Opinion This Teachers’ Day, I wish for my students to step out of the dishonesty of Instagram ‘likes’
A jaded generation, their exhaustion deriving from the pessimism that has been their sad inheritance, they have been raised by a culture of dishonesty. The language that surrounds them perpetrates the timidity and obedience forced on them by the behaviour of market forces
A jaded generation, their exhaustion deriving from the pessimism that has been their sad inheritance, they have been raised by a culture of dishonesty. (Express photo by Amit Mehra) 
Every teacher has a tic or two. It’s a gift to their students who turn the tic into jokes, gossip and anecdotes. I suspect that I’ve given my students an easy one — I really must ration the number of times I say “honesty” in a 90-minute class lecture. I’m quite certain that I didn’t use the word with such frequency in the early years of the millennium, when I first began teaching in a government college. The word — its scope, ambition and practice — was still a part of the cultural temperament of those times, I suppose. What is it that has changed in the last two decades that makes me run to the word so often in the classroom?
People did not live on the internet then, of course — fake news, WhatsApp forwards, Instagram aura, a vocabulary of lies, a compulsive need to lubricate the system by perpetuating the lie, these were still a thing of the future. Students could still ask how Robinson Crusoe survived on the island for so many years without a girlfriend. I do not mean to say that the last noun in the sentence might have been replaced by “smartphone” had it been today. I am thinking of a different kind of innocence — maybe I mean a different kind of imagination when I say “innocence”, one not doctored by the expectations of the world. Like Crusoe, students had few distractions. Like Crusoe, students were more independent-minded.
My intention is not to lapse into nostalgia. It is no wonder why we have rarely encountered the fearlessness of students — and the active collaboration of teachers — in this century. Naming a couple of student protest movements in metropolitan Indian universities in the last 15 years will only be an illustration of exceptions proving the rule. I do not blame our students, not those I taught for nearly 15 years in Bengal’s provinces, not those I teach now, in a liberal arts college close to the country’s capital city. The constituency and constitution of these institutions are starkly different — the first, of the kind where I studied, paying no more than Rs 1,200 a year; the second, where tuition fees for a year would perhaps be a quarter of my father’s life savings. Different as their histories are — and different as they will possibly remain, because of the inequities of the system — there is something that we have not been able to protect them from.
A jaded generation, their exhaustion deriving from the pessimism that has been their sad inheritance, they have been raised by a culture of dishonesty. The language that surrounds them, the ethos — or lack of it — of the vocabulary, both of praise and criticism, is a network of lies that they are being compelled to repeat and perpetrate because of the timidity and obedience forced on them by the behaviour of market forces. In one of the first discussions we have in class, I ask my students to tell me about three Instagram posts that they “liked” the previous day. Without exception, they are unable to remember. When I ask them to tell me about their favourite songs or poems or quotations, they look buoyant, there is cheer and conversation in the class — and, quite frequently these days, a lot of Taylor Swift. Why is it that they cannot remember these posts they “liked” yesterday when they can remember the poems and the songs? I ask. The answer is obvious: It is language and the form of writing that decides memorability; also, the finger that “likes” everything that falls in the way of their news feed is as agnostic as a vacuum cleaner, it has no commitment to memory or to life.
It is possible that my students agree with me when I tell them about art being outside the perimeter of intentionality, that it is from this that it derives its power, that only then will art feel as necessary as everything outside intentionality does, like sleep and love and shadow. Otherwise, it feels engineered for effect, and thus dishonest — that “craft” is not a skill but a manifestation of honesty. I’m not sure, though, whether they understand what I mean when I ask them to protect themselves from the culture of disingenuousness and disenchantment that surrounds them. Ignore the blurbs, the reviews, the awards, the aura, the self-advertisement, this culture that praises one’s own at the cost of honesty, abuses outsiders with indifference, the lies and words (“classic”, “genius”, “best”, “brilliant”, “masterpiece”, “amazing”) and the actions; meet the text, meet the words, decide for yourself, that is independence, I say, I nag them. I can’t give them a Taylor Swift song for this, but I do have a John Lennon song about fierce intellectual and artistic independence: “I don’t believe in Bible/Hitler/Kennedy/Jesus/Buddha/Gita/Elvis …,” Lennon sings; and then “I don’t believe in the Beatles …”.
I have a feeling that they will remember the song.
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University. Views are personal
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