MODEST PROPOSAL II

I’m Jonathan Swift. I’m eighty. I’m fifty. I’m twenty. Riding on the popularity of ‘The Tale of Benjamin Button', I’m rejuvenated; I feel young again. From this vantage point I always sit next to you, looking at the vapidity of your vanquished postures(including mine), which resemble that of the Fallen Angels, especially in a interminable lecture.

I believe in Shakespeare’s aphorism, ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, therefore let me plunge directly into my Modest Proposal II. But before formulating this unprecedented proposal for which I expect nothing less than Nobel Prize for Peace (all agog as I’m), let us talk something about our department. Our department is a kiln (we being the child labourers) that churns out Stoics- equal in pleasure and pain. The way we confront shocks and anagnorises, for instance, whether it may be the date sheet episode which was as much full of uncertainties as exit poll during the electoral process; or our internal marks (which we keep on counting -11,12, 13,like a mahajan counts the number of months), it makes us stone-hearted and staves off any contingency of cardiac arrest. I genuinely pity those fat uncles, aunts, and pretty girls who burn their calories in the park and keep on complaining about having cardiac diseases. Why don’t they join our department instead of being swindled by doctors? This will bring them closer to Gandhian ideals as doctors and medicines were an anathema to Gandhi, an idea enunciated in Hind Swaraj.

From Gandhi I could recall the Gita. During exams however hard I swoted to glean various hackneyed expressions from the background readings, my cerebrum revolted after wading through a few pages. And my strenuous efforts to instill into it the Gita’s philosophy of karmanye va adhikare ma phaleshu kadachane and Hemingway’s a man can be destroyed but not defeated seemed as inane and abortive as attempts made by a girl to cover her bare midriff by committing violence both on her T-shirt and the onlookers.

To steer past this enigmatic state of mind, when, once in the evening I came across one of the most prestigious teachers of our department, I asked him, ‘Sir, why do we read literature?’ He responded: Shelley has rightly… I cursed the moment I had decided to demystify myself as it puzzled me further.

A couple of years ago, I read a book Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla, where one of the characters talks about the predominant belief among the villagers including their vaidya (a charlatan) that a man after completing M.A. runs the risk of losing his virility to some extent. Had he imagined our department even in his distant dream, I’m sure he would have proposed something better for women too, in the aftermath of M.A., to extricate them from the post-M.A. syndrome. But I’m here, to accomplish the Great Tradition.

Most probably you’ll also agree that eve-teasing and Satanic-male-gaze are some of the foremost problems this bustling city is encountering today. Now the premise of my proposal is that it should be mandatory for all the girls of Delhi to undergo the two-yr odyssey of MA English and if feasible followed by a course in MPhil. What! You still find them stunningly beautiful? Then, let me tell you beauty lies not in the eye of the beholder but in the beholden. Who talks about exceptions and minorities in democracy?
PS: A few months back when I used to make jeremiads about our class and department one of my friends exhorted me to write something on the topic. I remember thinking it was like being asked while travelling to Shimla during the summer vacations whether I would take a detour and travel Switzerland as well in my limited resources. Onerous as the task seemed to me, I dropped the idea. Since I’m an unemployed person now I undertook the task.