Of Opinions and all that Jazz ...

Well, let's say that this post of mine is dedicated to one of the recent happenings in the campus that has raised quite a furore amongst a significant section of the final year students about to get placed. At the very outset, for the fear of being misconstrued, I would like to mention that the content in this post is just to make people reading this think a bit about the power of Opinions and the right way to express them. Hence I will post the ideas in a point-wise format, and let the reader form his/her conclusions.
So, yeah...the issue at hand is the 'Dow Chemicals Ban' issue.
For the less knowledgeable items of mortality, the context is as thus -- Dow chemicals is the firm that bought Union Carbide Ltd., the company whose negligence was the cause of the well known "Bhopal Gas Tragedy". Needless to say, there are a large number of ethical and legal issues involved with the company and its existence and operations. That being the case, students from some of the national institutes decided to ban Dow from recruiting from their campus this placement season. A certain section of IITM populace decided to follow suit as well.
When it comes to the motive behind this entire movement, I am sure everyone will agree that there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It is in fact a good thing that such issues were being discussed by people with at least some seriousness.
Having said that let's come to the points that I wish to present forth regarding the movement in our campus:

1. 1. A petition was drafted without the knowledge of a significantly huge chunk of the student community, and there was a signature campaign that was doing the rounds as well. It's all very good, but the fact where it gets debatable is that out of the total number of signatures taken a significant number of them were from a certain section of the student populace who won't at all be affected in any way if Dow decides to come or pack.
2. 2. Dow was supposed to be taking in students from Civil, Mechanical and Chemical Engg. However, when the faculty of these departments were approached for opinion and assistance regarding organizing an event related to the same issue, surprisingly large number of them seemed to not have been involved in this affair at all. Note that if the said company choses or refuses to come, their department students are the ones to suffer from not getting placed.
3. 3. While the students were not quite well versed with the issue itself, their immediate concern was the fact that some of their batchmates might not get placed because of this one company not coming. They decided to bring that issue to the fore front.
4. 4. A certain student group decided to have an open house for the issue so that, considering the fact that no attempt was made to clarify the entire picture to the student community, a proper platform is provided to discuss the issue on a non biased basis. When the organising body of this group went and fixed a certain faculty to be the moderator, he accepted and at the very outset mentioned that he would be a neutral speaker throughout as a moderator even though his opinions were formed. The organizing body also made sure that this point is clarified again and again. On the day of the event the said faculty actually at some stage says that he would like to come out of his neutral stance and vouch for the anti-Dow stance.
5. 5. The moderator had also mentioned that one of the speakers coming in was a victim as well as a social activist, and being a powerful speaker in Hindi, she would be speaking about the victims' perspective. It was quite well known that her speech would sway the opinion towards one side for sure, and hence it was mutually decided between the students and the moderator that this speaker be given a slot sometime late into the session when sufficient number of speakers have spoken. That speaker was sent in First up. Normal people would say that this was indeed a small meandering from the consensus, but no comments for now.
6. 6. When asked about the fact that the petition that was supposed to represent the student opinion regarding this issue was actually in no way a proper representation because hardly a handful of people knew about it as compared to the large number who did not, the faculty in charge of the entire movement (not from mech, chem or civil mind you) actually said that it was true. He agreed that it was not a proper representation but was something done in a haste to start off a movement regarding this, because of some specific issues. Yet, the students around him who helped him in the campaign, chose to deny it, until when the petition was forwarded to the authorities.
7. 7. Media involvement was there throughout. Not quite a view of both sides of the coin however, as it was only the petitioners' team which spoke to people, and the general student opinion went unmentioned.
8. 8. Same happened with the open forum discussion where all the student speakers were asked to speak in one consolidated slot, this in effect ruining the impact that they could have had on the proceedings of the day.

So it happened, that the entire picture was known to only a handful of people in the campus. No one else knew, yet it was portrayed in the media that it was the students' opinion that was being represented. The one opportunity of having a common platform for discussing the issue openly went on to become uncharacteristically one sided and even though content was remarkably good, the impact was not. Finally, the company decides to call the PR of IITM placement cell, and says that they were no longer interested in taking IITM students. Other institute grads were eager to join their firm and that was good enough for them. Motion quite successful one might say. We did manage to keep them out of the recruitment scene, but not by ditching them, instead we allowed them to ditch us. Fair...

The power of opinion and expressing opinion in the right way is remarkable. When mobilized properly, in a democratic nation like ours and many others', public opinions make and break. But thats only when its 'Public' opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of people all directed the wrong way. And with the entire movement leaving out the student community, and relevant sections of the faculty, one might take the liberty of calling the attempt 'incomplete' at the very least. We have allowed one company to ditch us because of all this. In the present scenario when companies are finding no dearth of good students to recruit, what guarantee do we have that some other company won't follow suit as well? After all every major corporate house today has some ethical issue or the other that might be dragged out into the media (but to no avail). And if these firms decide to look into such incidents that we have presented forth, and then say "Let's pack", we have nothing much to do. So much for the campaign. Questions are -- did it quite achieve what it set out for? or did it just leave a few apprehensive minds regarding next year's placements? was it responsible enough to get in the insti's name into the movement and then proceed without considering a proper opinion base of the insti ? or was it responsible enough to bring forth comments in the media, knowing that every of those would actually be presented as the opinion of IITM and not the person(s) making them?

In the end of it all, how good a question does "Are our students so insecure about placements?" make when it comes to the bigger picture involved?

Just a food for thought for some maybe...

P.S: Once again, this is just bringing out the issue as a general open ended idea for people to think about. I would seriously be grateful if people did not take anything personally. :)