Canning College: The Lucknow University Years

I did a B.Com from Lucknow University. The three years I spent there were quite memorable, though I now regret not having paid enough attention to my academics

In an earlier post, I wrote about Christian College, from where I completed the last two years of my schooling. After class 12 was done and dusted with, I decided to do a B.Com from Canning College, Lucknow University. The story continues here.

Getting admission into Canning College, Lucknow University was much simpler back in 1990, than it is now. There was no written test, for one. From what I remember, all I had to do was fill a form, attach copies of my class 12 marksheet, submit that form in the admin office and that was it – I was in. A bunch of my friends from Christian College had also secured admission – we’d all now be spending three years studying economics, accountancy and banking etc., and hopefully get a graduate degree in commerce at the end of those years. Looking back, I now realise I had no interest in – and no particular aptitude for – commerce. Why I opted for B.Com is now a mystery to me, but lack of other options must have been one of the reasons. In terms of general awareness and the existence of dozens of different career options, as well streams of study that one can opt for, 1990 may as well have been another planet when compared to 2024.

In any case, ready and willing, or not, my friends and I were now college students. Our first few days in Lucknow University were a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The University had a fearsome reputation for ‘ragging’ and incidents of seniors bullying and harassing first-year students were well-known. Some of the more serious incidents, involving beatings and other physical abuse, had often been reported in local newspapers. My friends and I formed a fairly large-sized group of people and we weren’t particularly scared. Plus, there was also the unsaid need to put on a show of bravado – we needed to show each other that we weren’t afraid of anyone or anything – it was a machismo thing. And so, dressed up in jeans and denim jackets and trying to appear more confident than we really felt, we strutted around the campus with the swagger of someone who’d already spent a year or two on campus. Thankfully, the seniors seemed to be busy with their own thing and did not pay much attention to us, pretty much leaving us to our own devices. We were confronted by a group of seniors only once, but they let us go after only a few minutes of mild verbal grilling.

The freedom we had at Christian College was only amplified at Lucknow University. The rules were very simple – come to class only if you want to study. Those who were not interested in attending classes were free to do whatever they wanted – the professors had neither the time nor the inclination to keep track of those who wanted to play truant. Problems would only arise if you walked into a class and then tried to disturb others or otherwise create a ruckus. In that case, and rightly so, teachers and other University authorities stepped in and took swift action against troublemakers. But otherwise, if you wanted to come inside the campus and then spend all your time in the college canteen or generally loafing around not doing anything, hey, it was your life and you were free to ruin it the way you wanted.

With a great deal of regret, I have to admit that I did not take studies very seriously. Every day, my friends and I would reach the University in the morning, attend maybe one or two classes, and then proceed to spend the rest of the day in idle chatter, roaming around aimlessly, having cups of chai and oily samosas in the canteen, and ogling the pretty girls on the campus. There were actually very few girls in the commerce department, which was a matter of deep regret for us. And the few girls who were there were quite selective in whom they spoke to and interacted with. The more enterprising and outgoing among us – which was only two or three guys – who had the gift of the gab, mingled with the ladies quite effortlessly, while the rest of us were left standing on the sidelines. I, for one, having always studied in boys-only schools, wasn’t very comfortable in the presence of members of the opposite sex. At 17 years of age, I was still quite shy – an introvert, who was only comfortable in the company of other guys, most of them being friends from school. This, in fact, did not change over the next three years – I have the dubious distinction of never having spoken a single word to any girl over the three years I spent in Lucknow University! Young people from the current generation will find this very hard to believe, but it’s true. Not that I was pining for female company anyway. In those days, all I ever thought about was motorcycles and motorcycle racing, and was obsessed with the idea of becoming a professional motorcycle racer. My father occasionally let me use his Bajaj Chetak scooter to go to college, but my heart was set on getting a Yamaha RX100, a little bombshell of a motorcycle that I absolutely loved. But a new one cost Rs 20,000 at the time, and my father wasn’t quite ready to spend that kind of money on getting a bike for a B.Com first-year student.

My first year in college was quite uneventful – for the most part, my friends and I continued with the routine that had been established in Christian College, when we were still in class 12. Our time in college was spent sitting around in groups, talking endlessly for hours. Today, when I look back upon those days, I can’t for the life of me figure out what it was we spoke about for hours. It certainly wasn’t our education or careers or what we’d do in the future. I guess teenagers can just talk for hours, without really having anything substantial or anything of consequence to talk about. We’d sometimes go to each other’s houses and have long conversations, or meet up somewhere in Hazratganj and just hang out, or get together on our scooters and motorcycles and just ride around town and go wherever we fancied. While we did not make productive use of our time, we were all just… happy. Happy to be young and alive, happy to have each other’s company, happy with our lives in general. It was like one long summer holiday, an idyllic existence with no pressures of any kind.

In the meanwhile, a major change was in the offing on the home front. Towards the end of my first year in college, my father was transferred to Muzaffarnagar, a smaller city that’s about 550km away from Lucknow. My father’s side of the family were, in fact, from Muzaffarnagar and while my father hadn’t ever lived there, he was already quite familiar with the city, which he had visited many times when he was younger. Now, my younger sister, who was in class 10 at that time, would leave with my parents and continue her studies in Muzaffarnagar. But since I was already in college and was on the verge of completing my first year there, it was decided that I would stay on in Lucknow and complete my graduation from Lucknow University. My grandparents spoke to my father and suggested that I should move in with them – a suggestion I was quite happy with.

At the time of his retirement, my grandfather was a senior banker and held the position of additional registrar at the UP Cooperative Bank. He had had his house constructed in the 1950s and it was a large, open and airy place with four bedrooms, a lawn, kitchen garden and a covered verandah at the front, an open courtyard at the back, a garage, two outhouses and a large shed for storing random old stuff. My grandfather let me have a room to myself and it had everything I required – a bed to sleep in, a large study table along with a very comfortable chair, cupboards where I could keep all my clothes and other stuff, and an attached bathroom. My father, in his boundless love and affection for me, even got a separate landline telephone installed for me in my room (even though there was already one other telephone in the house), so I could talk to my friends whenever I wanted, without any restrictions. Lucknow summers could be blisteringly hot and my father also arranged for a room cooler to be installed in my room, so the heat wouldn’t bother me. And if that weren’t enough already, he even agreed to buy me a motorcycle, so I could use that to commute to college. Spending Rs 20,000 to get a new one would not have been fair, so I insisted on getting a used bike, to which my father agreed. Within a few days, I’d found a nice, carefully-kept, 1988-model Yamaha RX100 and we bought that for Rs 10,000. It was one of the happiest days of my life – that RX100 was everything I’d ever wished for.

Soon, my parents and sister left for Muzaffarnagar, while I moved to my grandparents’ house. Of course, I’d spent the first 3-4 years of my life in that house and while we had moved out after that, we had continued to visit my grandparents once a week, so there wasn’t really anything ‘new’ about living there. My grandparents loved me dearly and I was quite happy to have moved in with them, though I did miss my parents and thought of them very often. Soon, I was in second year of college and my life was still all about my friends – we continued to hang out, watch movies, go out to eat once in a while, or just get together at each other’s houses and chat for hours. My obsession with motorcycles continued to grow and whenever I had some money to spare, I used to spend it on buying second-hand foreign motorcycle magazines. I used to spend hours sitting on the verandah or on the front lawn and read my dog-eared copies of Cycle World, Superbike, Performance Bikes and Bike, which I’d buy from a selection of small, obscure bookshops around the city. For me, those magazines opened the doors to a wonderful alien world, populated by 100-horsepower sports bikes and superbikes – the kind of bikes one never saw in Lucknow in the 1990s.

Often, I’d watch 500cc motorcycle GP racing on television, and then go out on my 11-horsepower Yamaha and try to ride like the GP racers I saw on the screen. Of course, given that there was a world of difference between the mechanical abilities of our bikes – and an even bigger difference in our level of riding talent – things would inevitably go wrong at times. I had a few relatively minor scrapes here and there and was lucky to get away without serious harm, but eventually had a big accident while coming back home one day. I was returning from tuition class on that day and must have been riding at a very high speed when the crash happened, though I don’t actually remember any details. What people later told us was that I was riding at a high speed and somehow lost control of the bike while overtaking another vehicle. In the process, the bike flipped end over end and I was thrown some 20 metres down the road. The impact must have been severe since my helmet broke, I suffered a severe concussion and passed out. Luckily for me, one of the local shopkeepers recognized me (my parents and grandparents had been buying groceries from his shop for many years) and some people took me to my grandparents’ house in a rickshaw.

My panic-stricken grandfather immediately called up my parents, who took the first bus they could get and somehow reached Lucknow the next morning. My father spoke to one of his friends, a senior surgeon, who came to our house to see me. After some evaluations, the doctor said I had suffered a concussion but there had been no other damage – he said I’d be fine in 2-3 days. My father asked if we should get a CAT scan done, or if any other tests were required, but the doctor said I only needed to rest for 2-3 days and that no tests were required. My friends came to see me and they were all very serious – not a normal state of being for any of them. However, once they knew I was going to be okay, everyone went back to their default setting – everyone started laughing and cracking jokes about my accident. Secretly, I think everyone was quite relieved that I wouldn’t be leaving planet earth anytime soon.

This was the second big accident I’d had in the space of two years. I had earlier crashed while riding my father’s scooter, which I’d been trying to corner like a GP bike. And because a Bajaj Chetak can’t be ridden like a Yamaha YZR500, I had, inevitably, crashed hard. In the process, I smashed my face on the tarmac pretty hard and ended up with two broken front teeth. And as a bonus, I also received severe injuries on both knees, which would take a month to heal. As for the broken teeth, there was no way they were coming back, so I had to get a root canal done on both, after which both the teeth were capped. Now, with two major crashes, things had become serious and my parents wanted me to give up riding two-wheelers. But I would have none of it – I loved my RX100 and couldn’t even think of giving up riding motorcycles. I did promise that I would henceforth be much more careful and would do my best to ride safely and not crash.

In the meanwhile, my bike had been impounded by the police after the crash and was lying at the Mahanagar police station in a rather sorry state. No one had filed any FIR against me, but the police had concocted some complicated story and, citing some reasons that we simply could not understand, refused to hand over the bike to us when my father and I went to the police station, 4-5 days after the accident. In the end, we had to pay a substantial chunk of money to them and finally got the bike out, after which I took it straight to the Yamaha dealership for repairs. The chief mechanic there – Munna – did a superb job and when my bike came out the workshop, it was running like a dream. The engine ran smoother than ever before, and the bike accelerated like a rocket when I opened up the throttle. At long last, the bike had been restored to perfect condition and I couldn’t have been happier.

My parents went back to Muzaffarnagar after making me promise I’d ride much carefully. While I did not realise it back then, I now understand how much of a pest I had been and how I must have made everybody’s life terribly difficult. Despite all my crashes, I refused to part with my bike and my parents still kept their faith in me and allowed me to keep that bike. It’s only now that I understand how exceptionally kind and generous and trusting they had been with me, despite the fact that I had not, on my part, done anything to earn their trust. I also feel terribly bad about having carelessly spent my father’s hard-earned money, first on buying a motorcycle (I could have used public transport to get around), then asking him for money for fuel and maintenance, then crashing the bike and spending even more money on repairs. I deeply regret my actions now and wish I had been much more thoughtful back then. 

Back in college, it was business as usual, except for the fact that I had made some new friends. Our former group had now splintered into two or three smaller sub-groups, each of which had some new people who had joined us, while one or two from amongst the earlier group had drifted away. One of my closest friends, Ashish, had become quite a big hit with the ladies at the University. He stopped hanging out with me and would only sit with one of the girls’ groups. We stopped visiting each other’s houses and things became awkward between us. However, both of us moved on with our lives eventually. Of course, I still had many other close friends – Manish, Sharad, Shobhit, Anil, Sandeep, Mayank, Anurag, Arshad, Piyush and a few others, so there was never a dull moment in any case. The thing was, our friends is all we had. Outside of that, college life in Lucknow University was not too exciting – nothing much ever really happened, there were no social events or activities of any kind, and things were kind of slow.   

I really enjoyed my three years of college and had a great time living with my grandparents in their house. My grandmother used to take very good care of me. Even though she was in her mid-70s at that time, she always made an extra effort to prepare the things that she knew I liked. While my grandfather sometimes had his meals a bit early, my grandmother and I always ate together – I enjoyed talking to her about her early years in Balochistan (where her father was a doctor, before the family moved to Gangoh, near Saharanpur, sometime after 1947) and I think she also liked having me around. My grandfather was also very affectionate – he knew which biscuits and cookies etc. I liked, and always made it a point to get those for me whenever he could. He was remarkably fit for his age and walked quite swiftly – when we went out together, I often found it hard to keep up with him.

My grandmother passed away quite suddenly, in mid-1993. This was during the time when my B.Com final year exams were going on. My parents happened to be in Lucknow at that time. One morning, after having a bath, my grandmother called my mother and mentioned to her that she was feeling uneasy and that she was having some trouble breathing. I immediately rushed to call a doctor but in the 10-15 minutes it must have taken me to return with the doctor, she had already passed away. The doctor checked her pulse and expressed his regret. It was a big shock for all of us. My father, who was not in the house at that time, came back in about half an hour. All our relatives were informed and our entire extended family arrived in Lucknow by the next day, after which my grandmother was cremated. I was asked to focus on my exams, but found it hard to concentrate. My grandmother had been a big part of my life, and now she was no more.

As one would expect, it was my grandfather who suffered the biggest shock – my grandmother’s passing left him in a state of utter grief and depression, which he was never able to overcome. After that, he was simply never the same again. After her death, he could not possibly have managed the large old house all by himself, so the house was eventually sold off, and my grandfather moved in with my father’s eldest brother, who was based in Jaipur. My father, in the meanwhile, had been transferred from Muzaffarnagar to Bareilly, and after my B.Com final exams, I moved to Bareilly. My grandfather visited us in Bareilly a couple of times, but my grandmother’s passing had taken a severe toll on him and he had very quickly been reduced to a mere shadow of his former self. It was heartbreaking for me to see him in this way – a strong, vibrant, active man who was always running around, getting things done, had now turned silent and shaky, always lost, always restless. My father consulted some of the best doctors in Bareilly, but my grandfather had gotten into a state where no doctor would be able to help him.

The story continues here