An exciting beginning

Another special day...

Today was a special Saturday in my life. It was the day of University Matriculation. It sounded quite exciting and indeed took nearly half of the day getting properly dressed up and getting the photos taken at the college. Then we marched en masse to the university examinations schools, graduates and undergraduates mixed up and everybody clad in special university gown called Sub-Fusc and dark suit with white bow tie. I am sure I must have looked funny. The tourists were eyeing at the hordes of gown-clad students moving from all directions, some moving to get matriculated and others returning in long ant-queues. I am sure the Oxford tourists must be really excited by what they saw today. A rare sight indeed!

The actual event lasted no more than ten minutes. Someone repesenting the vice-chanellor read out a few lines in Latin - in keeping with the hundreds of years of Oxford tradition. Of course, I did not understand Latin ( I even do not understand Sanskrit, forget about Latin or Greek) and therefore did not get the exact message. But it was later summarised in English, which was essentially an oath-taking for hard work and striving towards excellence. And then somebody else from the university read out the stuff about the matriculation tradition and how the university expects the students to learn from a rich diversity of talents from around the world. Very true, indeed! My college alone has 33 natinalities this year!

We were released in queues soon after the brief ceremony was over. Each student was carrying a hat but nobody put it on. The hats can climb on the heads only after we pass our final exams i.e. on the graduation ceremony. The hat carried a symbol of responsibility to work hard and pass the exams. Very interesting tradition indeed!

When I returned to my room, I became a litte sentimental and nostalgic. I remembered my illiterate and very poor parents who are still living in our village home in Gorkha hills of Nepal. I saluted their resolve to get me educated. If they had insisted on me working in the fields like most other kids in the village, surely I would not have come this far. Also, I thanked all the teachers in my life whose collective contribution made me who I am today. And I wholeheartedly thanked St Hugh's College and the University which offered me the funding, without which my dream of studying here would remain merely a dream.

On a slightly different subject, I have changed the heading of my blog as of today. There is a little story behind the change. As I started the blog under the heading, I am not Untouchable, the blogging company suspected it of being a potential spam blog. It threatened to get rid of it within 30 days if I did not express my desire to retain it. I did go back to them and mentioned my intention to retain it. Probably they checked the contents and allowed it to run again following a blockage for some days.

At first I was annoyed, but I soon realised the potential reasons. In fact the blog-incident opened my eyes to a new reality. In fact my heading was meaningful to me and south asians but not to the large chunk of British public and the Western world. In our culture humans are categorised into the "touchabe" and "untouchable" groups based on what level of caste hierarchy belonged to. And I was trying to resist the stereotype on me as a low caste or an "untouchable". But clearly, the westerners would not understand it straight away. Here the terms like "touchable" or "untouchable" tend to refer more to the bodily contacts for sex or love or son on. Perhaps this must be the reason why the company machines smelled something dodgy in my blog. Fair enough! Taking it positively, it was another opportunity to learn to adapt to the new socio-cultural environment. A perfect lesson to the future anthropologist!

I hope that the changed heading of my blog will help attract some readership in future. I would be most grateful for any comment or feedback from the interested people. I can live with the fierce criticisms as well, provided they intend to help me improve.

This much for today. I am now a bonafide member of the Oxford Unicersity, not just officially but also ritually. In other words, Oxford has baptised me today and taken me into its caring hands. Many great men and women have studied here. I may not become one of them, but I am sure many of the faces I see in the university will come out as great leaders or popular personalities in different fields in future. Who knows, I might have shared a chat or coffee with one of the Nobel Prize winners of the future!


Mitra Pariyar
Oxford University