Remember Chatur Ramalingam’s Teacher’s Day speech in 3 Idiots? The joke is no longer on the obsequious engineering student but, most unfortunately, on thousands of hapless pupils in Jammu and Kashmir.

Rote learner Chatur, who didn’t speak Hindi, became a victim of a prank when his mischievous batchmate replaced the word “chamatkar” (miracle) with “balatkar” (rape) in a speech that a ghostwriter had penned for him. But the absurdity that had been mined for laughter in a film has turned into a real-life challenge for students.

In Jammu and Kashmir, students appearing in their Class X exams on Monday are in a confused “UT” of mind. You read that right, it is not a typographic error by the newspaper but a fallout of the farcical situation that Jammu and Kashmir finds itself in in “New India” — a heady cocktail of mockery, unintended mirth and the macabre.

The board exams will start with a paper on “disaster management and road safety education”, which is also the title of a social sciences textbook. In line with the downgrading of Jammu and Kashmir from state to Union Territory,
the school board has replaced the word “state” with “UT” throughout the book, possibly by using a computer’s find-and-replace feature, without application of mind.

In several places, the change does fit — as in “Jammu and Kashmir UT is prone to various disasters”.

The problem arises with sentences where the word “state” had been used to mean “condition”.

Sample this excerpt from the book: “Unconsciousness or fasting is a UT of human body as a result of interference with the functioning of the brain which could lead to airway obstruction, loss of breathing (and) malfunctioning of (the) heart.”

Further: “The UT can lead to death of (the) victim if no immediate first aid is provided.”

If there’s a UT that can bring on death, can there not be a “UT of shock”?

“There are different causes of unconsciousness and the most common being is (sic) sudden shocking news, fall from height, epilepsy, carbon monoxide or drug poisoning and diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, low blood pressure, UT of shock etc,” a passage in the textbook reads.

A 2022 edition of the book accessed by this newspaper contains these mistakes, which are carefully preserved in the latest edition available on the board website.

The facetious question doing the rounds is whether the students should reproduce the error in their answers or whether they should let common sense prevail. It’s a tricky choice given that “upgrading UT to state without the consent of the Prime Minister’s Office might attract a jail term”.

It’s not clear what the students have been doing all this while: the error came under the spotlight after a social media user uploaded a video drawing attention to it. It has spawned jokes and memes.

“State of affairs. Listen into (sic) this short video. State is downgraded to UT and so is English language in our... books prescribed for school. It’s a Tragicomedy that we are living,” PDP leader Naeem Akhtar posted on X.

A Class X student said she had never spotted the error because the pupils seldom read the book. “The book has outdated data, which in some cases is two decades old or even older. Instead, we read a reference book where we don’t find such mistakes,” she said.