Away from Literature

I completed my Master's in Language and Literature from Loyola in the year 2000. It’s been 8 years and when I look back the former part of the degree seems to have helped me rather than the latter one. I became aware of this academic dichotomy the moment I started wearing the teacher’s garb. Language is for livelihood and literature is for your intellectual curiosity. I was swimming around the vast ocean literariness till my M.phil days; my thesis was related to the structuralist (psychoanalysis) French critic Jacques Lacan. I dabbled with the toughest theories of Lacan and the outcome was I realised that my research was nothing compared to the vast amount of studies that is been already done in psychoanalysis.
My teaching made me come in touch with the real problems of students. They were not interested in Lacan or Shakespeare. They were more focussed that I was, they wanted to speak and write faultless English to earn a livelihood. So my classrooms made me more practical and took me away from the fictional world of literature. Letters, words, sentences and paragraphs became my world. These days it has become more hardcore with different types of ESP’s – English for Specific purposes. If I remember correctly till date I have familiarised with more that five types of ESP’s

English for Media
English for Management
English for Fashion Designing
English through the Internet
English for Business
English through Literature,

After my arrival here in Oman, I have entered the world of Technical English.
It is not that I am totally cut off from the world of make believe. Movies fill this fictional gap and it is quite interactive and richer than literature.