404. Perfection of Magnificent Idealism

It was a private funded university, founded by an uneducated wealthy man on financially sound lines. The founder was not making a profit out of it. It was not like a centre of academic learning but a huge collection of rural youth after a degree. One offshoot of this unacademic adventure was the place became a leader of the Freedom Movement of youth. A national luminary was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the place to raise its status. In its fifty years of existence, he learnt few PhDs. On enquiry he was told that the most brilliant young men there had no reading habits. An idealistic young man of great courage and vision joined there as the junior most member. He was introduced to a student political volunteer.

The student suggested to the teacher that they could together reform the place into a true academic centre. The university had no graduate constituency.  In one year their combined efforts created that constituency, had this young teacher elected to the Board of Studies, Academic Council, to the Senate with 12 of his supporters, and to the Syndicate. On top of all this, the teacher persuaded a local Congress politician, a close friend of the Education Minister, to get elected to the Board of Selection. Their efforts led to the constitution of a high-power Committee to remove the uneducated founder and replace him by an educationist. This affectionate, magnanimous, broadminded teacher, owing to his low social origin had a marked streak of meanness that valued ONLY social status. As the rule of life insists, he exhibited it towards his student colleague who was the inspirer, architect and moving soul of this venerable transformation of the university, all within one year.

The teacher lost his job, became a professor in a college where his classmate was the Principal. The teacher lost all his eminent positions when the university authorities raised the flag of fight. Tired of this relentless opposition of 12 determined young men, the university offered a seat on the Syndicate to their representative. That was the moment when the young student was seeking a difficult admission.  The streak of meanness of this idealist Professor was on its shrewd guard and he defensively asked the student, "What are you going to do for your admission?" The sensitivity of the student made him refrain from asking for a favour, knowing full well the Principal of that college was a close friend of the teacher. As life always acts, the Principal of his own college, who was indirectly slightly related to the student, volunteered and got him the admission. The twelve years of idealist work done by the teacher, the risk he took in his job and life were magnificent. When the management offered a seat in the Syndicate, by the law of life, it went to the dummy Principal instead of the idealist professor, as one streak of meanness can cancel a mountain of idealistic sacrifice.