1. Enrol for a Master’s, M. Phil or Ph. D. in Humanities at a University.
2. Declare your contempt for what people generally like. Whatever that seems good is a construct.
3. Feel free to criticise everything. Choose criticism as the primary form of verbalising thoughts.
4. Attend film festivals. Sleeping through a South Korean film is permitted, but memorise the director’s name for use in a speech or article.
5. Despise all forms of wealth creation. The conspiracy of “work hard” should be replaced by the philosophy of “think hard”.
6. Try as far as possible to use the ideas of Derrida and Foucault instead of your own common sense.
7. Rule for argumentation: Make an argument only if it can confuse everyone, and most importantly yourself. Never change your beliefs. They are right.
8. Choose a recognised intellectual as your mentor. He/she will guide you on who to read, how to read only what you want to read in what you read. Your mentor will also tell you who is always right and who is always wrong.
9. Protest, protest, protest. This is the primary duty of an intellectual.
10. Same as point 9. (On Facebook this time.)
11. Needless to say, oppose all State policies. The most closely felt totalitarian and fascist activities of the State include repeatedly preventing you from clearing the UGC NET. This not only divests you of the intellectual’s fundamental right to earn a salary by rigorous deconstruction unobstructed by the illegitimate demands of the academic system to submit to conventional and inherently oppressive structures like classroom teaching.
12. Have strong, unshaken faith in the commandments above
(a) until you manage to get a private/corporate job or get rich in any other way
(b) until your children are settled abroad and take you to live with them, by which time you will have retired as a professor but you will still have been actively practising deconstruction as a mentor.
(a) until you are dead, if nothing else in life works for you.
Intellectual Curry 