Saurabh Khanna, the creator of the show, said that he aims to change the popular narrative surrounding Kota and IIT preparation in Indian pop culture to a more positive one via the show.[2] The series premiered simultaneously on TVFPlay and YouTube from 16 April to 14 May 2019. The series received a generally positive response from critics, praising its monochrome setting, realism, and the major technical aspects of the series.[3]
“Once upon a time, in small-town India, there lived two
intelligent boys.
One wanted to use his intelligence to make money.
One wanted to use his intelligence to start a
revolution.
The problem was, they both loved the same
girl.”
“Revolution 2020—a story about childhood friends Gopal,
Raghav and Aarti who struggle to find success, love, and happiness in Varanasi.
However, it is not easy to attain these in an unfair society that rewards the
corrupt. As Gopal gives in to the system, and Raghav fights it, who will win?” (Blurb on the last cover-page)
Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition is a 2011 novel by Chetan Bhagat. Its story is concerned with a love triangle, corruption, and a journey of self-discovery. R2020 has addressed the issue of how private coaching institutions exploit aspiring engineering students and how parents put their lifetime's earnings on stake for these classes so that their children can crack engineering exams and change the fortune of the family. While a handful accomplish their dreams, others sink into disaster.
The author stated that the novel is based on the "rampant corruption" apparent in the Indian educational system (Firstpost)
Characters in the Novel:
1. Gopal Mishra—one who wanted to use his intelligence to make money—ultimately joins hands with corrupt politicians to walk on the path of corruption and starts a private engineering college, Ganga Tech College, in Varanasi.
2. Raghav—one who wanted to use his intelligence to start a revolution—ultimately runs his own newspaper, 'Revolution 2020,' to bring in change in society and make the nation free from corruption. He has cracked JEE and AIEEE and joins BHU-IT instead of famous IITs or NITs so he can pursue journalism along with engineering. He follows his passion to be a journalist who can bring in 'change' in society rather than opt for an easy job in a multinational company or public sector company like his father, who was an IITian and works as an engineer in BHEL.
3. Aarti, daughter of an IAS officer who is the District Magistrate of Varanasi and love interest of both Gopal and Raghav.
Chetan Bhagat's narrative technique has a sort of method that he follows in most of his novels. His signature style is to start with a prologue and end with an epilogue. He himself appears in these prologues-epilogues and listens to a story from one of the characters of the novel and then allows him to tell the story in first-person narration.
Undoubtedly, Revolution Twenty20 belongs to the genre of 'Genre Fiction.'. It is part of popular literature. It represents popular contemporary culture of India.
“Bichitra :: Online Tagore
Variorum :: School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.”
Accessed November 25, 2021. http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php.
T, Shanmugapriya, and Nirmala
Menon. “Infrastructure and Social Interaction: Situated Research Practices in
Digital Humanities in India.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 014, no. 3
(September 25, 2020).
Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech.
Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and ’40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In this essay Eliot argued that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a “dissociation of sensibility,” which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet “metaphysical” was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to “abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.” At the end of the century, John Drydencensured Donne for affecting “the metaphysics” and for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.” Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them “the metaphysical poets,” and the term has continued in use ever since. Eliot’s adoption of the label as a term of praise is arguably a better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets themselves; his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets’ debt to lyrical and socially engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character of their writing. (J.E. Luebering)
The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance. (Click here to read more)
Academic Writing in English for Examination Purpose
In this post, you will find two videos. These videos are prepared for the students of English Studies. These students are supposed to write descriptive essay type answers in their term-end university examinations. With an objective to improve the quality of their essay type descriptive answers, these guidelines from suggested.
Video 1: Qualitative Error Analysis and Suggestions to Improve the Quality of Writing Essay Type Descriptive Answers
In this video, teachers are discussing common errors made by students in writing essay type descriptive answers.
Following topics are discussed in this session:
Error Analysis & Suggestions to improve the quality of Essay Type Descriptive Answers.
1. Correctness of English Language:
(i) No grammar errors.
(ii) No spelling errors.
(iii) Apt vocabulary.
(iv) Apt sentence structure.
(v) Apt punctuation marks
2. Content of the Answer
(i) Quotes from original text.
(ii) Quotes from critics.
(iii) Apt illustrations from the text.
(iv) Do not write summary
3. Organisation of the Answer
(i) The question is properly justified and exemplified.
(ii) The trajectory of the answer is very well worked out.
(iii) The arguments are well justified with illustrations from the text.
(iv) Logical sequence is maintained. Introduction to conclusion – all well synced.
(v) Apt connectors used for the ease of flow of thoughts from one para to another.
4. Handwriting
(i) Cursive, larger, clearly visible, clean and tidy.
(ii) Legible. No difficulty in identifying alphabets.
Chapterization of Video 1:
0:00 Introduction
4:35 Vaidehi Hariyani
26:30 Dilip Barad
1:16:09 Suggestions to Improve the Quality of Writing
Video 2: Quantitative Analysis: How Much Shall I Write in Essay Type Descriptive Answers?
Quite often, the students come with the question - How much are we supposed to write in essay type descriptive answers? or - How many words shall an essay type answer consist of? or - In how many pages an essay type answer is supposed to be written?
In this video, we have reviewed several guidelines and have suggested a sort of 'golden mean'.
Chapterization of Video 2:
0:00 Introduction
2:18 The Context - Students' anxiety - How much shall we write?
5:26 Quality matters . . . so also quantity.
6:48 Murray and Orii's Automatic Essay Scoring
8:22 Perelman criticized over-privileging length of answer
10:04 Average speech of hand-writing
12:48 Length of answer does have some association with marks
17:35 Calcutta Uni - Pattern
18:40 Students' sample write-ups
22:55 Final Outcome and Recommendations
34:35 Conclusion
35:30 Students responses
Following points are taken into consideration in this video:
Tom Benton [Cambridge Assessment, Research Division]: “I remember this question being asked by someone in the class nearly every time… Despite the ubiquity of the question, clear answers are hard to come by.”
Previous research has shown that the length of responses does have some association with achievement and also provided some norms around the possible writing speed.
Tom Benton’s study shows that –
“Nearly all responses of fewer than 200 words resulted in a grade U, suggesting that whilst very long answers are not necessary for a good mark, candidates must write enough to make sure that the examiner can recognize their knowledge at all.”
With this in mind it would be a good advice for all candidates, even those who are not expecting to achieve the highest grades, to ensure that they write at least a significant number of pages in response to an English Literature exam question allowing 30 minutes to write descriptive answer.
But exactly how long shall a student write?
How many words shall an answer consist of?
How many pages or lines shall be produced in writing descriptive answer?
Conclusion:
It is expected that these videos will help students in qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of their academic writing for the purpose of essay-type-descriptive answers. If students will work on the guidelines and suggestions discussed in these videos, we are hopeful that our learning objective i.e. improve the quality of answers and academic writing, shall be achieved.
ICT / Digital Technologies for Research in Humanities
Highlights of the talk:
ICT (Information and Communication Technology) or Digital Technology.
From using ICT tools for Research to researching literature generated by digital technologies.
From using ICT as tool to researching Digital Technology as an object of study.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been a vital tool for researchers in the Humanities for a long time. It has been used to research literature, review previous research, formulate hypothesis, collect data, and analyze information. ICT tools like Inflibnet, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR, and virtual libraries such as Gutenberg, Google Books, and online book stores have been used extensively.
However, with the advent of digital technologies, the possibilities of research in the Humanities have increased significantly. The digital technology is acquiring the ability to think and create like humans. Its artificial intelligence is getting smarter, and its ability to process natural language is getting closer to that of humans.
Digital Technology for research in Humanities has several advantages. For example, tools like the CLiC web app, nGram Google Books, and tools for corpus linguistics provide new ways to analyze literary texts. ELAN is another tool that provides multiple ways to view annotations and supports the creation of multiple tiers.
However, the use of digital technology for research in Humanities has its own challenges. For example, the question of morality arises when using AI and its potential for unconscious bias. The generative literature, being produced by computers, requires a new way of understanding and reading.
In conclusion, while ICT remains an important tool for research in Humanities, the increased capabilities of digital technologies open up new possibilities and offer new ways to analyze information. Researchers in the Humanities must be familiar with digital technology and take advantage of its benefits while addressing its challenges.
A #Pedagogical Shift from Text to #Hypertext: Language & Literature to the Digital Natives.
Silvio Gaggi has argued in 'From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media' that
-It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered.
In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level.
Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.
We can use this argument to say that:
The very tenet of Digital Pedagogy makes the subject unstable, fragmented, and decentered.
Here, the 'Subject' is 'Core Content, the teacher and the taught'.
This decentering of #learners and the notion of #Teachership may for all practical purpose be lost.
