Research Surrogacy

beware of the organ-trafficking of scholarship 

Saraswati for sale!

It’s time she compromised

but too sacred and fertile for

the rising traffic of  proxies,

we willingly queue for a ghost

to replace our barrenness.

Ethics is replaced

by Economics and

ghost-written with

self-definitions of

scholarly morality.

Words-worths of originality

dead and wordsmiths

of necessity born into

a Brave New World

of mass compromises.

Today you are timed

by career and the self

is pledged to robotic

systems that scalpel

you to size and your

home waits for your love

like those latchkey-children

when you return in the evening

and like a thorn in flesh

tomorrow’s work slowly

creeps and pokes your thoughts

while you nestle in the warm and

pending embraces of your family.

Now bonded and accountable

to the career that closes in,

on the little infertile

room of your own

and as the brain’s too exhausted

to conceive its children amidst

this binding loneliness you’re

pressed to resort to the fertility

and research centres that

have a multi-special faculty

of qualified, trained and

well-paid surrogates, midwives,

and even mid-husbands – the

professional transformers and terminators

to labour, plagiarise, ghost

and conceive a birth for you

double and triple peer-reviewed

under an autonomy of

doctors and doctored ethics

you must reach only “through a

god-fatherly proper channel” –

which ensures will mother,

Guide and supervise, you

to “right” persons who can

help process the tailor-ready

research thesis and papers.

Your compromising voice

then whispers a silent soliloquy:

Once a scholar,

you no longer belong

to your gifted-self so

isn’t dependency

better than pendency

and be too late?

Remember the counter

-ethical- golden-thumb-rule:

being a scholar, cultivate the

art of undergoing the ordeal

of being a tight-lipped dark

horse, patiently tightrope-

walking on the guided ropes

scapegoating your gifted self

at the avaricious altar of a

ghosted subway blindly

giving your formal consents

and promptly offering gifts

and favours, greasing all the

deft hands for smooth movement

in blind obedience till you are

a doctor of ‘cut and paste’ philosophy

lest your ethical defiance will

be considered arrogant trespass

which may delay your course. 

The deal is mediated according

to the intensity of your need.

May be a promotion,

or revised pay scale!

The transplanted body

of your ideas is permitted

to have its choicest anatomy

but at the end should stand

only on the Chicago, MLA,

APA or AMA styled crutches.

May be no fruit is forbidden

anymore! Since God is ‘Dog’ged

by our hardened conscience, now

it’s not only an idle man’s brain

that’s a devils workshop but

a busy, infertile brain as well, that

can make a heaven out of hell.

All is fair not only in

war and love but in

becoming a paid co-parent

as well, to a brain child

parenting a co-authorship

with two, three sometimes

even four-more,

mothered by a ghost-writer and

fathered by Artificial intelligence!

The research surrogacy now

ratified by the scientific, and

Scopus-indexed plutocracy.

The modus operandi is

of Socialism but the spirit

belongs to Capitalist dictates.

Feathering the caps with

a legion of phenomenal births,

elsewhere wades of crisp bank notes

golden iPhones, diamonds, laptops

and of course needy women,

shift hands of intellectual lapdogs

in the intercontinental hotels

for an A ++ Grade for a

deemed to be capitalist university

of well-feathered nests

that puts on the Marxist mask

and a Communist voice.

A spirit of compromise

has already been vaccinated

into the sedated veins of

the post-modern society.

The only second nature

you need is, be a roman

when you’re in Rome,

and be true to the

reconstituted amendments

blind your conscience,

convince, re-educate its

out-dated moralities and

then consistently self-rhetorize:

What though the

conscience be lost

All is not lost!

While the plagiarists

are the law-givers and

research moguls of surrogacy

that frigidize your fertility

in this terminal world

of obsolete ethics;

the ghostless writers of

non-artificial intelligence

become mere poetic-onlookers

looking for the stuttering

figures of speech that shy away

from the undressed reality

etherised on the ghost-writer’s

plagiarised table.

And the pen that was once

mightier than the sword

is blunted now gets

sheepishly confined

to a breadless reality

of a cobwebbed future.

PS: Ghost-writing, large scale plagiarism, commercialisation of research and publication, corruption at the hierarchy, have  defiled the moral fabric and sanctity of academics and research. All this mass treachery has profaned the emblem of Saraswathi