The Autodidacts



Russell Brand, who I think is quite easily the best looking man I've read this year and most certainly the funniest, at the Oxford Union with his autodidact's take on racism and the BNP.


Another autodidact (he claims somewhere in one of his essays) whose works I have read and loved is Ved Mehta. Author of the wonderfully amusing Delinquent Chacha, his essays on Oxford intelligentsia (he studied History at Balliol) containing amusing tidbits about English philosophers make his Reader a delightful read. And like all art that deals with one's recent history we all but succumb to the pleasure of its consumption. Having desired to write about Oxford and failed, I resort to Mehta's version of the truth of academia past, present and future.

As we grew older, we discovered, of course, that many of these supposed certainties did not always hold true even in England, to say nothing of the larger world. Moreover, there was a definite closing in of options for clever men, and one could sense a creeping gloom among top undergraduates as they approached the end of their Oxford years; it sometimes made them reactionary in politics and out of sympathy with the mass culture that was taking shape around them. (Now that the mass culture has arrived, some people at Oxford speak of it as the New Dark Age.) They felt like misfits in their own country and culture. Many of them settled for an academic career, doing so not because they were natural teachers or because they felt there were certain books that had to be written but because there was nothing better to do out there. In contrast, like many good students from America, I had come to Oxford in the hope of perhaps being an academic, but I was beginning to doubt my abilities. I felt I could never be as good as , say, the Greats men (those who workd toward a degree in ancient Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and ancient and modern philosophy), because I had long since missed the bus for learning the ancient languages thoroughly. Nor could I comfort myself with the thought that I was as knowledgeable about Indian culture as they were about Judeo-Christian culture.

In the Force and Road of Casualty - Ved Mehta