We are trained to copy...

By Tehmina Qureshi

Unlike intelligent nations of the world, who educate their young to think out of the box, we teach our children to do just the opposite...think inside the box. Not only do we rest at that, but we demoralise them too. When kids want to become train drivers or mountain climbers, parents tell them about a certain cousin of theirs who did his BBA, or BSc and is now abroad doing his post graduate studies. Copying what others do seems to be a national phenomenon... morning TV show hosts give out dresses exactly like theirs and a Pakistani break dancer calls himself Sonu Jackson!

This copy culture does the most harm to our students, who, when they can't reach outside the box, scram for whatever they get inside from anyone and anywhere, without knowing what it is, and use it to achieve their purpose, that is, passing exams.

When in school, students are taught by teachers who studied the same thing themselves decades ago, and have been teaching the very same thing for all their lives. Kids are told to do exactly as they are told, or their marks will be cut. They write and memorise the exact information  which they are given, and told to clone it to pass exams. Those who do dare to show a bit of  originality in their studying are rewarded with a loss of marks by the examiner, because that is not way everyone else does it. Next comes college where they don't make the same mistake again and rote learn their way out of college.

 In their formative years in school and college, the students only learn how to reproduce  information, not learn it for their own benefit. They have not been learning knowledge, but merely memorising pieces of information that they don't understand, and if they do, they consider it worthless.  Till now, they have copied information without being aware of what they are really doing.

By the time these students have entered university, their minds and thinking has been pretty much capped, and when suddenly they are told that originality is a virtue, they figure out how to copy that too. At this level copying has become a habit, and they are unable to do assignments or exams by themselves, hence they resort to copy-pasting. This in the spur of the moment often leads to plagiarism. Like most government institutions, even University of Karachi does not have any regulations for cases of plagiarism.

To an extent our education system endorses a kind of plagiarism. Students are made familiar with it at school level, and then the habit gets the better of them as they grow up. This pestilence cannot be curbed until the weeds at the roots of our education system are pulled out.

The KU Book fair- Nojawwan style!

By Atiya Abbas

Much has been said on these blogs about the party scene, no, not that party scene, at the Karachi University. How they disrupt our education, grease hang-out spots, even affect our day to day living by telling us where to sit and how to sit. But I am going to defend these noble upholders of our honour. They plan and execute the best (and only) event of the year. Come January and every bibliophile is abuzz. Yep, it’s time for the KU Bookfair!

The party in questioned shall not be named but they at least get one thing right by organizing this fine event. For three days, the recreation-starved youth of Karachi University flocks to the gymnasium for discounted books and snacks, the latter more than the former. And while music never blares out of the speakers anywhere at Karachi University, except when the Neanderthals hit the grounds for the cricket matches, the dulcet sounds of (Insert party name here) ka Nojawwan is heard in the vicinity of the gymnasium. Prior to the event, Readers are Leaders banners adorn trees and walls around the Arts Lobby. Of course, the irony here is that that the organizers didn’t get where they were merely by reading.

If one really thinks about it, we live in an age when everything that could bring some entertainment is considered sinful, be it watching movies, listening to music or indulging in artistic endeavors. In such an age, it is a relief that reading is an activity that unites and encourages the sharing of ideas. And for that, I thank the party that organises the KU Book fair.

I am not lazy; I am just a bit more thoughtful!

Mohammed Ammar Bin Yaser

The day she brutally grilled Rehan, Ma’am Sadia said that writing a blog post shouldn’t take us much time, it’s nothing: ‘Just sit and think of anything you come across in KU’ she  said, ‘and jot down a few paragraphs on it, that’s it!’

Maybe it is that easy for others, but for me, it is not so. I can’t usually sit and write about a subject I don’t feel. I know it is a very un-journalistic thing to say, but this is how I am. I find it difficult to scrawl mindlessly on a subject I don’t care about, and then patiently dissect and dress it to make it readable. It’s pure torture.

But I must confess one thing: this blog-a-week exercise is kicking me on the butt. It’s pricking me to change my stubborn writing habits. I can feel the change.  Added to the pressure of writing something interesting every week is the anxiety that the moment it flies out of my hand, my writing will be read and commented on. Unlike scribbling my fleeting ideas in a private diary that I can hide in a closet, it’s going out, being read and talked about. It’s crazy.

I feel like a bathroom singer being dragged by his collar to the stage amidst thousands of people and being forced to sing. And this very thought gives me creeps. So it’s no wonder while writing my weekly blog post I become over-conscious and my mind goes blank. I struggle to put down words in an intelligible sequence but with little success - I hate the feeling. It is not that I can’t write a number of technically error-free paragraphs and post it, I can; but I fear exposing my shabbiness that stem from urgency, the ‘quickness’ of it all.

I’ve read pieces in other blogs being run by my classmates who are following the same regiment. I often find sentences and passages in their posts, which in my opinion require complete re-writing. But they are fine with it. They are not only fine but excited about it. Some of them often plead me through text messages to comment on their blogs.

To tell the truth, their breezing confidence about their work made me uncomfortable, I was pricked by envy until the great German author Thomas Mann, who won the 1929 Nobel prize for Literature, came to my rescue. The moment I came across this quote from the master I knew I was in a different league: “A writer", says Mann, " is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Now I know why people call me lazy!    

Thirsty crows of KU

By Ayesha Ahmad

The period between July and September should be known as the dog days of summer, specifically in Karachi. As a matter of fact, nobody can understand this hottest and muggiest part of the season better than the piteous, miserable students, whose ill fates had destined them to study at departments like Mass Communication and UBIT, which are situated at the remotest and the godforsaken corners of Karachi University.

Being in a hot, steamy sauna with a dozen lamps bearing down on you...yes, these are exactly the kinds of heat we MCDians experience when we return from our subsidiary classes, held usually in the Arts Faculty, with the scorching sun's rays raining down on us, as if we were just a feet away from it.

For those of you who are not familiar with KU, Arts Faculty is like a mile away from the department of Mass Communication, hence the inconvenience.

 You really ought to thank your lucky stars if you are granted a spare car or a bike to bring to the university as it makes life a lot easier and, not to forget, livable.

Once you return to the department, after attending a mind-numbingly boring lecture and travelling a great distance on foot in the sultry weather the only thing you would want to want to do is, after dropping yourself on those black leather couches which definitely would have been comfy once upon a time, have a tall glass of ice cold water as nothing can prove to be more satisfying than this in such a wretched condition.

 This is exactly when the water coolers come into the limelight. There are two of them in the department of Mass Communication and I bet all of us have taken this 'luxury' for granted like almost forever, but earnestly these can come in very handy when it is our parched throats we are concerned about. Trust me, if you are familiar with this machine and know how to deal with its settings, then cold icy water can be at your disposal whenever you would crave it.

All you have to do is to make sure that the machine is switched on and then check its thermostat, which is usually hidden somewhere on its either side, and turn its knob to the point where it says 'coolest'. Ask your nerves to grant you patience for a while and voilà!- refresh yourself with as much cold water as you like!

Van-dalism

By Sidra Rizvi

When I started my first year in the university, my dad called me close and said ‘sweetie now that you are in university you should be more independent’. This was a sugar coated way of saying ‘come to your “auqaat” and stop dreaming that the car would be available whenever you need it’. But since he was aware that while crossing the road he still has to hold my hand, he decided it was unwise to trust me with the transport system of Karachi. Therefore, on my first day he marched up to the numerous van drivers standing near the administration building and handed off my responsibility to them.

Since then the better part of my first year was spent waiting and running after the van. My van every morning would come around 7:50 am. By that time there was hardly any space, if at all, left in it. The only seat was by the door which I disliked because I had to get off again and again to allow more ‘hapless damsels’ to stuff themselves in the back. However by comparison the morning ride was surprisingly less torturous. Very soon we would arrive at the university. My department being the nearest I was carted off fairly earlier.

The real agony started when it was time to go home. Come flood or rain the van’s policy was to leave by 2:30 pm only, even if that meant killing and hour and a half in between. The van would soon start filling up with my fellow ‘van-dam-sels’ and following their suit I would too hurriedly go in and sit by a window. The van then visited various departments of the university ingesting one woman after the other, until the van was so full it could very likely vomit. Nevertheless it proved it had a very strong stomach and bravely gobbled more. Women were forced to sit so close that when one breathed four others felt her lungs expanding.

Tired after a long day at the university the only thing that kept me alive was the thought of my comfy bed waiting for me at home. However, the thought was mutilated by the hour that I had to spend in the van while other lucky girls reached their destinations. Everyday I would pray that at least half the girls would stay home so I could reach my house earlier than usual.

And then there were the songs. Belonging to God knows which century, almost all the girls in my van, as soon as they sat asked the van driver to switch on the ‘tape’ which he obligingly did. And the music that came out from it made one wonder if the world was coming to the end or was it an Indian music artist exercising his vocal cords.

Travelling in a van is not as easy as people think it to be. It certainly wasn’t the thing for me and very soon my dad realized it too. So now he has given up the hope of me ever travelling on my own or in a van and without a word comes to pick me up.