Section D and the Botany of Business
At fifteen, I walked into Jankidevi Bajaj Science College with the singular, heavy-hearted purpose of a boy whose life rested on a single exam. To get into the Government Medical College (GMC) in Nagpur, one had to conquer the BSc Part One. I was assigned Roll Number 562 in Section D.
In the campus hierarchy, Sections A and B were the “good” sections—the academic aristocrats. Section D was a different republic altogether. Many boys came from local business families; they could calculate the profit margins of their fathers’ shops with their eyes closed, but they viewed Zoology with a deep, suspicious apathy. The classroom was a hundred-strong sea of sweating shirts and a low, untamable hum of gossip. Two small wall fans labored heroically against the cruel April heat, but they only succeeded in shuffling the hot air from one side of the room to the other.
***
The Winter of Iron and Mercy
That winter, I traded my books for a bicycle and a sudden obsession with fitness. I loved the reckless speed, pedaling across the college grounds with my hands off the handlebars, tasting a freedom that had no syllabus. Along with three classmates, I spent my mornings running in circles, doing squats, and gripping the iron double bars until my fingers went numb in the biting cold.
I might have physically strengthened myself into academic ruin if my friends hadn’t shown a rare, selfless clarity. Eight weeks before the finals, one of them looked at me and said, “We are boys with no future, but we won’t spoil yours. You’re the youngest and the brightest. Go home. Study. We don’t want to see you on the ground again.”
I listened. I left the bars and retreated to my desk.
***
The Guardians of the Green
The college was governed by Principal Vasudeo P. Damle, a man of sharp blue eyes and a French beard, topped by a Gandhi cap that sat with geometric precision on his head. When the seven o’clock bell rang, Damle appeared as if the sound itself had materialized him. No one dared to be late.
He and his wife, Mrs. Kamla Damle, turned Botany into a theatrical event. Principal Damle could spend ten lectures on photosynthesis, treating the transformation of light into energy as a miracle. Mrs. Damle taught us Algology with a memory so sharp it seemed to defy time; she lived to be 102, passing away only in 2020.
The department was a microcosm of India. Kamalnayan Bajaj had wanted Wardha to have that intellectual mix. There was Mr. Sathianathan from Chennai, whose booming voice filled the lecture hall when he spoke of mosses and ferns. Mr. R.S. Acharya, another Craddock alumnus, taught Plant Morphology; he was a quiet man who believed the classroom was a sacred space and private tuitions were a sacrilege. In the practical lab, Mr. C.D. Zamvar presided. I could never master the sunflower stem; my blade was always blunt, my sections always slanted. Zamvar Sir would look at my messy diagram and dryly remark, “Kalantri, is this a microscopic stem or a cricket pitch—with a bowler at one end and a batsman at the other?”
***
Right and Wrong
Principal Damle’s vigilance extended beyond the morning bell to the very souls of his students. He policed the invisible line between the sexes with the zeal of a frontier guard. During our annual dramas, the stage was a place of strict segregation—there were “All-Boys” plays and “All-Girls” plays, a theatrical apartheid that forced us to find our leading ladies among classmates in wigs and borrowed saris. To Damle, a mixed cast was a script for social ruin.
This rigid code once collided with the cosmopolitan winds of the seventies. A Malaysian girl, perhaps oblivious to Wardha’s unwritten laws, arrived on campus in a skirt. In the sari-clad stillness of the college, it felt like an accidental revolution. Damle did not see a garment; he saw a breach in his cultural fortress. He commanded her to trade the skirt for a “formal dress” at once. In his kingdom, modernity was always expected to bow to tradition.
***
The Longest Word
Our English master, Mr. V.K. Pande, treated the language like a playground. He could take a turgid editorial from The Times of India and make it sing. Once, when I asked for the longest word in English, he beamed and gave me floccinaucinihilipilification—twenty-nine letters signifying the act of treating something as worthless. To a schoolboy, it was a mountain of a word, and I spent days climbing it.
In those days, a teacher earned roughly 633 rupees a month—enough for a new bicycle and little else. Only two professors owned scooters—one being Professor Maheshwari from Zoology. The rest of us, masters and students alike, pedaled the same dusty roads of Wardha under the same unrelenting sun.
***
The Veranda of 1972
I recently sat with my old classmate Dr. Kishor Dubey, who retired from JB Science after teaching Botany there for four decades. He pulled the past back into the present. In our time, the college was the center of the world. Every year, forty students arrived from Sirpur Kagaznagar, and five or six traveled all the way from Malaysia. The hallways were crowded and alive. The Biology division had four sections (A to D) with 100 to 120 students each, while the Mathematics sections (A and B) were packed with 80 to 100 students.
Our monthly afternoons were spent in the “Rescue Debates.” We would imagine a burning house with five people trapped inside; the challenge was to argue who should be saved. Murthy and Dubey were the masters of these fierce arguments. Occasionally, Avinash Joshi, Bharti Deshpande, and Sharma would join in, their voices filling the room. When the shouting stopped, Bhagat would sing, his voice so clear it was no surprise he later became a Professor of Music in the Yeshwant Arts College.
On the playground, Shaikh and his partner—both giants at six-and-a-half feet—dominated the kabaddi patch, while Murdiv led the cricket team as captain. Rathod Sir, our Games Incharge, watched us like a hawk. If he saw a student slouching, he would bark: “Why are you standing there like a dead body? Act alive!”
Our laboratories were guided by legends: Ronghe, Supe, Maradwar, and Deshpande in Physics; Galkar, Naigaonkar, Kulkarni, and Sarode in Chemistry; and Maheshwari, Kardar, and Varma in Biology. Mr. Mashankar kept a watchful eye over the library.
“Do you remember the cost?” Dubey asked. “Sixty rupees for the entire year.” Five rupees a month to learn the secrets of the universe.
***
The Withheld Miracle
The university exams in April 1973 were a crucible of heat. I walked out of the hall feeling a rush of confidence, that dangerous certainty that I had cleared every hurdle. But student confidence is a fragile thing; it can vanish in a single morning.
The university exams in April 1973 were a crucible of heat. I walked out of the hall feeling a rush of confidence—that dangerous certainty that I had cleared every hurdle. But student confidence is a fragile thing; it can vanish in a single morning.
In those days, the university didn’t send letters; the results simply appeared in the local newspaper. My father was an early riser, a man who treated the morning paper with the devotion of a ritual. He would scan it from the first headline to the last advertisement as soon as it hit the porch. One June morning, at six o’clock, his eyes chanced upon the BSc Part I results. His excited call broke the silence of the house, pulling me from a deep sleep.
I came running from the house, still half-awake, to the front lawn where he sat in his chair. The morning was quiet and the air was still cool. He opened the newspaper, his eyes scanning the tiny columns of print, and asked for my roll number.
“562,” I said. My voice was calm; I expected to see my name among the toppers.
We looked once. Then again. The number was not there.
The world seemed to go silent. That cool morning air suddenly felt heavy. I felt a cold, hollow knot tie itself in my stomach. My father stared at the paper with a look of pure bewilderment, as if the ink had betrayed him. He had never imagined I could fail, and seeing that empty space where my number should have been felt like a physical blow. The shame was sudden and sharp.
We searched one last time, our eyes stinging, until we found it at the very bottom under a different heading: “Withheld.” I hadn’t failed, but I hadn’t passed either. I was a ghost in the system. A simple clerical error had trapped my entire future in a dusty university file cabinet, leaving me in a state of agonizing limbo for weeks.
The following weeks were a blur of university counters. When the envelope finally arrived, my hands shook. Seventy-three percent. It was the magic number. I had my seat at GMC Nagpur.
The house erupted in laughter and the scent of sugar. My mother made kilos of pedhas. I was to be the first doctor in the family. As I packed my bags to join Suhas Jajoo, Rekha Sapkal, Avinash Joshi, Rajan Bindu, Narayan Dongre, Pramod Mahajan, Prabhakar Patil, Laxmikant Rathod, Ashok Gambhir, Nandkishor Taori, and Maya Khati, I felt a rush in my chest. We were young, sure of ourselves, and blissfully unaware of the long nights ahead.