NON CONSUMPTUS

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NON CONSUMPTUS

RAJENDRA PANDIAN

Former Governing Council Member

At last the new bishop for the CSI-DM & R has arrived. So, The Rt.Rev.Joseph becomes the Bishop-Chairman of our Governing Council.  We congratulate him and wish him a very successful and meaningful term in office. However, it was weird to see an advertisement in the dailies greeting the new bishop on behalf of the Principal, Staff, and Students of the American college. Besides, regular class work was suspended after 10 am Friday, the day of his consecration in the Cathedral. This was more bizarre, I should say, as we normally suspend classes like that only after a condolence meeting, as the one we had today,  as a mark of respect to the memory of the departed. 

Probably our administrators think these things will substantiate the intermittent and half-confident claim they make that this is a CSI institution. They also try to buttress this claim by cooking up sporadic and false evidences through recently printed materials. Thus, the acts mentioned above can be read in sequence to their organized fraudulence and pretensions to present the American College like a CSI institution. We believe that the new Bishop is aware of these trickeries and acts with conscience and fear of God. 

The college which is on the ‘auto-pilot’ mode, as a senior professor commented, is functioning under the headship of one with paper credentials to be the Principal—leave alone the legal disputes relating even to that. The present quiet manifests the indifference, fear, and resignation instilled in many of us. And of course opportunism also is a vigorously practiced value that pays off between concrete benefits and abstract principles. I have nothing to say on it except that this movement has suffered from large scale defections and betrayals. Unshaken by that, Dr.Anbudurai is bent on securing the jobs and seniority of our management staff—both teaching and non-teaching—and getting their arrears at the earliest. 

May be this is time (even for the traditional administration once restored) to see all the management staff alike - whether appointed by Dr.Chinnaraj Joseph or Dr. Davamani Christober - in the larger interest of the college. This may not apply to anyone with a record of involvement in violence though. I register this as my personal opinion. I also believe, both we and they came to this college to try our fortunes and they are entitled to the same dignity and fair consideration as we are. However, service seniority is something that an employee has hard earned over years and no administration has the right to meddle with it. Any “manipulation of register”—as rightly phrased by Prof. Suryakumar before we staged a walk out from a faculty meeting—is illegal, unacceptable and needs to be reversed by the incumbents at once. And also, “junior getting more pay” should be treated as a serious anomaly even with the management staff and needs immediate redress. 

If fixing the management-staff issue is our most immediate goal, retrieving the college and restoring the traditional administration is the ultimate. By ‘traditional administration’ I mean the administration backed by the legitimate Governing Council and by “legitimate Governing Council” I mean the council registered by the founders in 1934 and marked by its inimitable “continuity “ since then—unlike the one conjured up 5 years ago by the late Bishop’s necromantic  skills.  As the task of identifying the legitimate council is with the honorable court we can hope that wisdom will prevail on the new bishop that he waits for the court verdict and abstains from presiding over anything non-existent.

The progress that we make in the struggle—particularly on the legal front— before the retirement of Dr. Anbudurai in January 2014 is crucial and has to be substantial; the follow up stands to be worked out by the rest. We need not get discouraged as we appear to have dwindled into nothing more than a “like minded few”. In fact, Prof. Suryakumar’s election to the Governing Council; Dr. Premsingh and Prof. Joel’s election to the Senatus and the number of votes won by other contestants on our panel who ran for various offices in the recent faculty elections only reveal that we are not ‘a few’ but ‘many’. These elections declare the undying democratic spirit of our faculty and their unchanging love for the college. What has happened to this institution is an aberration which cannot last long. Eventually, the American College with its proper course should, and will, be restored—at any cost. 

I, rather fanatically, believe that the outcome of the struggle has already been revealed to us in the form of our motto: Purificatus Non Consumptus!

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