From Abhilasha:

"Stop the car right now!!" I shrieked, horrified at the news I'd just heard.

On my way from the Tatanagar station to XL for the Independence wetnight, I had just comfortably settled into the passenger side and casually asked Guppu, my junior, for campus news. He turned to me and, almost reluctantly, said "Dadu's has been broken down".

For a few minutes, there was complete silence as I tried to figure out if he was pulling one of his usual fast ones on me. He looked serious enough, concerned even... I asked him to repeat himself, a little slowly this time, from the beginning... even before he got beyond the first sentence I was screaming for the car to stop.

My eyes brimmed over and through the mist I could see two years of friendship, heartbreak, fun and nostalgia flash before my eyes. Our first days at XL, and finding my first set of friends at Dadus... the autumn evenings seated at the log... 'nimbu paani' by the litre during Ratanjee and XL-IIMC... taking a break during classes, leaning against the white washed walls proudly proclaiming 'Happy Diwali'... express sutta service for batchmates during SIP... winter mornings with seniors, banging on the blue counter window, waking Buddhu up to make a steaming cup of tea when the sun had barely risen... rediscovering friends and observing the new crop after summers, while the smoke trailed from our fingers... jumping the compound for impromptu dinner at Madrasi... from visiting dadus, to making it home--Niranjan da's smile and welcome small talk... discovering, in a cycle that I suppose repeated itself in every batch, friends among the junior batch while seated on the compound wall...

My heart was heavy as we headed to XL, the initial excitement having died down completely... it was near midnight when I got there, and in the rush of meeting people, it slipped my mind... the next morning, we took a walk down and I saw the shell that remained... I could not fathom why anyone would have wanted to break Dadus down--to me, it was as horrific as ripping one's own limbs apart...

Dadu's has now been moved behind GH1, where the broken furniture used to be kept... when I met Niranjan da, he told me all this had happened but a day before I got there... one look at their faces could have shown any fool that they felt cheated, betrayed by their own... to them, XL had been family all their life, and the little room known to the XL world as Dadu's their lifeline... to snatch that away must have taken an awfully cold heart and lack of all human consideration...

Is that where XL is headed? The official reason is that this is a part of an overall plan to beautify the campus.

Many XLers hold prominent positions in the corporate world... I ask of you, when you come to recruit us, does it really matter how green the garden is or how even the pavements? Or do you look for signs like these, that tell you what we value and what kind of human beings we are? And what does such blase destruction of a revered symbol of the XL tradition say about XL now? I, for one, am sorely disappointed......