DU students taught to keep their emails short, like skirts

New Delhi: A Delhi University textbook advising B.Com. (honours) third year students to keep their emails short like a skirt has sparked an outrage on social media.

The book Basic Business Communication has been authored by C.B. Gupta, a former head of the commerce department of a DU-affiliated college.

The book, which has been in print since over a decade, said, “Email messages should be like skirts-short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover all the vital points.”

A student, on the condition of anonymity, said, “Some students from socially and economically weaker sections have a tendency to memorise everything written in the textbooks, without realising that such analogies may legitimise casual sexism in our society.”

“Thankfully, we are able to realise and question the reliability of such textbooks in our course. Why didn’t anyone question this statement in this book which is being reprinted for years?” she asked.

Now, a septuagenarian, Prof. Gupta expressed regret for hurting people’s sentiments and said that the analogy was taken from an article by a foreign author.

“I have already deleted the statement from my book. I will also advise the publisher to remove the content before publishing the latest edition,” Prof. Gupta said.

To a question on why such an analogy was made, he said it was a mistake on his part. “It was not to hurt anyone. I took the analogy from an article written by a foreign author,” Prof. Gupta said.

The pictures of the textbook and the content was uploaded on the Facebook page — DU Updates — along with a post, which read, “Words have power, and to impose such kind of a learning on an impressionable youth will never lead to gender equality. As a student I have the power to fight this casual sexism in my own university prescribed textbook and if I don’t exercise this power, shame on me.”

While a user commented on it saying it was a great metaphor and not a sexist remark, another Facebook user slammed the former for an attitude of taking it easy.

Last year, a book of the varsity’s history curriculum had called Bhagat Singh a “revolutionary terrorist”, prompting the freedom fighter’s family to raise the issue with university authorities as well as the HRD ministry.