Making out in AMU? Please, university libraries not sexy enough

Remember that episode in Friends, where Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) guards an exceptionally un-visited part of a library, so that people don’t seek the shelter of the dust-covered, book-filled shelves to make out? A lot of popular culture has had as its fulcrum the lusty eyes of a young student seeking out the sexy librarian. Or fantasies of making out on the ground, in between the decades-old, yellowed books. Or following that extremely hot nerdy-spectacled girl into the hallowed portals of the library and hoping against hope that she spares you an impressed glance, if Hindi music videos of the 90s are to be taken into consideration.

While naive young sensibilities go about creating numerous lust-filled, dreamy scenarios about being able to go to the third base inside a library, the truth, sadly – okay, mostly – is not as exciting. For most libraries – and let’s just concentrate on the college/university ones here – come suitably equipped with the hawk-eye sensors of a bespectacled, almost-old, scandalised-at-the-drop-of-a-hat librarian. This species, most would agree, have feelers and antennae receiving signals from every single corner of their territory. In most cases, they report to someone even more rigid as far as the blasphemous issue of stealing a glance at a woman inside the library is concerned. And in one particular case, there are librarians who need to report to Lt Gen Zameer Uddin Shah, the vice-chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

AMU, to most students in India – apart from the ones who study there (and to many who study there, too) – is famous as a place where holding hands inside the campus is treated as a sacrilege. As far as other, graver issues are concerned – take homosexuality, for example – the place is a veritable hell of sorts. One is reminded of the 2010 incident, where AMU teacher Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras was dishonoured and suspended on charges of indulging in consensual – and yes, homosexual – sex with a rickshaw-puller. And 2010, mind you, was a time when Section 377 hadn’t reached the Supreme Court. And the suspension, which had happened, thanks to the orders of PK Abdul Aziz – the then V-C of AMU – had been quashed by the Allahabad High Court after about two months. Around the same time, the 60-plus teacher was found dead in his house, after an alleged suicide. The university maintained its tight-lipped stance back then. And despite black flag marches and numerous public criticisms of the ways stuff inside AMU worked, which broke out all over the country, nothing really happened.

So, when the current V-C makes a statement about not letting women sit inside the Maulana Azad Library – one, which is better-stocked and richer, as far as the number and quality of books are concerned – it doesn’t really come as a surprise. Shah had initially cited a "discipline" reason for the same – saying that allowing women inside the library would quadruple the number of boys inside. Later, the statement was patched and tweaked, and put across as more of a space issue than a discipline one.

Time and again, many of the AMU alumni – women, yes – have rued the inability to access the shelves of the Maulana Azad Library. The anachronistic rule allows women students to take books home, but not sit inside the library. After AMU’s much-criticised former V-C Aziz stepped down, one had expected something more from Zameer Uddin Shah. But who knows, having a brother (Naseeruddin Shah) in the Hindi film industry might have alerted this V-C to the nefarious ways of boys who like to seduce women inside libraries (They do in the movies, no?). Or, his earlier role as the Indian military attaché to Saudi Arabia, and his years spent in that country might have turned Zameer Uddin Shah into what he is. Not delving into psychoanalysis here; merely wondering what might have been the actual reason behind Shah’s more-than-famous statement.

Anyway. No matter how many glances the "four times as much" boys inside the Maulana Azad Library steal at that endangered and extremely rare species called women, they will just have to stop at that. One will probably not disagree – doing anything more than glancing at women inside a university library in India; and that too, in AMU – is a boundary one wouldn’t really want to cross. With or without the V-C’s orders.