Only Dr Joy

Election or no election, the city is strewn with posters of strange leaders with strange names, grinning teeth, folded hands, thanking Sonia Gandhi for something else or the other. If there’s one person that deserves posters across the city, it is Doctor Joy. ‘Only Doctor Joy’, the poster would shout. Head shaved closer than the cheek, thick specs, grim expression, thick drool, bloodshot eyes, cigarette dangling from the lips. Foucault’s reincarnation. But if you call him Mogambo, he’ll say, “Dr Joy dukhi hua”. So stick to Foucault. If any party needs a giant killer to defeat Sonia Gandhi or Vajpayee, call Doctor Joy.
The campaigning done, I must return to Dr Joy’s class. A very old and famous college, in an old and famous city, the classrooms still have wooden platforms. One fine morning Dr Joy walks in, and the terror struck students quietly take their seats. Dr Joy stares at them, and then his red eyes look in the distance. He lights his cigarette. He bangs his foot on the wooden platform. Everyone’s heart misses a couple of beats. “What happened,” Dr Joy’s voice quivers.
We stare at each other, our head hangs. None of us knows the mistake that has invited his wrath.
Dr Joy breaks the silence, “The earth is shaking. The oceans are shaking. The trees are shaking.” Under the doctor’s spell, might be we had missed the earthquake. The doctor continues, “The very being is shaking. Life is cruelty. Death is cruelty. Taking breath is cruelty.” I scratch the table with my fingers in anticipation of the cruelty that the doctor might unleash. The doc speaketh again, “It is all cruelty. From today we will study Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.”
We were supposed to be reading Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal but that did not surface in the next three months. “This shall sort you out and being,” was what the doc said if you brought up the subject matter. The name of the playwright was quite a tongue twister, it was Aa-kh-hto and not Ar-tau, and we got snubbed quite a few times for getting it wrong. Artaud looks somewhere between Foucault and Dr Joy, by the way. “We are determined to shatter false realities,” Dr Joy said at the end of the course. We did that by buying guides on Ghasiram Kotwal that could see us through to another year.