India That Is Bharat
Dear Mr Editor, Satiricus is writing this confidential letter to you to make a confession. But before doing so he must thank you for assuring him that your readers are still alive and well and this column has not yet bored them to death. And of course thank you for the cheques. But you know what? And here comes the confession Satiricus does not write this column, he out-sources it. It is really ready-made. In a way, it is even imported. Are you shocked, Mr Editor? And if you are, should you be? Surely not. For if Satiricus can place an order for a cup of instant coffee, why can’t he order and get an instant column? That being the essence of out-sourcing,can you honestly expect Satiricus to waste his time in actually putting pen to paper when illiterate journos like him can rely on literate ghosts who will do the writing for him for a reasonable charge? In other words, why bother learning yourself when instant sale of learning is big business?
True, once upon a time long, long ago, when advanced India was backward Bharat and Satiricus was a school kid, he was told KutoVidyāthinahSukham, there can be no knowledge without hard work. Those days are gone, and we now live in terrific times when students don’t have to waste time in studies, for everything from school homework to a PhD thesis can now be out-sourced for a price. Naturally the price will vary as per the product ordered. For instance, out-sourced school homework may cost only a few hundred rupees, while the bill for a PhD thesis may go upto a couple of lakhs. (Sorry, Satiricus cannot divulge what he pays for this column.)
Unfortunately there are those who do not appear to appreciate this intellectual industrialization. For instance, the other day a rather irreverent report said there are “bespoke factories which churn out dissertations.” Fortunately such crass criticism has not dampened the spirit of synthetic scholarship, and the good news is that, to quote a newspaper, the “phantom writing industry” is “taking over campuses across the country”. In the capital itself there is such a factory where the labour force consists of PhDs and MBAs. Satiricus is impressed. How he wishes he had some cash so that he could go to a cash and carry scholarship shop and order a university degree that could overnight transform him from an illiterate journalist into an erudite professor.
On well, he missed the bus. Actually he had read in the papers many years ago that ready-made (rather, ready-written) PhD theses were on clandestine sale in the U.S. of A. even back then. Why, oh why, did this dimwit miss that instant erudition? But all is not lost.For in this glorious age of globalization the assembly-line manufacture of scholars is no more confined to America, it is spreading across the world. According to the Centre for Academic Integrity in the US nearly a third of the 360 American colleges and schools affiliated to it reported students downloading essays and papers written by someone else from online sites known as “paper mills”. And if America comes, can China be far behind? Naturally not. So Satiricus was not surprised to read that according to a study at the University of Wuhan in China commercial sales of ghost-written dissertations and journals were worth nearly one billion yuan (150 million dollars) in 2009 a 500 percent increase over 2007, in just two years. And between America in the far west and China in the far east lies Great Britain with a great online essay industry estimated to be worth more than 200 million pounds.
So when is India going to take its rightful place in the comity of online learned nations? Or are we going to keep on feeling stupidly sorry that our fifth-grade students cannot read our second-grade primers, and not a single one of our universities finds a place in the top 200 of the world’s universities? Let us rather take pride in the fact that we have a proliferating profusion of “paper mills” and a thriving throng of knowledge factories. Finally, ‘fess up, Mr Editor, who is your editorial-supplier?
Neutral Genders
Satiricus should have seen it coming the very moment chairman and spokesman were discarded for chairperson and spokesperson. Now it has happened. Schools in Gujarat are going to weed out all references to gender in the school books. They won’t even teach the poem “Khoobladimardāniwoh to Jhansiwali Ranithi”. Poor Laxmibai. A recent American survey may have named her among ten most outstanding women, but they do not seem to know that praising a woman as a woman is being unkind to womankind. By the way, what about that lady who is our Rashtra-”Pati”?
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