Sunday, July 6, 2008

Beyond career and character?

The official web portal of the IIUI carries a caption: “Beyond career and character, its [sic] life building at IIUI”, which supposedly reveals the vision of the institution. For quite sometime we used to reproach our self for being unable to understand the semiotics of this caption. Okay, one can assume that word ‘its’ is a typographical mistake and should be read as ‘it’s’ (contraction of ‘it is’) but that is not the main problem with this apparently unique dictum. If it were “Beyond career, it’s character building”, it could have made sense. However, in its present form one wonders what the hidden wisdom is contained in this phrase. To make sure that our bewilderment is not simply because of ignorance, we searched through Google putting the phrase “Beyond career and character” in quotes and it yielded not even a single hit (not even the one under discussion because the phrase appears at the webpage as an image not text). This means that the construction is really strange. Perhaps those concerned could explain what the worth ‘life’ is which is beyond ‘character’ and how this caption communicates the vision of the university?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I want to ask one question? do the faculty members themselves have any character? Today i saw Dr. Hafiz Yasin on GEO TV in Aalim Online. He was stressing that we must stop the unjustice and brutality with force but I ask has he got that much moral courage that he talk to president about all injustice being carried out in IIUI? We should not say to others that we do not do ourselves.