Five ways a library will never be the same again

I don't know what Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) vice-chancellor Zameer Uddin Shah ate for breakfast – or lunch or dinner – on the day he made his epic piquant comment. I don't even know what I had for breakfast – or lunch, or dinner – the very same day, but I do not know the day of the week he made the comment.

That, though, is not important, unless, of course, either of us falls sick and the doctors diagnose and blame the breakfast – or lunch, or dinner – that either/both of us had had that very day he made the comment. But on second thoughts even that is hardly important, though both of us take our good selves with a pinch of salt marked "self-importance".

Having established the maxim that you need an opening to open an account, let's get to the meat of it before the lunch gets over. Now, Shah said something to the effect that the main library in the famed university does not allow more or less half its student population, which, predictably and rightly, has won him the Twitter version of rotten tomato award for inanity, if not insanity. Here are five developments that you may have missed while checking the temperature of rage and wrath that followed Shah's remarks:

1) Shah followed up his asinine statement with a pristine one: he said there's a space crunch in the library; ergo the ban on women students. At precisely this point lines outside the library swelled so much and went so zig-zag-ziggly that people manning dictionary sites began coining a new word for the much-used and abused "serpentine queues".

2) Chetan Bhagat tweeted voila!, which was favourited by 1,29,983 people. Bhagat, the cool gent he is, followed it up by saying it has a half-twit, at which point half the people who had previously favourited his previous tweet unfavourited it. In a third tweet, Bhagat said it was just the preface to the real face of his real tweet, which said he has found the title for his next novel. Half Library. For the record, the solitary comment it attracted came from Zameer Uddin Shah, who asked him to get his whole soul out of the said library.

3) A sting operation done on people in different libraries across the length, breadth and depth of the country showed approximately half the male students were "distracted", to use Shah's words by the women and at the same time convincing themselves that they were attracted to the same women. In effect, they were purportedly eyeing the women while attempting to book a date with the guide books.

4) Meanwhile, a survey done on students of Delhi University found 2.67 per cent youths polled had heard about the news. 67.2 per cent had heard about the university, 27.6 per cent knew about the vice-chancellor and 100 per cent had thought the V-C had asked students to not come to the university. Ever. Sources close to the ground on which ground reality lay, lazily enjoying the coming Delhi winter, said different students' groups were gearing up to petition the DU vice-chancellor to take a leaf from his Aligarh counterpart's garden and close all libraries in all DU colleges till a week before final examinations.

5) Parents and tutors of pre-teens formed an association, with chapters across all major and minor cities, to inform the children that a library lies outside Kindle, that it's a place where one goes to read books, including as well as aside of reference guides, and often to borrow books that you might find in your parent's home 20 years thence.