Humanities, Where Are You?

Student politics through a lens of query

The student general elections are underway at one of the foremost institutions of the country. The people involved, the curious campaigns and the specific lingo are anything but dull. But one thing is conspicuously absent and that is a systematic chronicling of the elections in an institute where curiosity is to be rewarded.
As a post-graduate student at IITB, our involvement in the election process is quite limited. We are good and necessary only to the point of a well-voting electorate. Of the six positions that the Gymkhana of IITB facilitates the election of, all but one have only undergraduate candidates (The only exception being General Secretary, Academic Affairs - Postgraduate). Why the office of General Secretary, Hostel Affairs is not split into four to accommodate the concerns of all students equally is not the topic of this blog. But the election of this arguably most important student office in IITB and others is. \

Right from filing the nominations, the students of the third and second years of undergraduates take up a different hue of interpersonal dynamics. A litany of newly created Instagram accounts will send you requests to follow. Their posts? A mishmash of viral audios and memes adapted to the purpose of supporting their candidate. Some put up skewed polls, some put up viral gossip in the name of unknown Q&A and yet others, do the minimal effort ad-hominems. \

The theatre of going through the responses of their polls is also an experience in popular linguistics like no other. Much like “Livvy Dunn talked about Beabadoobee, Rizzler gives it three booms out of five,” I was absolutely fascinated by the systems of support and opposition. The students will call the process of promoting their candidate and lobbying as “polting”, what I suppose is a short goto for politicking. And politicking it is. As an appropriate microcosm of real life politicking, the people involved are indeed self-important and nothing is off limits. The uncontested nature of elections for some posts did not really pop out to me as interesting. But the all important position of General Secretary, Hostel Affairs turned uncontested when the associates of one candidate shared with the relevant authorities a picture (or video?) of the other candidate smoking (whether it was the benign tobacco one or something more, I have NO idea). This was enough, for good reason, for the candidate to back out and withdraw the application. \

But, clearly, that team is not ready to go down in defeat. The calls to elect their candidate turned to calls of voting NOTA instead. Instagram accounts were renamed, Reddit posts were put up. As the height of wanting the reach necessary for a proper call to action, the team also sent a mail through a suspiciously phishy ID that evaded the spamassassin filters of Computer Center and reached our inboxes. \

In chronicling this riveting ordeal, I am time and time again mortified as to why there is no academic interest in the psychology of some of the most competent students in the country. Why does it grip such a non-trivial mass of students? I don’t know if apathy is the correct stance to hold in this case, but the fervor does make me pause. I feel that there is a wealth of correlation and in-place analysis of extrapolation to be made when talking about the tendencies, the behaviors and outcomes/consequences in this process. \

The campaign teams of three candidates for three separate positions approached me to pitch their teams. Of these, the very first team, back in January was of that withdrawn candidate from above. I think to myself that conversation that he might have had with his campaign team. How that would shape his psyche for some time in the near future, how it would affect his confidence. These are <=21 years old men and women. I was a student president myself. But I myself would be the first person to say that I’m a work in progress. That was even more true back then. Maybe these are more emotionally mature and robust people. But on the off chance they are not, they make a very interesting body of populace to understand effects of social dynamics on the psyche of students. What goes on in the mind of a set of people that want to blow up the chances of someone at some college position and make their reputation as a collateral as well. If I were an Anthropology or Cognitive/Behavioral Psychology student, I would use the devices in my arsenal to understand the situation more. Perplexing as the saga of elections at the premier engineering institute of the country is, even more confusing is an academic interest in it, situated in our friends in Humanities. So, humanities, where are you?