Hee hee.. Couldn't resist putting this in.

As he hurries to class, Prasad glances at his watch for the 10th time, quietly wondering what excuse he should give his professor – should he blame it on the Aquaguard man, or should he claim to have had a meeting or should he just stick to the plain and simple truth – that he woke up late! As he stands in the doorway of his classroom, with a sheepish grin on his face, his classmates smirk. The person who had come five minutes before him had got blasted and shooed off. The professor won’t do the same thing to the chairman, would she? The professor turns around and sees him standing there. She opens her mouth to say something, but the cries of “chairman sir” daunt her. She gives in with a small nod. Prasad, the Chairman of Madras Christian College walks in amidst cheering!

The above is a daily occurance. While it goes to show how his position influences his activities, Prasad is, essentially, a 3rd year Physics student – right from sneaking into the lab an hour late, having his cell phone confiscated, forging spectrometer readings to having a nickname for every single one of his classmates!

It all started, he says, with his wish to be “involved in college activities”. To satisfy it, in the first year, he joined the college ball badminton team. He practiced everyday from 3 - 6.30. Unfortunately, come the first tournament, he was not-so-politely asked to leave the team. Undaunted, he joined the NCC. There, due to his physical stature, he wasn’t allowed to do “drills”. They trained him intead to climb obstacles(literally) and shoot (again, literally). At his first camp he was the only MCCian to be selected. However, he didn’t get through the second. “All this taught me not to get dejected when you lose what you’re aiming at”, he says. “Oh, and also punctuality” he adds with a wink.

Thus he stood for the post of department representative. Once selected, he wanted to give the Physics dept ‘a voice’. So, he stood for chairman. Contarary to popular belief, one doesn’t have to know the big shots or the “annas” to become chairman, he says. All one has to do is contact the many hundred people who do not even know that an election is happening and convince them to vote – for him.

Now that he has become chairman, he insists that he is “one among the students”. “After two years of enjoying without responsibility, I have begun to enjoy with responsibility”, he muses. He also claims that his professors are understanding and he takes care not to miss a single practical class(even if all he does there is blink at the sodium vapour lamp). Theory class, on the other hand, are a different story…

He also says that he has had to learn to deal with different people during his tenure and one of the issues he is sensitive about is the name of the college getting tarnished due to improper behavior of the students.

“As a chairman I learnt not to simply give promises but to be honest and be fair so that no one can point to you”, he concludes.

An MBA asapirant, Prasad has recently been placed in CTS, but whether he will take up the job or not will depend on his performance in CAT.