Post-Apocalyptic Fatigue or Intimations of Impending Doom? A Professor on DU's State of Affairs
N P Ashley | 07 July 2025 | The Wire
Two of the texts I had to teach in recent years as a teacher of English in Delhi University – excerpts from the Mahabharata in Indian Classical Literature and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the Twentieth Century British Poetry and Drama course – seemed to present the pendulum-like predicament of an undergraduate teacher most strikingly.
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the most ‘barbaric’ of plays: written in the aftermath of the second World War, the play captures Europe’s struggle with language like the struggle of the 5th century CE Romans with the “ba ba ba” language (hence ‘barbaric’) of those who made their empire fall….