Admissions Open

Padma Devkota

Admissions Open!

    Human gullibility yields to subliminal invasions at all fronts except one. Study the advertisement culture on TV, on radio, on billboards and in print and you will notice how the clever businesspersons of the world manipulate your interest in certain commercial items over others. You will buy Colgate gel merely because you want to be the idiotic person admired by the beautiful girl who feels your passing whiff of breath and turns around on swirling skirts like a top to admire you (commercially of course!) with all her body and soul. You will buy wai-wai just because a girl in shorts (who probably has a knee problem) does her physiotherapy as she puts a long, ribbon-like strip of pasta into her mouth and winks and smiles at you from a dead screen. And, in real life, you will even place friendship below seduction if a girl offers an inch and nothing more of personal space for you because she likes to tease you out of your wits. However, no Eve that first fed you from the Tree of Knowledge can today lure you into buying your education from an institute that does not have a direct influence on the marks you receive because what you really want is marks, not education.
    This is what the head of the examination section of MA English has understood so well and is playing you for. The Machiavellian scheming of one who, endowed with power, nevertheless falls short of democratic, academic and moral values that may justify national welfare, has historically influenced your decision. Your gullibility has been tested and approved for the educational farce practised by the State. You qualify for admission into the degree programme offered at the Central Department of English, not because you can write a single sentence correctly in English, but because you were present at the ritual farce they call the entrance examination, which is invigilated also by numerous student party leaders who feel the need to assert their superiority (or, equality at best) over the university's practically defunct administrative competence. You need not even attend classes, which is a great motivation to join the department's programme especially if you work somewhere else or need to be stationed outside the valley throughout the major part of the academic year. You may even appear for the entrance examination by proxy, with the help of the student union, and the nation owes you entrance into the English MA programme.
    And admission is cheap! Which university in the whole wide world can vie with the basement bargain price for higher education offered by TU? Limp in one leg only on campus and they will even offer you a scholarship for the disabled. Present a minority certificate, a proof of being below the poverty line, or a testimony to political martyrdom. These find more instant economic rewards than your innate love for learning. Your interest in honest and sincere efforts at excelling yourself must ever go unnoticed because you will never rise above the average without the cunning and the craft of dishonest servitude to the pragmatist's ideals or to anthropoid idols that you worship because they fly over your head to the tune of droning neologisms. To maneuver is to succeed economically, academically.
    What more do you want? You have the additional opportunity of producing a cut-n-paste or a colluded thesis in no time and of scoring around ninety percent without any understanding of what research really means. All you need to do is to pose the attitude of an irrational hooligan if you cannot play the role of a devotee. And, you are simply lucky if you join the Central Department of English, TU, Kirtipur, because the academic chief is so intelligent that he requests class teachers of each subject there to prepare questions and to give these to him so that the same questions may appear in the next exam or be stored in the question-bank at Balkhu. How wonderful! Respective subject teachers set questions especially for students they teach at CDE, Kirtipur, while those who study the same course elsewhere in the nation depend upon mere luck and sheer individual effort to get through the exam. Why join any other TU Campus when you can easily join CDE as a registered "private" candidate with all these advantages?
    And the glory and the heights! It is only Kirtipur that really feels like Tribhuvan University, does it not? Legendary academic heroes such as Professor Dr. Abhi Subedi, Professor Chandra Prakash Sharma, Dr. Avadesh Thakur and so many others that I cannot list them all here define the eminent heights of academia. It will be a real loss to you if you miss the opportunity of learning from these eminent personalities. Why do you even think of joining a private campus? A private campus sucks your economic veins dry. It requires you to task your will to put in a lot of effort to obtain less marks than students at CDE do with unconcerned ease. It overemphasizes regular class attendance without even coding it as an unbreakable rule. It requires you to submit home tasks that, when returned to you, bleed with red ink and make you feel like crying. It is never satisfied with what you are academically at present and keeps on giving you the feeling that you are less than what you think you actually are. And, whoever has heard of these young English teachers of private campuses who have neither long creamy beards nor deep, dark wrinkles on their foreheads? What antithesis they present to the sublime heights of Kirtipur!
    I insist that you join the Central Department of English, TU, Kirtipur, if you want to study English literature. Unlike private campuses that advertise a single "Admission Open," the principal's office has advised CDE to take as many entrance tests as may be required for as many admissions as possible throughout the whole academic year. There is absolutely no chance of your not being admitted even if you apply the day before the examination. Think about it. You have the time to do so. Should you face the slightest difficulty in getting admitted into the English programme there, talk to the student union or ask a political leader of our nation to dial the phone. Your academic career is in your own hands.
    Don't you understand? Private campuses have no direct influence upon the marks you receive in the final examination. Therefore, the Central Department of English is waiting for your application at the earliest. Come any time before the final examination and become a registered student of Tribhuvan University.

Thursday, November 10, 2005