Lest Auld Acquaintance....

Well, it looks like I'm blogging in solitary splendour here, for which I guess the exams are mostly to blame. BTW, does anyone know where the board for the meatspace blab has gone? It was used during the MAdmission but I can't find it anywhere.
People, do you want this to go the way of the other defunct JUDE blogs, or shall we continue to bless it with posts? For one thing, it's a useful directory to everyone's blogs, and still gets used as such. PLus, it could be a space for people (like myself) who have a blog presence but don't want to take on a whole blog, since most of the time I (to take a sample case) don't have enough to say to prop up a full time blog. Plus the thought of pontificating in solitary splendour is kind of off-putting. Also JUDE newcomers to blogs and their habits can start off posting here and graduate to their own blogs if they wish.
Since JU Arts has been deprived by dastardly conspiracy of the lobby, this is as close to a virtual lobby we'll ever get. As most of the people reading this blog have no idea what the lobby was, let me try to explain. It was kind of like the late-lamented bridge, except that khuchro prem/subs. ab./pnpc were only part of the lobby menu. There was also plenty of serious, heated discussion and idea-swapping. Of course, in those days JU was a very different place. Nearly all the faculty we have today had not shown up, with the exception of Supriyadi. We followed the annual system, in as must as we followed any system at all. JU was NOT a trendy place to be, that was reserved for Presi or maybe Xaviers. Presi was the ideological hotspot: people there aspired to be thinkers. JU English and Comp. Lit. (which were much more sister depts then than now) were more oriented towards doing, esp. Comp. Lit. which still had the shadow of Buddhadev Basu on it and turned out many accomplished actors, directors, dancers and creative people. English was the oddballs' haven (diluted somewhat by the homely convent-educated ujjol shyambornos) with lots of moffusil-refugees and people with no background whatsoever. Anyone who turned up in a car was subjected to long, slow scrutiny. The faculty were mostly either nice, flustered incompetents or completely insane, once again with the exception of Supriyadi who is and will always be in a class of her own (yes she's my favourite teacher: Swapanda was in England). Of course, I didn't experience JU as an undergrad since I went to Brabourne (yet managed to spend most of my third year in the lobby). To the credit of the Brabourne teachers, they quickly identified me as a nutcase and left me benevolently to my own devices, a privilege I would not have got at Loreto or even Xaviers. I even managed to act in a JUDE play in my third year (this was before DIP and ALal). Hence the importance of the lobby and the people in it: they and the old British Council Library are largely responsible for my education (in so far as anyone apart from me can be blamed for it).
But things have changed. The stuff we bootlegged on the lobby steps is now part of the syllabus. The annual system is history. People who do NOT turn up in cars are subjected to fast, incredulous scrutiny (not). Most of the Presi faculty has been lifted Noah's ark-like into JUDE (no don't even attempt to pair them off). And we have blogs. Perhaps the lobby would have died anyway, under the mounting pressure of the new dispensation. Or perhaps not. I shall at this point resist the urge to quote Malory via Tennyson.