Jhelum, a former student of English at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, recalls an evening stroll to the Parthasarathy Rocks where she spotted a nilgai looking at her quizzically: an epochal moment in her life. “It’s an urban legend in JNU that if a nilgai crosses your path and looks into your eyes, you are destined to stay on campus for a decade. So that was it,” she says. In this melting-pot of wildly diverse political/ intellectual streams and social backgrounds, often lampooned as a world of lotus-eaters who live life to their own rhythm and rules, Jhelum found herself at ease for seven years. “When I first came to the campus in summer, it seemed dry, angry and orange, but a month later JNU had turned a lush green embracing you with open arms. That’s how varied it can be,” she remembers fondly. A more recent walk around campus brought back warm memories of charged-up debates around the role of Marxism or of post-colonialism; of street plays, learning the intricacies of history or development economics in classrooms, student politics, evening sojourns at Ganga dhaba or the occasional midnight snack.