I remember lying down on the side upper berth of a train and picking up the phone. I don’t remember where I was coming back from or anything else for that matter. I only remember sitting up when the phone rang (yes yes, senior bhaav was a thing) and picking up, wondering what might be the matter. We need you to convert all the abstracts into blind entries and save it, a second-year told me in what I imagined was a very authoritative voice. I…well, I couldn’t. I explained that Indian Railways had other plans for my evening, that connectivity meant I was already piecing together what he was saying, and would it be okay if I did it first thing in the morning? No, I was told. They needed it right away. I stammered out an apology and guilt-tripped myself the rest of the evening. Fast forward five years and said senior is a very close friend.
The next year, I remember being stopped in the corridor and asked if I was applying for the conference team. I don’t know, I replied in all honesty. I hadn’t thought about it. Well, think about it, I was told by another second-now-fourth year. Think about Publicity. And so I did. The next year, I spent sitting in DCF (or out in the corridors as the case was) brainstorming how to spam most effectively and efficiently, how to make sure the most number of people saw our posts and did not get scared away by something that called itself DoHSS Academic Conference. We created pre-conference contests, floated some of them, and promised ourselves we’d plan them better next time. Fast forward three years and I have a conversation with the head of that team every two weeks.
One year after that, it was my turn to stop juniors and corner them about conference applications. At the end of my third year, as applications for the post of Department Secretary opened up, I knew mine would be filed if only for one reason. I wanted to run the conference. For my first three years, the conference had been the one thing that structured my time in the department and I couldn’t imagine letting go already. So I spent hours taking fundaes, writing notes, and agonising over possible changes that could be made. With that, my third conference was born, the first that was open to PhD students as well. I remember the night of the abstract submission deadline. I walked back to department from hostel and into 331E where my co-secretary was working. As the clock ticked past the time we stopped accepting entries, I held my breath as we tallied. In my notebook, there was a box around a number, my golden target. We would get 125 abstracts, I had announced in one meeting, light years ahead of the preceding year, which was light years ahead of the one before that… No one was sure we’d come anywhere close. Will this PhD gamble work out? The tally came in. There were a hundred and twenty-four.
Negotiating Conflict, 3rd semester. Urban Spaces, 6th semester. Migration, 8th semester.
The story of my time in department can be woven around the milestones of DoHSS Academic Conferences. More often than not, it is not the story of speakers and talks. It is not the tally of how many likes and shares (though we always bully the team into becoming particularly active on social media around the time). It is these stories, of creating a platform for people to work together, get to know each other, and foster relationships that last beyond deadlines and emails and Gmail labels.
And then it happened one last time.
In my final semester, there was one more conference, the only one I watched from afar. And yet, I have memories from this one too. As a third semester student, I had discovered, uncovered, and thoroughly enjoyed Lata Mani’s writing in a back bench of a classroom. Three years later, I found myself walking down the corridor with her, listening as she told me how to tackle the job I was all set to take, and use education to mould the minds of children. Everything that was my degree lay in the moments between that classroom and this walk – my own growth as well as that of the conference.
Every year, freshers listen to a talk about what the conference is and why they should participate. Every year, the Publicity team is warned about how hard it is to “sell” the conference. Yet, every year a group of students voluntarily step forward to spend the greater part of nine months working towards a three-day event, academic, specialised and theoretical. Why? Because of everything that happens behind the scenes – the stories of teammates looking out for each other and buying people you barely know lunch, the tales of learning to carry yourself with a certain poise so that you can hold your own in that conversation from the airport with that speaker, and more often than not, the experience of standing up for yourself and finding your own place on the team.
When I gave the vote of thanks at the end of the DoHSS Academic Conference on Migration in 2015, I teared up because there was so much left to say. So many months on, I am well past my word limit now. There is always so much left to say.
-By Yashasvini Rajeshwar
Article 19 