Being in the English Press Club means that my everyday life involves a fair amount of reading and writing. It’s mostly due to a passion for the practice and reverence for the language. But it isn’t a position too special—it means I hear what most of the campus eventually will, albeit a bit sooner, and many more times (several distorted versions of the same story may eventually make it to the ear as well). This effect is especially pronounced when we form our fest presses and cover as many events as we can—mainly because there’s one phenomenon that ties them all together. While it’s easy enough to guess, this brief introduction allows me to segue neatly into the crux of the matter:

BST. It’s an initialism that’s been introduced and engraved on the BITSian’s vocabulary as thoroughly as a few other, equally obnoxious words. It’s a highly common occurrence—from showing up to classes well into the session, to arriving fifteen minutes late to a club meet (blaming the long walk), and commencing auditorium shows much later than the times promised on the emails and flyers. At some point (I assume years ago), its perception would’ve changed. It would’ve gone from a sign of shoddy planning and execution, to a mildly inconveniencing detail that people could poke fun at, to an expected (and weirdly, endearing?) part of any performance. The strange sense of familiarity and comfort that seems to permeate through every message of “there’s half-an-hour BST”, or “light BST today, just fifteen minutes”, while perhaps being a matter of light humour and amusement, is likely also a symptom of problematic behaviour that’s taken for granted now. 

The main issue I’ve got with the matter (as I would imagine countless coordinators and faculty do as well) is that the most frequent defaulters often seem to think it’s a bulletproof excuse to have around. It’s almost as if being in BITS has given them automatic immunity against all punctuality requirements. Wilfully believing that their tardiness is out of their control, they attend whenever it pleases them, with some sort of paper-thin fallback in case the (reasonably annoyed) senior calls them out on their lateness. It’s usually something about how far their hostels tend to be from the Rotunda.

Those who’ve studied psychology to some degree must be familiar with the “locus of control”. It’s the degree to which people believe they have control over what happens to them (against outside forces). People with a strong internal locus believe their actions are the main cause of effect and consequence. People with a strong external locus tend to shift the blame to external factors, like chance or destiny. It’s easy now to see why astrology is rather popular—I’d feel better believing I failed my exams because my stars hadn’t aligned, rather than because I was up all night playing video games. It’s tantalising to take no responsibility for bad events (and credit for good ones), but it’s obvious how troublesome this is. 

A study published in September 1977 (and remains relevant still) correlated students’ academic successes with the locus of control they had^[1]. Students whose locus was internal believed that hard work and concentration would result in progress, while externally controlled students believed that luck and fate would be the main factors in determining success. It shouldn’t be too hard to guess which set did better academically. 

There’s a point to going on this psychological detour here. The external locus is symptomatic of a lack of effort and determination, care and credibility. BST is something that fuels this belief and allows people to shift blame for their actions onto a nonexistent, arbitrarily defined concept. No wonder it angers the recipient of the excuse—now they’ve got nobody and nothing to fault for the lapse, and the one person they assumed would be responsible for turning up late—the person themself—is saying it isn’t their mistake. While there may be other reasons why the averages of most tests don’t cross one-third of the total marks, it seems to me that the prevalent attitude of casualness towards generally everything is a significant factor.

The other issue to address is the esprit de corps that the average campus resident harbours towards all things quintessentially BITSian—especially to the unique lexicon we’ve developed here. Biswa Kalyan Rath needed only to bring up already well-known, vague references to the BITSAT and pander to the sentiment of the Pilani campus being the “true” campus last BOSM for the crowd to go wild. This extends to ideas like BST and “taking lite”. People like to believe that everyone on campus lives and breathes lite, that oodles and oodles of liteness can be found everywhere on campus, and that it’s something that sets BITS apart from the other, lite-deficient colleges. Similarly, the classic ever-late shows, the lack of seriousness towards dates, times, and deadlines—it would seem that when a term for that is coined, now that’s also a BITSian thing? One would think procrastination, poor organisation, and a general disregard for work aren’t things you’d find anywhere else on earth, given the fervour with which we say “there’s BST” rather than just saying “it’s running late”. Being in BITS doesn’t provide us with a license to arrive at any given meeting fifteen minutes later than scheduled, but we all do it in the hopes of not being the first person to be there, and thus, not waiting for everyone else. But it’s an inconvenience to that everyone else. 

We receive an immense amount of freedom in BITS, both academically and otherwise. But with that freedom comes a lack of imposed accountability—nobody holds us to commitments and morals with the expectation that we see to it ourselves. Roadblocks in that regard are the avenues that we’ve unfortunately given ourselves to pass it off as “not my problem”. As much as all of this would sound like something an old man disillusioned with the newest generation would mumble about while sitting on the front patio and sipping tea, values are important. A lack of time sense is not nearly as appealing as the presence of mind. If we had more respect for others’ time than we did our own, we’d all find ourselves wasting less time and having less time wasted by others. To conclude: the next time you have to attend a meeting at FD1 at 9:30, leave from Vyas Bhawan at 9:10. Heck, leave from Krishna Bhawan at 9:10. It can’t hurt.

^[1] Whyte, C. B. (1977). HIGH-RISK COLLEGE FRESHMEN AND LOCUS OF CONTROL. The Humanist Educator, 16(1), 2–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-6163.1977.tb00177.x