Chief Justice of India Surya Kant did clarify, the very next day of his controversial statement, that he didn’t mean all “unemployed youth” to be cockroaches but only those with “bogus or fake” degrees. I argue that the so-called real universities can also produce cockroaches. 

But before outlining, I am pressed to clarify, for cockroaches mean different things to different Indians. 

We used to inhabit a country some time ago when cockroaches were universally loathed and considered dirty. They crawled through all kinds of spaces in the dead of the night; they came out of nowhere and disappeared into holes and shades; got crushed under some chappal or got pesticide-choked to death. The Home Minister of India some years ago said, “infiltrators are termites.” Had he said cockroaches, it would have worked just the same. Frederic Nietzsche’s critique, “If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain” used to be applicable for us too.  

Now there is a new cockroach on the national horizon and it is making us remember all the forgotten aspects of cockroach life. Cockroaches are remarkably resilient. The species has been around for 300 million years, long before us humans and will be, apparently, the only ones to be around after a nuclear cataclysm. They renew the earth by decomposing dead plants and animals and enable the nutrient cycle. They have exceptional flexibility to survive in all kinds of habitats. 

In this piece, I am talking about the first kind of cockroaches that Justice Surya Kant and us millennials and GenX used to talk about, and not the resilient, flexible, renewing agent that GenZ have now developed (in the etymological sense of un-covening). 

Let me come back to my original point: cockroaches can as well be mass produced in established Indian universities. 

The current Education Minister of India, who knows he has the support of the richest and the most powerful armies of the country, is rightfully confident but the problem area is that his own ministry’s work actively contributes to the further mass production of cockroaches. I don’t mean this only in the general sense that the ruling party’s three operational maxims, “demolish, demonetise, bulldoze” have a tendency to feed into a cockroach-thriving ambiance but specifically in the recent history of higher education. 

Ten ways to mass produce cockroaches in Indian........

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