02/04/2024
Today I complete six years at VIPS. It was on 2nd April 2018 that I enetered the hallowed portals of this prestigious institution with the Chair of BOM Dr S C Vats and then Principal Director Professor Rattan Sharma escorting me to the room that has since been my work pod.The credit for convincing a footloose reporter like me to take on the regimen of academics solely goes to Dr SC Vats, his patience with me has been monumental, so has been that of Suneet Vats, the Vice Chair. Agreeing to my demand for writing my regular newspaper columns must not have been very easy. Allowing me with experiments in introducing new methods of pedagogy always found support with them. The satisfaction has been to see the under-graduate students rise to the benchmarks which I have made higher by few inches every passing year.
A few I want to name here, Navya Singh, Aviral Grover, Ravi Pratik, Aayush Sharma, Utkarsh Rana, Sanchit Nagpal, Pratham Sharma, Raj Dhingra, Jagriti Gambhir, Deepak Muktal, Aaron Justine, and of course Abdesh Jha. They all are doing well, well meaning happiness in whatever they are doing.
I am eagerly looking forward to the passing out of the first batch of post-graduate students enrolled in the MA(MC) programme. I am in know of the initial complaints that the course has been made very rigrous and there is hardly any breathing space. But today after three semesters those who volunteered to embark on the tough journey are different individuals, each confident of her/himself.
Not because I work here but because my training and long innings as a reporter has infused in me the quality of objective observation(I belong to a different era), I feel convinced about VIPS being the best centre of media studies. It's not only about the infrastructure, its also about the faculty members. Most are solid in their work and fluent in delivery, and engage very well with the students. Most importantly its fees is most reasonanble, peanuts to what some others charge with no such quality of facility or gravitas of faculty as VIPS.