What with the demand for faculty outstripping the supply of competent teachers, academic hiring often ends up somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and farce, with nonsensical dialogues and ludicrous endings. In the past ten years or so, as a subject expert, I have been a silent onlooker in hundreds of absurd and farcical faculty selection dramas in which my role has often been hijacked by KIA to my great relief.
In one of the latest of these dramas, KIA, who is as distant from English literature as Donald Trump is from good sense, asked a candidate, who was a postgraduate in English with several other academic qualifications and plenty of experience as a teacher, if she had studied Shakespeare in her MA. She nodded wanly. The reluctant nod encouraged KIA to drivel on about the Bard.
“Do you read Shakespeare even now?”
She both shook and nodded her head.
“What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?”
“Paradise Lost, saar” she said in a hushed
voice as though she was naming a serial murderer.
KIA looked confused. He turned in my direction
for a confirmation. I kept a blank face. Shakespeare or Rajamouli’s father –
how the hell would the authorship of this book matter in an engineering
college?
Never one to give up, KIA decided to address
the subject without any expert guidance. “I know,” he said fixing the woman
with an intimidating gaze, “Shakespeare wrote Helmet. Did he write Paradise
also?”
“Oh yes, saar. Paradise Lost, saar, not
Paradise. It’s a famous book.”
“Drama?”
“Of course, drama, saar. Shakespeare wrote
only dramas.”
KIA has a deeply suspicious nature. “Who lost
paradise in the drama?” he persisted, leaning forward as though pouncing.
“Angels, saar,” she said in a bright and clear
voice. “They were in paradise, and they lost paradise.” Her eyes gleamed with
confidence now.
This seemed a convincing explanation. KIA
leaned back and nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, teach a demo lesson now.”
She got up and moved slowly like a detached
wagon being shunted on to a side track in the Vijayawada railway yard. The
wagon stood between the two boards, one white and the other black, on the other
side of the hall, thought for a while and decided to use the white board.
‘The Road Not Taken’ – she wrote this in tiny
letters on the board and started talking to the board itself. She said
something about some Robert-something who wrote the poem.
KIA wouldn’t allow this. “Write on the board,
without doubt, but speak to the students behind you. Don’t you know this? You
are an experienced teacher, aren’t you?”
She smiled with a piteous look on her face and
continued her teaching. It was a dialogic process with KIA making it as
interactive as possible.
“There were two roads, and the traveller took
one of them.”
“But there was only one traveller, so he could
have taken only one of the roads. How could he take both roads?”
“Yes, saar. But there was another road also,
saar.”
“But he did not take it. Why bother about it?
Tell us what happened on the road he took.”
“Nothing happened, saar.”
“What are you saying? There were two roads. He took one. And nothing
happened on that road. Is that what the poem is about? Funny.”
“Yes, saar. But no, saar. He talks about other
roads also.”
“Other roads! You said there was only one
other road, but now you are saying there were more roads. How many roads were
there? Be clear about the number.” Then he turned to the subject expert and
asked, “How many roads, sir?”
KIA is a facts-and-figures man. So, I decided
to do justice to his question. “Actually, there are three roads,” I said
approaching the question with deep reflection. From 2014 to 2023 I took the
road on the Addada-Gudlavalleru route. When it became broken up and unusable
beyond Penjendra, I took that serpentine one on the Chirichintala route – the road
that takes you through several run-down cemeteries, full of tumbled tombstones,
before it crosses the railway line and touches Angaluru. A few months ago, even
that road become impassable. Then I went beyond and took the unfinished flyover
near Dokiparru. The flyover hasn’t been opened to traffic yet, but I use it.
It’s a roundabout way, of course, but it doesn’t hurt my back much.”
It was a moment of enlightenment for KIA – a eureka moment in which all illusions are
shattered and one sees things as they really are. “Is that what the poem is
about?” he asked the woman who, both shook and nodded her head, as was her
wont, especially when deeply confused, and that concluded the lesson.
‘The pain ends when you let go,’ as the song
goes.
