Catch-22 and The Emperor's New Clothes

I wrote a 'paper' on Catch-22 just over a month ago. It won a (negligible) prize at this Paper Presentation contest we had at college during Litmus, the English Department fest.

Now here's the deal:

a. I wrote this for a lark
b. I had not been able to finish Catch-22 ever before, having started to read it at least thrice. It was a challenge.
c. I wanted to see just how much I can use my faffing skills, to pusk faffdom to its utmost limit: that was the goal.

Apparently I achieved it too.

The only one who seemed to see through me was SC.

SC was congratulating all the 'winners' after the results came out, but she didn't say a word to me. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, now, but I think she didn't know what to make of my 'paper'. To acknowledge that it was just a hoax would have been out of the question, right? I mean the Establishment can't do that, can it? But then it was obviously (well, to me, at least!) not a serious academic effort. I should have thought it was obvious to everyone else too. Anyway, you never know with SC.

It struck me that there were enough phonies^ in that room to say, "Jolly good, old chap, impeccacable delivery, it was rather intriguing the way you grappled with these ideas". Well not exactly that, but that drift.

For god's sake, my 'paper' was called

Yossarian and Murphy: The Greatest Conspiracy (Theorists) of our Time Or Which came first? The Conspiracy or the Theorists?

I would have had a good laugh, given the presenter a friendly pat on the back, and said a person who tries to pass this off as a Paper should try for the Ignobel instead.

It's quite scary how far the ole faffin' can take you. Remember Stephen Glass? Oh boy.

//This post has been written in a rather perfunctory manner due to constant net connectivity problems and the fact that this machine keeps rebooting of its own accord, this rudely breaks the train of thought; perhaps I shall edit it later, but I doubt it. In any case, as I told a friend, I have just shelved this piece away for future amusement value and plan never to write like this again. *fingers crossed behind back*//

//Oh, I remembered now what I was going to say. Baba once wrote an article to the Lucknow city supplement of either Hindustan Times or The Times of India, I forget which. It was titled "My Girlfriend is a Handbag". No kidding. It was to see if they would actually run something which sounded so patently stupid. Guess what? They did! And with a picture of a handbag and everything. All it said was that guys think their girlfriends are just fancy accessories to show off, nothing more subversive than that! but isn't it incredible what rot people will print?

This whole thing reminds me of that episode in the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night

//

^ Yes, yes, Caulfield's got a Holden me!