Angad Kambli
And So I Said Jai Bhim: Three Aprils in Roorkee
And So I Said Jai Bhim: Three Aprils in Roorkee
Angad Kambli
Photo by Angad Kambli
Photo by Angad Kambli
Photo by Angad Kambli
Born and raised in Mumbai, Angad works as a Software Engineer by day. Open his Google Keep, and you’ll find Pyar-Mohabbat-Yearning poems alongside a dozen story ideas he hopes to turn into a novel someday. You can find his writings on @kambli.text on Instagram!
Born and raised in Mumbai, Angad works as a Software Engineer by day. Open his Google Keep, and you’ll find Pyar-Mohabbat-Yearning poems alongside a dozen story ideas he hopes to turn into a novel someday. You can find his writings on @kambli.text on Instagram!
Born and raised in Mumbai, Angad works as a Software Engineer by day. Open his Google Keep, and you’ll find Pyar-Mohabbat-Yearning poems alongside a dozen story ideas he hopes to turn into a novel someday. You can find his writings on @kambli.text on Instagram!
My earliest memory of Jayanti would be standing beside my dad at the entrance of my society as a rally went by - people dressed in blue and white marching as Bhim Geet played in the background. To me, Jayanti feels like a celebration of expression, an affirmation of pride as we collectively remember Babasaheb and all other people who made the world much more equitable.
I wish to tell three stories of my engagement with Jayanti in my university - these are stories of expression, self-reflection, coming to terms with my identity and our collective history, and of the dawning realization of my responsibilities as an Ambedkarite who made their place in a premiere institute and had preceding conditions that enabled them to have a positive experience while studying there.
After having spent almost two years in front of a laptop screen on Microsoft Teams, thanks to the pandemic, I returned to the campus in my pre-final year of college. In this time, I had consumed a lot of Ambedkarite content and had come to campus much more aware of the subtleties of interactions that took place all around me in this space so apolitical on the surface - yet so clearly political for someone who performed even the slightest amount of introspection. Jokes on reservation at standup events under the garb of being dank were rather commonplace. Gossip about a peer's reservation status was also not as rare as one would like it to be. “Apolitical” spaces like these give you complete freedom of expression, as long as your opinion matches the majority opinion that lacks any thread of nuance.
But I did not conform. There I was, a freshly educated Ambedkarite looking for ways to express his identity. Ways to, if nothing else, signal to other such Ambedkarites that we exist in this together. I was part of a literary group that hosted an annual slam poetry event. That particular year, it was scheduled on 14th April.
That year, I wanted to go to the campus’s official Jayanti celebration that took place in the senate hall but owing to our slam poetry event and the preparations for it, I couldn’t. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to celebrate Jayanti that year in my own way, however small the actual gesture. It was my first time on stage that day after a long time and I was definitely anxious. The poem I was performing was a Pyar-Mohabbat piece not related to Jayanti at all, but I wanted to end it with a proclamation of ‘Jai Bhim’. But even a gesture so minor seemed so scary. To just utter ‘Jai Bhim’ in front of so many people and let them know that today, I am celebrating the birth of a leader to whom we owe a much more equitable present felt like a rather monumental moment.
It shouldn’t have felt that way, but it did.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to go ahead with this plan until the moment I stepped onto the stage. In a blue shirt that I adored those days, I stepped into the spotlight and was on auto-pilot for the whole piece. As the applause died, I knew I owned that space for that moment in time and it felt fitting, if not a responsibility, to say it. And so, I took a step towards the microphone, and in the silence of the audi, I said,
“Jai Bhim.”
No one actually addressed this ‘Jai Bhim’ after the performance. For a long time I wondered if people missed it altogether.
It was after nearly half a year in December, when I was sitting in a canteen, slurping on Maggi in the cold winter when a junior appeared out of the fog.
“You’re Kambli, right?”, he asked.
He praised the performance followed by telling me how happy he felt to see someone wear blue and end their performance with a ‘Jai Bhim’ on Jayanti of all days. His joy was infectious and the fact that he remembered these details after all this time made me feel a mixture of pride and delight. That day I learnt, or rather confirmed two things - the right people notice everything; and every bit counts.
The next Jayanti was my final Jayanti on campus before graduation. A friend and I woke up much earlier than our usual unhealthy time tables allowed us to. We made our way to the senate hall on campus for the official celebration. This was my last chance to attend it on campus and I wasn't going to miss it. Students, faculty, administrative people and even their family members dressed in clean white clothes, some wearing blue, congregated at the entrance of the hall. This was the first Jayanti celebration I was attending, and for my friend who was not from the community, an introduction to the culture. The event was rather quaint. People giving speeches on Ambedkar’s life, the SC/ST liaison of the campus telling us about his experiences, an address by the director, a ceremony to award students who had won some quiz on Ambedkarite topics, etc. But being part of the event, being there to celebrate this day together with everyone who believed in an equitable and fair world was a profound feeling.
The following May, I graduated.
Last year I was back on campus to meet my juniors. Something about being in a closed walkable space where you have access to people you relate to and hang out with at leisure keeps calling you back long after you’ve left it. It was just in time for our literary group’s slam poetry event and I was going to perform as an alum. It was just a couple of days past Jayanti and I’m happy to say that I performed a poem on caste and identity this time.
A junior approached me after I performed this poem in our literary group’s meeting a few days before the actual event. She wanted to talk to me. I had never met her before this for she had started college after my graduation. The poem she was going to perform was tragically comic where the inherent humor in it was lost on most people and so, I was interested to know what she had to say.
The next day, I met her over chai at a tapri I had grown to adore in my time at the university. The chai there was still the same - the right amount of chai patti, milk, water, and ginger - a concoction strangely reminiscent of home. She told me how she felt nice to see someone so brazenly talking about his identity and his opinions. She told me how she had a friend, just like her who was Dalit and how people in her friend circle would joke about his rank and question his intellect. She said it made her feel small knowing that she came from the same community, even though people around her didn’t know. Having faced similar such scenarios in my early years at university, I could relate to her. She asked me what she should do.
I wish I could have told her to brazenly proclaim her identity and fight all those that bear a problematic opinion but despite some progress there’s still a long way to go. Maybe one day living your truth might be possible without putting your ambitions and goals at risk.
I told her to be pragmatic, and find better friends in the meanwhile. To express her identity only in spaces she felt comfortable doing so - and to aim to gain enough skills and the resulting confidence from it, that she’d be comfortable expressing herself everywhere. As people who have worked their way towards studying at a premiere institute, we should be pragmatic and think of how we can make the most of this opportunity to be much more helpful to the community and the world at large in the long run.
I saw myself in her and wanted to make sure that her college experience is just as great as mine. I’m glad I met her and I’m glad I get to help her as much as I can. I don’t want to shoehorn all these experiences into one watered down overarching moral of the stories but if anything, I’d say - Every bit of expression counts. Every bit of expression makes someone feel a little more at home in this world and so, let’s proudly send blue hearts filled with hope and love to each other and say Jai Bhim to the whole wide world to hear. I’ll end this essay with an excerpt from the poem I performed that year.
And so I say Jai Bhim and kinda kinda wait for an echo from the public because I believe the mountain's far but not non-existent.
My shout traveling at the speed of around 340 meters per second shall be reaching the mountains anytime soon, my words and the words of so many others shall surely pierce the hearts of all those that care.
And so I wait for an echo, because I feel I have said Jai Bhim loud enough.
Photo description: A photo from Ambedkar Jayanti program I attended in my final year
💙
My earliest memory of Jayanti would be standing beside my dad at the entrance of my society as a rally went by - people dressed in blue and white marching as Bhim Geet played in the background. To me, Jayanti feels like a celebration of expression, an affirmation of pride as we collectively remember Babasaheb and all other people who made the world much more equitable.
I wish to tell three stories of my engagement with Jayanti in my university - these are stories of expression, self-reflection, coming to terms with my identity and our collective history, and of the dawning realization of my responsibilities as an Ambedkarite who made their place in a premiere institute and had preceding conditions that enabled them to have a positive experience while studying there.
After having spent almost two years in front of a laptop screen on Microsoft Teams, thanks to the pandemic, I returned to the campus in my pre-final year of college. In this time, I had consumed a lot of Ambedkarite content and had come to campus much more aware of the subtleties of interactions that took place all around me in this space so apolitical on the surface - yet so clearly political for someone who performed even the slightest amount of introspection. Jokes on reservation at standup events under the garb of being dank were rather commonplace. Gossip about a peer's reservation status was also not as rare as one would like it to be. “Apolitical” spaces like these give you complete freedom of expression, as long as your opinion matches the majority opinion that lacks any thread of nuance.
But I did not conform. There I was, a freshly educated Ambedkarite looking for ways to express his identity. Ways to, if nothing else, signal to other such Ambedkarites that we exist in this together. I was part of a literary group that hosted an annual slam poetry event. That particular year, it was scheduled on 14th April.
That year, I wanted to go to the campus’s official Jayanti celebration that took place in the senate hall but owing to our slam poetry event and the preparations for it, I couldn’t. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to celebrate Jayanti that year in my own way, however small the actual gesture. It was my first time on stage that day after a long time and I was definitely anxious. The poem I was performing was a Pyar-Mohabbat piece not related to Jayanti at all, but I wanted to end it with a proclamation of ‘Jai Bhim’. But even a gesture so minor seemed so scary. To just utter ‘Jai Bhim’ in front of so many people and let them know that today, I am celebrating the birth of a leader to whom we owe a much more equitable present felt like a rather monumental moment.
It shouldn’t have felt that way, but it did.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to go ahead with this plan until the moment I stepped onto the stage. In a blue shirt that I adored those days, I stepped into the spotlight and was on auto-pilot for the whole piece. As the applause died, I knew I owned that space for that moment in time and it felt fitting, if not a responsibility, to say it. And so, I took a step towards the microphone, and in the silence of the audi, I said,
“Jai Bhim.”
No one actually addressed this ‘Jai Bhim’ after the performance. For a long time I wondered if people missed it altogether.
It was after nearly half a year in December, when I was sitting in a canteen, slurping on Maggi in the cold winter when a junior appeared out of the fog.
“You’re Kambli, right?”, he asked.
He praised the performance followed by telling me how happy he felt to see someone wear blue and end their performance with a ‘Jai Bhim’ on Jayanti of all days. His joy was infectious and the fact that he remembered these details after all this time made me feel a mixture of pride and delight. That day I learnt, or rather confirmed two things - the right people notice everything; and every bit counts.
The next Jayanti was my final Jayanti on campus before graduation. A friend and I woke up much earlier than our usual unhealthy time tables allowed us to. We made our way to the senate hall on campus for the official celebration. This was my last chance to attend it on campus and I wasn't going to miss it. Students, faculty, administrative people and even their family members dressed in clean white clothes, some wearing blue, congregated at the entrance of the hall. This was the first Jayanti celebration I was attending, and for my friend who was not from the community, an introduction to the culture. The event was rather quaint. People giving speeches on Ambedkar’s life, the SC/ST liaison of the campus telling us about his experiences, an address by the director, a ceremony to award students who had won some quiz on Ambedkarite topics, etc. But being part of the event, being there to celebrate this day together with everyone who believed in an equitable and fair world was a profound feeling.
The following May, I graduated.
Last year I was back on campus to meet my juniors. Something about being in a closed walkable space where you have access to people you relate to and hang out with at leisure keeps calling you back long after you’ve left it. It was just in time for our literary group’s slam poetry event and I was going to perform as an alum. It was just a couple of days past Jayanti and I’m happy to say that I performed a poem on caste and identity this time.
A junior approached me after I performed this poem in our literary group’s meeting a few days before the actual event. She wanted to talk to me. I had never met her before this for she had started college after my graduation. The poem she was going to perform was tragically comic where the inherent humor in it was lost on most people and so, I was interested to know what she had to say.
The next day, I met her over chai at a tapri I had grown to adore in my time at the university. The chai there was still the same - the right amount of chai patti, milk, water, and ginger - a concoction strangely reminiscent of home. She told me how she felt nice to see someone so brazenly talking about his identity and his opinions. She told me how she had a friend, just like her who was Dalit and how people in her friend circle would joke about his rank and question his intellect. She said it made her feel small knowing that she came from the same community, even though people around her didn’t know. Having faced similar such scenarios in my early years at university, I could relate to her. She asked me what she should do.
I wish I could have told her to brazenly proclaim her identity and fight all those that bear a problematic opinion but despite some progress there’s still a long way to go. Maybe one day living your truth might be possible without putting your ambitions and goals at risk.
I told her to be pragmatic, and find better friends in the meanwhile. To express her identity only in spaces she felt comfortable doing so - and to aim to gain enough skills and the resulting confidence from it, that she’d be comfortable expressing herself everywhere. As people who have worked their way towards studying at a premiere institute, we should be pragmatic and think of how we can make the most of this opportunity to be much more helpful to the community and the world at large in the long run.
I saw myself in her and wanted to make sure that her college experience is just as great as mine. I’m glad I met her and I’m glad I get to help her as much as I can. I don’t want to shoehorn all these experiences into one watered down overarching moral of the stories but if anything, I’d say - Every bit of expression counts. Every bit of expression makes someone feel a little more at home in this world and so, let’s proudly send blue hearts filled with hope and love to each other and say Jai Bhim to the whole wide world to hear. I’ll end this essay with an excerpt from the poem I performed that year.
And so I say Jai Bhim and kinda kinda wait for an echo from the public because I believe the mountain's far but not non-existent.
My shout traveling at the speed of around 340 meters per second shall be reaching the mountains anytime soon, my words and the words of so many others shall surely pierce the hearts of all those that care.
And so I wait for an echo, because I feel I have said Jai Bhim loud enough.
Photo description: A photo from Ambedkar Jayanti program I attended in my final year
💙
My earliest memory of Jayanti would be standing beside my dad at the entrance of my society as a rally went by - people dressed in blue and white marching as Bhim Geet played in the background. To me, Jayanti feels like a celebration of expression, an affirmation of pride as we collectively remember Babasaheb and all other people who made the world much more equitable.
I wish to tell three stories of my engagement with Jayanti in my university - these are stories of expression, self-reflection, coming to terms with my identity and our collective history, and of the dawning realization of my responsibilities as an Ambedkarite who made their place in a premiere institute and had preceding conditions that enabled them to have a positive experience while studying there.
After having spent almost two years in front of a laptop screen on Microsoft Teams, thanks to the pandemic, I returned to the campus in my pre-final year of college. In this time, I had consumed a lot of Ambedkarite content and had come to campus much more aware of the subtleties of interactions that took place all around me in this space so apolitical on the surface - yet so clearly political for someone who performed even the slightest amount of introspection. Jokes on reservation at standup events under the garb of being dank were rather commonplace. Gossip about a peer's reservation status was also not as rare as one would like it to be. “Apolitical” spaces like these give you complete freedom of expression, as long as your opinion matches the majority opinion that lacks any thread of nuance.
But I did not conform. There I was, a freshly educated Ambedkarite looking for ways to express his identity. Ways to, if nothing else, signal to other such Ambedkarites that we exist in this together. I was part of a literary group that hosted an annual slam poetry event. That particular year, it was scheduled on 14th April.
That year, I wanted to go to the campus’s official Jayanti celebration that took place in the senate hall but owing to our slam poetry event and the preparations for it, I couldn’t. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to celebrate Jayanti that year in my own way, however small the actual gesture. It was my first time on stage that day after a long time and I was definitely anxious. The poem I was performing was a Pyar-Mohabbat piece not related to Jayanti at all, but I wanted to end it with a proclamation of ‘Jai Bhim’. But even a gesture so minor seemed so scary. To just utter ‘Jai Bhim’ in front of so many people and let them know that today, I am celebrating the birth of a leader to whom we owe a much more equitable present felt like a rather monumental moment.
It shouldn’t have felt that way, but it did.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to go ahead with this plan until the moment I stepped onto the stage. In a blue shirt that I adored those days, I stepped into the spotlight and was on auto-pilot for the whole piece. As the applause died, I knew I owned that space for that moment in time and it felt fitting, if not a responsibility, to say it. And so, I took a step towards the microphone, and in the silence of the audi, I said,
“Jai Bhim.”
No one actually addressed this ‘Jai Bhim’ after the performance. For a long time I wondered if people missed it altogether.
It was after nearly half a year in December, when I was sitting in a canteen, slurping on Maggi in the cold winter when a junior appeared out of the fog.
“You’re Kambli, right?”, he asked.
He praised the performance followed by telling me how happy he felt to see someone wear blue and end their performance with a ‘Jai Bhim’ on Jayanti of all days. His joy was infectious and the fact that he remembered these details after all this time made me feel a mixture of pride and delight. That day I learnt, or rather confirmed two things - the right people notice everything; and every bit counts.
The next Jayanti was my final Jayanti on campus before graduation. A friend and I woke up much earlier than our usual unhealthy time tables allowed us to. We made our way to the senate hall on campus for the official celebration. This was my last chance to attend it on campus and I wasn't going to miss it. Students, faculty, administrative people and even their family members dressed in clean white clothes, some wearing blue, congregated at the entrance of the hall. This was the first Jayanti celebration I was attending, and for my friend who was not from the community, an introduction to the culture. The event was rather quaint. People giving speeches on Ambedkar’s life, the SC/ST liaison of the campus telling us about his experiences, an address by the director, a ceremony to award students who had won some quiz on Ambedkarite topics, etc. But being part of the event, being there to celebrate this day together with everyone who believed in an equitable and fair world was a profound feeling.
The following May, I graduated.
Last year I was back on campus to meet my juniors. Something about being in a closed walkable space where you have access to people you relate to and hang out with at leisure keeps calling you back long after you’ve left it. It was just in time for our literary group’s slam poetry event and I was going to perform as an alum. It was just a couple of days past Jayanti and I’m happy to say that I performed a poem on caste and identity this time.
A junior approached me after I performed this poem in our literary group’s meeting a few days before the actual event. She wanted to talk to me. I had never met her before this for she had started college after my graduation. The poem she was going to perform was tragically comic where the inherent humor in it was lost on most people and so, I was interested to know what she had to say.
The next day, I met her over chai at a tapri I had grown to adore in my time at the university. The chai there was still the same - the right amount of chai patti, milk, water, and ginger - a concoction strangely reminiscent of home. She told me how she felt nice to see someone so brazenly talking about his identity and his opinions. She told me how she had a friend, just like her who was Dalit and how people in her friend circle would joke about his rank and question his intellect. She said it made her feel small knowing that she came from the same community, even though people around her didn’t know. Having faced similar such scenarios in my early years at university, I could relate to her. She asked me what she should do.
I wish I could have told her to brazenly proclaim her identity and fight all those that bear a problematic opinion but despite some progress there’s still a long way to go. Maybe one day living your truth might be possible without putting your ambitions and goals at risk.
I told her to be pragmatic, and find better friends in the meanwhile. To express her identity only in spaces she felt comfortable doing so - and to aim to gain enough skills and the resulting confidence from it, that she’d be comfortable expressing herself everywhere. As people who have worked their way towards studying at a premiere institute, we should be pragmatic and think of how we can make the most of this opportunity to be much more helpful to the community and the world at large in the long run.
I saw myself in her and wanted to make sure that her college experience is just as great as mine. I’m glad I met her and I’m glad I get to help her as much as I can. I don’t want to shoehorn all these experiences into one watered down overarching moral of the stories but if anything, I’d say - Every bit of expression counts. Every bit of expression makes someone feel a little more at home in this world and so, let’s proudly send blue hearts filled with hope and love to each other and say Jai Bhim to the whole wide world to hear. I’ll end this essay with an excerpt from the poem I performed that year.
And so I say Jai Bhim and kinda kinda wait for an echo from the public because I believe the mountain's far but not non-existent.
My shout traveling at the speed of around 340 meters per second shall be reaching the mountains anytime soon, my words and the words of so many others shall surely pierce the hearts of all those that care.
And so I wait for an echo, because I feel I have said Jai Bhim loud enough.
Photo description: A photo from Ambedkar Jayanti program I attended in my final year
💙
