem under a critical lens. Everyone would then give their
views on what they thought it meant.
Katherine Mansfield’s short stories revealed
an amazing amount of insight into the female psyche, which the boys in our
class found initially intriguing but later tired of, as their attention
spans contracted after a point, trying in vain to understand the vast, often
contradictory expanse of the way women behaved!
3.) The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism
This was our only evening lecture, from 4.00pm
–5.30 pm held in Newnham College. The course director was a very spiritually
inclined, approachable and generally affable professor, by the name of James
Giles.
He had actually travelled extensively in Japan
and China, trying to trace the course that Buddhism took and understand why
it underwent the transformations it did.
One big mistake that the slightly learned make
is that they are often overconfident of their limited knowledge and
therefore arrive at too presumptuous conclusions. Yes, the villain of the
piece here is me, as I thought that I already knew a lot about Buddhism,
being a regular BSG member myself in India. Since the choices in the third
category were most limited, with the other options being, “How to Maintain
an English Garden,” and Britain’s Economic Policy During the 2nd
World War, none of which I found particularly interesting, I decided to opt
for Zen Buddhism. But it was this course that singularly transformed my
whole outlook to life, opened up new vistas in me, which I never even knew
existed and made me revamp my whole reason for existence into something
joyful and unending. I got much much more than I had bargained for from this
course.
A close examination of Zen Buddhist thought
will show it is based upon a clear philosophical orientation to the nature
of reality and the human condition. The course started with a brief account
of how Buddhist tradition arose in India as a reaction to Vedic and
Upanishadic doctrines concerning the permanence of the self or atma and
moksh, and its final liberation in the return to God or brahma. The doctrine
of sunyata propagated by the Mahayana school of Buddhism-the Madhyamika and
Yogachara schools, and the chain of dependent origination were studied
closely.
The most intriguing questions were thrown up,
like, “What is the self?” And that ‘there is no constant entity called the
self, because the self is reborn every minute.’ So usually, in
disintegrating relationships when people say, “ You are not yourself
anymore,” the truth, though when voiced at that delicate moment might be met
with violence, is that there never was a self, there never was a “you”.
Because if you are you, and if you changes, which happens as a result of the
imprint that everyday circumstances and stimuli leave on you, then you are
no longer you. So the whole idea of the self is looked at from a radically
different angle.
Many Zen philosophers were studied, including,
Lao Tzu, (we read a few translated verses of the “Tao Te Ching”), Dogen,
Hakuin and Bankei.
The main method of propagating enlightenment
is routed through different techniques of meditation. One of them is to
train the mind to achieve a state of being beyond thinking and non-thinking
or Hishiryo. Another is to ponder on baffling questions, called Koans, like
how to raise a pagoda out of a teacup, or what is the sound of one hand
clapping. The idea is to initiate and trigger off intense introspective
spirals, pushing ahead your own inner boundaries, which ultimately leads to
enlightenment.
This was actually the best course that anyone
with an inquisitive mind could hope for, as a space was created where we
could pose all those profound questions on life, that our parents had never
been able to answer satisfactorily, to Mr. James Giles. It’s not as if we
all came away enlightened, but he certainly showed us a path, and that the
answer lay inert in all of us.
For example, one gentleman asked him how the
whole idea of warfare gelled with the whole Buddhist ethos.
Mr. Giles replied that morality becomes a
convention which sometimes puts blinkers on the lateral thought process in
human beings, disabling them from rising above the trap of socially
established concepts of right and wrong. Maybe, the situation was such that
if the Buddhists didn’t enter into warfare, the suffering that would have
ensued as a result of the lack of fighting would have been far greater.
Buddhism was a very practical approach to life, but it offered no direct
answers. You had to struggle within yourself to discover the truth.
Nothing was going to be spoon-fed to you,
because if it were, you wouldn’t attach any value to it.
I could talk about what knowledge I gained
from thus course for the rest of this report, but I must adopt the middle
path and exercise some restraint on my enthusiasm.
Between the literature class and the Zen
Buddhism class, a few of us would generally grab a sandwich or two from the
Buttery, which was the local bakery. The afternoon would be spent either
lying sprawled out of on the lawns of Lady Mitchell Ground, or in your room
reading up a bit for the next day’s scheduled text. But it was most often
the former, because I had thankfully already read up all the prescribed
books.
There were a host of options to choose what
you wanted to occupy yourself with in the evenings: concerts for the
musically inclined, lectures for the academically inclined, plays for those
who were thespians at heart and pubs for all.
I attended a few very well conducted, engaging
evening lectures, which were on a very diverse range of topics, ranging
from, “Undressing Mr.Darcy” to “Was Hamlet Fat” to the “History of the
Aztecs”. As the days passed, I became addicted to punting and so you’d very
rarely find me frequenting any more lectures in Lady Mitchell Hall. I have
to say that people from all age groups attended this summer school, and the
ones who attended the evening lectures were very rarely below the age of
25.Perhaps a purely defensive sentence on my behalf, necessitated by guilt,
but one I thought I’d include nonetheless.
After going for our last class for the day,
which finished at 5.30pm, we usually hung out with our Zen Buddhism teacher,
just for a brainstorming session on profound yet baffling questions, which
he answered with great ease, thus reflecting his in-depth knowledge of the
subject and hence life. After walking back to Harvey Court and dropping our
books, we’d rush off to dinner and then meet our friends who were staying at
Selwyn college (which had a television in the common room where we watched
the opening ceremony of the Olympics), or Newnham College, which had a pub
where people played pool, the guitar or the fool, or congregate in Harvey
Gardens, in “our spot”. This place reserved exclusively by us, for a few of
us, was around a small feeble tree with just a few leaves dangling on it.
We’d usually sit around and sing songs. By the time our stay was over, there
were very few leaves left on it!
We also went on a locally conducted ghost
tour, which frightened the daylights out of us, as it took us to all the
spots in various colleges and churches and restaurants that were supposedly
haunted. On another evening, we walked down to the local movie theatre and
saw, “Fahrenheit 9/11” which sparked off a lot of anti-Bush sentiments in
us, but triggered off a lot of counterarguments from the American students,
but all was taken sportingly.
On the one weekend that I spent in Cambridge,
I worked on my paper that I was being evaluated on. Many students went on
weekend excursions, but I chose not too. There was enough to see in the
university itself. A Filipino friend, who was staying in a suite, called us
over on Sunday. He made the most delicious and healthy vegetarian food I’ve
ever had. We spent a nice afternoon chatting and went punting in the
evening. I almost capsized the boat and so in the general interest of
everyone was asked to stick to rowing!
On the whole, I have to say that I have never
had more fun in my life. The days flew by, and before I knew it, I was back
in Delhi, making this report. Right from the wonderful friends I made from
different parts of the world, to the spectacular insights I got, into the
subjects that I’d chosen, reflecting the sound pedagogical practices of
Cambridge, to the amount I learnt about myself …it has been an amazing
odyssey of personal growth and enrichment.
I thank India Habitat centre and Equus Red
Cell Agency for having made it possible, and wish all the future contestants
of this prestigious competition good luck!
|
|
