The love lives of students at a premier educational institute in Pakistan have become the subject of a heated debate.
The campus of the elitist Lahore University of Management Sciences, which has been “divided between conservative, retro-revisionists, ultra-modern, party-hopping and next-generation liberals,” was witness to the debate when a woman student sent a mass email on the university's mailing system.
The unnamed student, thought to be a conservative, sent out the email saying she was fed up with “on-campus indecency”.
The mail titled “To love or not to love”, has been described as a “social suicide bomb” by Asif Akhtar, a recipient of the mail.
The student claimed some senior students had to “seek physical consolation from the members of opposite sex many times in a day” on campus and in public sight. To back her claims, she provided specific examples and collected photographic evidence. Akhtar quoted the student's email in his blog.
“Standing at the main entrance, a girl stands on tip of her toes and kisses a boy good bye; lying in the lawn in front of the library, a boy rolls over the girl lying down beside him and remains in this posture; sitting in the academic block, a boy constantly rubs a girl’s leg....”
After furnishing this evidence, the student points out that because of such behaviour, “aunties spread rumours that doubt the chastity of girls studying in LUMS”.
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Advocating a “religious, cultured and social” environment at the campus, the student asked the university administration to draw out rules that outline an inter-gender code of conduct on campus. The email has elicit strong responses on the campus. One male student responded with a "I have sinned" mail.
“I shave twice a week and my 'painchas' (trousers) hang obstinately below my heels. I have a penchant for ties that resemble the Christian cross and my satanic dress code is causing me to stray far, far away from the straight path. During the holy month (of Ramzan), instead of attending Quranic recitals in the mosque, I was listening to the demonic sounds of Pink Floyd," the student wrote further in his email. He blamed "deviant professors" for this transition, whose theories made his moral-compass go awry. Sheikh Umer Zaheer Tajwar, another recipient of the mail, wrote in lumsdailystudent.Com, "Larki, you had four years to bring it up; why now? You have courageously tolerated this fiesta, why are you pulling the plug on it when you have six months left?"