The philosophy department at VIT, Indore, was a world of its own. Tucked away in the oldest building on campus, it smelled of old paper, dust, and the faint, lingering scent of chalk. The walls, painted a pale, sun-faded yellow, were lined with portraits of stern-looking men who seemed to disapprove of the very concept of fun. For the second-year students, this was their home turf, a place where abstract thoughts collided with the messy reality of college life.
It was in this room that Gangesh Verma and his friends held court. They weren't the toppers, not by a long shot, but they had a presence. Gangesh himself sat straight, his notebook open to a clean page, his pen held like a weapon ready for battle. To his right, Aditya was doodling a fantastical bike in the margin of his notebook, muttering about how existentialism was a scam if it didn't make his bike go faster. To his left, Sagar had already achieved nirvana, his head cradled in his arms, softly snoring through a lecture on Kant's categorical imperative. Karan was scribbling furiously, his "strategy" for the upcoming mid-terms already involving a complex system of color-coded notes and memory palaces that he would undoubtedly forget the structure of by lunchtime.
Across the aisle, a different kind of energy radiated from Anya Chauhan and her friends. They were known, famously or infamously, throughout the humanities block. In their first year, their group presentation on "The Semiotics of Modern Protest Art" had been so brilliantly delivered and fiercely defended that it had silenced the usually rowdy class and earned a slow, impressed clap from the hardest-to-please professor. They were the unit you didn't mess with. Anya sat at the forefront, her posture radiating a calm authority. Suman was beside her, organizing her notes with terrifying precision. Kusum listened with a gentle, absorbing focus, while Sandhya, quiet as a shadow, watched the entire room, her eyes missing nothing.
The professor, Mr. Joshi, a man whose beard seemed to contain entire philosophies of its own, was mid-sentence about John Rawls' theory of justice when his phone buzzed on the desk. He frowned, held up a finger to the class, and stepped out into the corridor, leaving the door slightly ajar.
A relaxed chaos instantly descended upon the room.
Aditya nudged Gangesh. "Yaar, Rawls is just saying what my dad says. Close your eyes and divide the cake, then no one fights."
"Your dad bakes cakes?" Karan asked, intrigued.
"No, you idiot, it's an example! But think about it, my plan for the canteen line is the same. If we all go in blindfolded—"
"We'll all trip over Sagar," Gangesh finished, a small smile playing on his lips. His eyes, however, drifted across the aisle. He couldn't help but watch Anya's group. They hadn't broken into chatter. Anya was pointing something out in Suman's notes, and Kusum was nodding in agreement. There was a quiet efficiency to them that he found both impressive and mildly irritating.
It was then that a voice, loud and unnecessarily boisterous, piped up from the back of the room. Rohan, a guy from the sports wing known more for his muscle than his mind, decided to fill the philosophical vacuum.
"Equality, equality, that's all these books talk about," Rohan said, laughing. "But it's simple. Everyone should get the same chance. Man, woman, doesn't matter. Run the same race, may the best man win. Fair and square."
A few guys around him chuckled and nodded. It sounded simple. It sounded right.
But Anya's head snapped up. Her pen stilled. Gangesh could see the shift in her posture, the way her shoulders squared. It was the same feeling he got when Aditya was about to pick a fight; a sudden charge in the air.
Suman was faster. She turned in her seat, her voice a sharp, precise instrument. "The best *man* win? Is that the only competitor you can imagine? The race itself was designed by and for men. Telling everyone to run the same race on a track full of potholes only one side has to jump over isn't equality. It's a setup."
Rohan flushed. "It's just a saying! You're overcomplicating it. Women want equality, right? So there it is. Same race."
Anya finally spoke. Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the room's murmur like glass. "It's not about complication. It's about blindness. You see the finish line and call it fair. You don't see the different starting points, the weights we carry, the hurdles that only exist on our lane. To say 'may the best man win' in a world built for men is to already declare the winner." Her words were bold, not punchy, but they landed with the force of undeniable truth.
The room fell silent. Rohan spluttered, unable to form a coherent argument against her logic.
This was the moment. Gangesh saw a situation spiraling, a guy being publicly dismantled, even if he deserved it. His principles twitched. Justice, to him, wasn't just about the big truths; it was about fairness in the moment. He felt a surge of impulsive need to step in, to be the mediator, to find the moral center that everyone was missing.
He stood up. All eyes turned to him.
"Hold on," Gangesh said, his voice calm but firm. He wasn't looking to fight Anya. He was looking to resolve. "Rohan's being an idiot, no doubt. His 'same race' idea is naive." He acknowledged the fault first, establishing his fairness. Then he turned his gaze to Anya. "But his core point, the one buried under all the clumsiness, isn't completely wrong. Equality *should* be about equal opportunity. The problem is, we haven't fixed the track yet. We haven't made it truly equal to start. So the focus shouldn't just be on the race, but on the builders, on fixing the system before we judge the runners."
He felt good about it. He had taken a hot-headed argument and tried to cool it down with reason. He had acknowledged her point while salvaging a kernel of truth from Rohan's. He saw Aditya nodding vigorously beside him, and even Karan looked impressed, as if this was part of some grand strategy.
But from across the aisle, the reaction was different.
Suman looked at him as if he'd just stated that the sky was green. Kusum's face was etched with a sad disappointment. Sandhya's observant eyes narrowed slightly, as if she'd just updated her internal file on Gangesh Verma with a critical, negative entry.
And Anya. She didn't get angry. She didn't raise her voice. The fire in her eyes banked into something colder, more scornful. It was a look of pure, undiluted contempt for what she perceived as cowardice—the cowardice of a half-truth.
"You think you're being the hero, don't you?" Anya said, her voice dangerously quiet. "Finding the middle ground. But there is no middle ground here. By trying to salvage his 'core point,' you just validated it. You said the focus *shouldn't just* be on the race. That 'not just' is the problem. It should not be on the race *at all* until the track is level. By asking us to shift focus, you're asking us to neglect the very reason the race is unfair. You're telling us to stop talking about the hurdles so the people who don't have to jump them can feel better about their own run."
She stood up now, facing him fully. The entire class was the audience to this duel.
"In your attempt to be morally just, Gangesh, you just dismissed every single hurdle women face as a secondary issue, a 'builder' problem for later. You reduced centuries of systemic imbalance to a problem of track maintenance that we can get to after the race. That isn't heroic. It's neglect. It's a blindness that is, frankly, worse than his stupid saying."
Her words weren't an attack; they were a dismantling. They peeled back the layers of his argument and exposed what she saw—a fundamental failure to understand. She wasn't angry at his interruption; she was scornful of his inability to see the whole picture, his pride in his own principles blinding him to a larger truth.
Gangesh stood frozen. The pride he had in his principled stand crumbled. The justice he thought he was delivering felt hollow, exposed as a shallow compromise. He had walked in thinking he was dousing a fire, only to have Anya show him he was just fanning the flames with his own ignorance. The silence in the room was no longer comfortable; it was accusatory.
Just then, Professor Joshi walked back in, oblivious to the philosophical earthquake that had just reshaped his classroom.
"Now, as I was saying," he droned, picking up a piece of chalk. "Rawls argues from the 'veil of ignorance'..."
But no one was listening. The real lesson was over. It had been delivered not from the chalkboard, but from the clash between two different kinds of pride, two different interpretations of justice. And as Gangesh slowly sank back into his seat, he knew, with a sinking feeling, that Anya Chauhan had just taught him the most important philosophy lesson he would ever learn: that sometimes, the most immoral act is to try and be fair to everyone without first understanding who you're being unfair to.
The message was clear, and it was etched into him by the scorn in her eyes.