Delhi is a melting pot: Manish Tiwary

One look at his film “Dil, Dosti Etc” and you can bet all your savings that director Manish Tiwary has studied in DU. After all, only a DU alumnus can depict the campus with all its nuances and that too with such precision. Manish studied Zoology at Hindu College and this is also the place his film is set in.
My idea of Delhi, Delhiites and DU
I’d come to Delhi before I came to DU, so I had a fairly good idea of what the city was about.What I did not know was where and how I would fit in. Slowly, the city made space for me in hundreds of little ways. Also, after boarding school and small town life in Bihar, Delhi meant a certain escape to freedom. As a director and a storyteller, my Delhi days are important because sans this period (as I was to leave India for the next seven years) I’d be poorer in knowing my country and its people and having any real understanding of their stories.
My experience as a Hindu student
Delhi is a melting pot and there’s no better place to find this than in DU’s campus life. I was beginning to find my feet and the time in Delhi proved to be a good springboard. One of the songs in “Dil, Dosti Etc” that goes ‘Iss Sheher Ke Naye Collector Papa Paincho Hum Hain’, penned by Prashant Pandey, captures the dream that outsiders in the city have.
Memories from my Hindu days
During those days, the protests against the Mandal Commission were on. A number of hostellers took a DTC bus hostage and ordered the driver to join a march in CP. When the bus started, one of the guys remembered he’d forgotten his slippers. So, we first took the bus to Hindu, so that he could get his footwear. The audience can see an altered version of this bus hostage episode in “Dil, Dosti Etc”.
I also remember indulging in addabaazi of all kinds – with friends in St Stephen’s and Hansraj (Dinendra Kashyap, Suveen Sinha and Deepak Kumar are some who come to mind) and also at Miranda, IP, and (as I was no snob) even Daulat Ram! Another fond memory is of the bike rides to Priya Cinema for evening shows. Midnight meals at Ghantaghar and Hindu Rao were also a lot of fun.
Hindu Vs Stephens
The whole ‘whose better between Hindu and St Stephen’s’ debate was indeed there, and I fear shall remain so. What’s funnier is that this banter continued as I went for postgraduate degrees to Cambridge and then Yale University. But I’d like to believe that I defended all my alma mater rather successfully in all these debates.