05 | January | 2016 | The Tea Cerebrations

It has been some years, but it feels like an eternity. I don’t really remember those days at all. Did they really happen or were they just dreams? I do have the certificate and the mark list; so it should have happened at some point of life. I have only some recollection of the same, but it seems like I did do it. There will be doubts if it is really a useful thing, but I guess I did it at that time. Sometimes I wonder if it was ever supposed to bring something better in mortal life or monetary benefits; I guess it wasn’t on the list.

Yes, I am talking about the MA English Language and Literature course. It was only a few days ago that I found and looked at the syllabus of the course, and that made me wonder if it was me who really studied that course and wrote those exams for that MA English First Class (read as the BCom First Class which was mentioned in the movie, Naadodikkaattu). I actually remember very less from the course and a lot of these papers in the syllabus stare at me as if I am a stranger. The syllabus itself seems to wonder if it had ever seen me before, but I will show this one the degree certificate! I will just go through what used to be that syllabus and see if we remember each other enough in the end.

The classroom itself has the special charm that we all need.

I will miss this classroom all the time, no matter where I visit in my life!

I dig deep into the memories, and I remember those earlier works like The Canterbury Tales, Utopia, Doctor Faustus, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Way of the World and all that we studied, but there were the two papers which followed, and those were Phonetics and Literary Criticism. I remember being shocked at the subjects which were part of these papers.

Vampire Owl: What do you mean?

Vampire Bat: Biographia Literaria, The Language of Paradox and others.

Vampire Owl: Okay, whatever.

In the case of Phonetics, I felt that I was going straight to hell. But I still passed, and scored well there, and that was a confident booster. I still believe that words should be spoken like we want to and not according to the Phonetics side – that will be Indian English 😀

These days, when I look at these papers, I am only going to be more and more shocked. I really wanted to use what I studied in life because I managed to pass, but such an opportunity was never to come. While my earlier talk was about the first semester, here I remember that the second one was much smoother, and I remember the second semester as a rather easier one; I was more comfortable with the class and the college, and the seniors were close; the papers were smooth and Linguistics remained the only problem there. But with more focus on that, I could do it better than I did in the case of Phonetics.

I remember that the first semester of the next year, and this third semester of the course had two big troubles; one being the Literary Theory – I was absolutely uninterested in this, but I had good teachers. The classes turned out to be better than expected and something in the internet surely helped. Nature of the Linguistic Sign? The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles? The Death of the Author? The Critic as Host? And whatever came after that, I don’t remember much of it, and I am not that disappointed about my short memory here. I will keep the memories of my college instead of that, the greenery and everything else. Those sights will surely bring more of the memories back to me.

It is easy to work with green here. You can understand the reason easily.

The greenery at college is inspirational, but the theories are surely not.

The second big trouble was this paper called Politics of Narration, about the aspects on fictional and non-fictional expression in narratives. Even though this was a twisted paper, the scores came good just like Literary Theory. Another thing about this paper is that the talks and discussions related to this paper has helped me in improving my writing. Along with the same, there were a few interesting works of fiction with this paper. Women and Literature along with Writings of the Public Domain were partly bad for me! But the fiction and some interesting ideas saved the day most of the time. I still wish I could go forward with life as the MA English graduate, but that option is the jobless one.

Film Studies was the strangest paper for me; one one side, there were those movie which we surely had to watch, and there was the need to write critical appreciation of movies. This side was pretty much okay for me, and by the end of this paper, I was ready to start the blog, Movies of the Soul. The review of Celluloid at the blog is the same which I submitted for the assignment, with slight changes. But it took me a long time to recover from the theories which were related to movies; those were the difficult ones for me, and I shall not name them – but the memories are coming back to me; now I realize that I had learnt them all, and they are stored somewhere in my memory 😀

Now I am sure and I remember that I am MA English First Class from Mahatma Gandhi University and jobless 😦
Check this video of the BCom First Class version from the movie Naadodikkaattu 😛