“The annually occurring, prolonged nightmare of pains,also known as CU is now over.
And I am alive once more.It is tough to describe the past few months. Actually I have been rendered numb by the end of it so I don’t really have words to replace the genuine feelings of hatred,contempt,disgust and repulsion which I feel for that institution.”
This is an excerpt from an email sent to me by a friend of mine who is a resident of Mars. Yes Mars.
Before you jump to hasty conclusions,let me expand CU for you……it is Chubki University,located somewhere in the hilly terrain of Mars( so my friend tells me). The nomenclature is more to do with the way the university has a habit of shocking and startling the students when they least expect it, than anything else. Anyway my friend went on further to explain his ordeals and the intellectual impediments he faced while dealing with ultra-boring works of (f)art.
First there was a play called
Edward…according to my friend,the play was based on the life of an unabashedly homosexual king and his minion;his consequent neglect of the duties of kingship,which resulted in (a)civil war for England (b)a box of aspirins for the student. Its repercussions can be gauged from the fact that, the play spawned an entire new genre of hybrid humans who,for some odd reason, started to call themselves Booby Darlings…..
Second there was
School For Scandal….a comedy which drew more Ha-Ha’s than bhojpuri porn…and he told me it was an achievement in itself. The plot was supposed to be mostly of the Restoration genre. The play did fit the bill of restoration,he tells me,as his sanity was restored soon after he was done reading the play.
Third there was
Pride and Prejudice which according to my friend was the literary equivalent of ekta kapoor soaps. The characters_ the ladies to be precise_were only interested in hooking up with rich guys with huge estates…much similar to our modern day gold-diggers to some extent…
There was also a novel called
Return of The Native…one of the main characters in this novel,going by the name of Eustacia, is a loose portrayal of all the new age mallika kherawat’s, who are comfortable with their sexuality and have no qualms in using their sex-appeal to seduce prospective mates; especially if the mate happens to have a lucrative job in paris. The novel also presented the character of Wildeve; someone who is stupid enough to assume that an unpredictable woman like Eustacia would actually spend her whole life with a single man. An even dumber character is that of Clym, who prefers serving the locals instead of going to Paris with a hot wife…idiot.
My friend gave me inputs on how the university tortured the students in innovative ways. He said that some students had to sit for exams on two consecutive days with the timing for the first exam being from 2-5 and that of the second exam being from 10-1; this practically meant almost no time for recuperating from the trauma of the exam gone by….he also stressed that the sex-life of a few students were also affected as they could not indulge in nocturnal rock-n-roll in so less a time-gap. The jerks.
But my friend is an optimist.He points out that he’s better placed than many of his friends who had to sit for 2 exams in one day!! you gotta have the stamina of a pornstar to actually sit through 6gruelling hours of accounts/maths or whatever combination you prefer.
All said and done,my friend is a bit disillusioned right now. He told me with a lot more than pain in his voice,that the university syllabus would not be this soporific,if it was presented well and a certain degree of creative freedom given to students. By curbing the imagination of young minds, and compelling them to memorise literature in a rigid,tasteless fashion; instead of giving them room for personal interpretations; the powers-that-be are destroying the entire charm of the subject itself.
“so what about you? Things must be better back there…”
This is how his email ends.
And I am still thinking on the reply.
