Rainy Day Women

POORVA PAKSHA

While listening to Bob Dylan’s Rainy Day Women, I chanced upon an article in the Indian Express that has opened my eyes to an urgent problem plaguing college campuses all across India: not enough stone statues. As Rashmi Das, member of the Executive Council at JNU, points out in her piece, Who’s Afraid of Vivekananda?, the monk “taught us kingly values. These will permeate JNU now and make it grand.”

That the honorable Prime Minister took valuable time out from steering our nation through a pandemic that has destroyed countless lives and livelihoods, crippled the economy, and taken a horrific toll on the country’s most vulnerable, in order to grace the unveiling of the Vivekananda statue, is itself clear testament to how important statues must be to the health and success of a university. And indeed, this statue will prove to be of particular effectiveness because, as Ms Das points out, “Vivekananda was a spiritual generalissimo” who “gave us our manliness.” I wonder what Vivekananda himself would have thought about such a characterisation – kingly values, spiritual generalissimo (does that sound like an oxymoron?), manliness!

Moved by Ms Das’ assertion that housing the statue “will give JNU its nationalist spine,” I think we should prioritise erecting stone statuary on university campuses. In an increasingly competitive global knowledge economy, “kingly values” and “manliness” are the core needs of higher education today. For this reason, we must commission statues of Dr Harin Padma-Nathan to place on every college campus. Dr Padma-Nathan is a urologist specialising in sexual disorders, whose work led to the development of Viagra. Although he is an American, being of Indian descent, we are free to laud and appropriate his achievements as our nation’s own. And the best thing is that Pfizer will pay for it!

No doubt we will face resistance from the Left, ever hostile to fresh and innovative ideas from the 19th century. As Dylan prophetically pronounced in opening Rainy Day Women, ‘Well, they’ll stone you when you’re trying to be so good’.

Rashmi Das cautions us about such nefarious tendencies of the JNU faculty: “having converted their centres and schools into Leftist swamps, they have survived on past regurgitations of stale theories.” Well said. Feminist theory, critical caste theory, queer theory, disability theory — stale!

Just contrast the research output and international academic recognition of JNU’s Leftist swamp creatures against those of the faculty from India’s eleven central government-funded Sanskrit universities, each of which can boast housing the imposing stone bust of at least one eminence, if not more. Perhaps you have never heard of our Sanskrit universities. Perhaps you will point out that the most significant Sanskrit scholarship and publications in the world emerge not from India, but appear in the likes of NYU’s Clay Sanskrit Library or Harvard’s Murty Classical Library of India, neither of which has a single work by any faculty from India’s prestigious Sanskrit universities. Okay, prestigious is an overstatement, but they do spend plenty of taxpayers’ money furthering kingly values (varnadharma) and working hard to promote ‘nationalist spine’ and ‘manliness’.

Now, humourless feminists will also raise objections to erecting statues of Dr Padma-Nathan on college campuses, but this would be a mistake. For, the inventor of Viagra is currently at work developing a cannabis-based vaginal gel for women. He is a champion of equal-opportunity orgasm. The fact that his new medicine is marijuana-based should also help those of us who are pro-statue to win over recalcitrant JNU students. As Dylan put it, although I am not entirely sure that his song really was promoting stone statuary:

‘But I would not feel so all alone,

Everybody must get stoned.’

(Aakash Singh Rathore as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes. @ASR_metta)