[ Momordica Charantia ]

Welcome to our university, the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU), where learning begins long before we enter the classroom hall. Here, students learn balance on uneven roads, patience while navigating potholes, and advanced techniques for avoiding puddles of uncertain depth. By the time we reach our lecture halls, we have already completed a practical survival course - one that no university curriculum ever thought of including.

The RGU route has been an amusement for me, definitely not necessarily because it is a road, but because of the remarkable number of things it has managed to become. On a dry day, it resembles a dry, rugged terrain. After rain, it offers a more ambitious experience: a combination of low-budget Niagara Falls and an off-road driving track with the occasional landslide. And somehow, we have become experts at it. At least I have. I know which potholes to avoid, which puddles are harmless, at what distance the next one is coming, and exactly where to slow down if I would like to reach the university with my bones, vehicle, and dignity intact.

After so many unexpected somersaults, I have practically memorised them, although, honestly, this was not how I intended to learn somersaults. But to warn the readers, in my three years of experience, the RGU route is probably not the best place to learn stunts. You might come back with what could be called a permanent tattoo or, more realistically, an injury.

But there is something else I have learned along this route. Whenever a friend announces that she is coming to our house, suddenly the cleaning spirits in us come alive. We clean everything that has been ignored for months. The same spirit seems to appear in our authorities whenever a minister is invited. Every time a minister is expected to visit, the road condition miraculously improves by the next morning. Cracks disappear. Potholes are filled. The road suddenly receives the attention it has been waiting for. If only ministers visited every week. But I have also noticed that they have tried (hopefully not their best).

Sometimes the cracks are filled with soil gathered from the side of the road; sometimes perhaps, with sand from the Dikrong River. And on particularly happy days, we might even get some cement. Not necessarily the best solutions, but at least they tried. As sir Bengia Ajum says, Arunachali people are too good to the government. Perhaps this is reflected in the attitude of RGU students as well. We have learned to navigate our own route because demanding our rights often feels much harder.

Behind all the humour, however, there is a serious problem. We have become so accustomed to poor roads that we have started treating them as a normal part of university life. We joke about them, make memes about them, complain to our friends about them, and then continue using them the very next day. We have adapted so well that perhaps we have forgotten that we were never supposed to adapt to this in the first place. A bad road is not merely an inconvenience.

Every morning, the roads around the university are filled with vehicles, students coming to class, faculty members and staff arriving for work, visitors entering the campus, and people travelling in and out throughout the day. With that much traffic, it becomes a safety concern. You cannot have a road full of potholes, uneven surfaces and water-filled ditches while simultaneously having vehicles moving through it every few minutes and expect there to be no consequences. A road should help people reach their destination safely. It should not turn the journey to university into a daily test of reflexes. And temporary fixes after a VIP visit cannot be the solution to a problem that students face throughout the year.

The irony is that we are students of a university, a place where we are constantly encouraged to question, analyse, speak up, and demand better. Yet when it comes to our own basic rights, we often choose to simply find another way around the pothole. Maybe it is time we stopped doing that.

Change should not come only when a minister visits, and repairs should not wait until an accident forces us to pay attention. Let us not wait for someone's injury to become tomorrow's news before we realise the seriousness of today's potholes. Because at the end of the day, we are not merely asking for a better road; we are asking for everyone's safe return home. (The contributor is a student of RGU, Rono Hills.)