College means masti, maza and more

MUMBAI: As the first and now the second merit list for admissions to Class XI has come out, thousands of the city''s students are coming closer to that hallowed land—college.
"Everyone says it''s fun," says Sana Saeed, who played Shah Rukh Khan''s daughter in the college caper ''Kuch Kuch Hota Hai''.
Sana has passed out of Fort Convent and already got admission to H R College.
"Now that I''m in college, I''m considered a big girl," she laughs, adding that she will have to be more responsible, travelling alone and learning to study by herself. Sana''s mother, Farida, expresses the nagging worry of most parents when she says, "The fear of ''bad company'' troubles you somewhere. Anything can happen nowadays."
An apprehension shared by students, says school counsellor and child clinical psychologist Anureet Sethi.
"Although students have mainly positive feelings about college, they may have heard about ragging or may be worried about not fitting in," she declares.
Television producer-director Raman Kumar came from a Hindi medium school. His initial days in Khalsa College were not very comfortable, he recollects.
"I had this perpetual fear of how to react when people spoke to me in English," says Kumar, son of a taxi driver, who went on to make the popular Hindi serial, ''Tara''. Students respond to being released from the pressure and hard work of the tenth standard in different ways.
Unlike most teenagers who react to this new-found freedom by partying into the mornings, actress Amrita Rao of films like ''Main Hoon Na'' and ''Masti'' says she turned into a bookworm at Sophia College.
"I guess it was a hangover of the tenth standard. I was an archetypal front-bencher who never partied, working towards a career in clinical psychology. Only towards the end of the eleventh standard did modelling happen," she says.
Not everyone is as serious. Anisha Parikh, who studied at Bombay International and then went to H R College says, "We had to go to school every day. But college? I scarcely attended college at all."
As a result came certain lifestyle changes. "When I was in school, I scarcely went out and didn''t get an allowance. But once in college, I started partyingmuch more and spent around 2,000 bucks a month," she says.
For a variety of reasons, of which peer pressure is one of the most compelling, many students try smoking, drinking and drugs for the first time, once they join college.
Kabeer Lakdawala started smoking when he was 16 and had just joined National College. "I guess it was the fact that smoking was seen as being ''cool''. The Marlboro ads got us hooked," he recalls.
A chemical analyst today, he has only recently managed to quit smoking, six years later. Anisha too remembers how many of her friends started smoking and drinking soon after they had joined college.
However, many teenagers are not enamoured by the free time that college grants them and decide to make better use of their time by working.
"I''d get up every morning and have nothing to do," says Khyati Shah of her first few days at N M College. Khyati began to give tuitions to a friend who had failed her tenth standard and gradually began to coach more and more students while completing her education.
"I''m an independent person who comes from a conservative family. I loved working and earning," she says. Khyati''s first salary at age 16 was Rs 300. Six years later, she was making Rs 15,000 a month.
Whether an excuse to party or the first step towards a career, what college should not be, counsellors believe, is a larger-than life myth.
MP Sharma, principal of G D Somani School says, "So many students come back and tell us how much they miss the protection and the ''home atmosphere'' of schools. They say that no one cares about them in college."
Adds Sethi, "Many students are disappointed by what college actually turns out to be and end up feeling lost. Instead of hyping the phenomenon of college, discussing what it actually entails with students is more advisable."