Make it short and crisp’ would have been an apt instruction on how to write emails.

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But some authors of school and college textbooks tend to go overboard, forgetting in the process that drawing room jokes aren’t meant for public consumption, least of all for impressionable minds.

The author of Basic Business Communication, Prof CB Gupta, now finds himself drawing flak for writing, “Email messages should be like skirts — short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover all the vital points.”

Gupta is not alone in the hall of shame because textbooks recommended by various boards and universities have been accused of carrying sexist observations.

For starters, a physical education book, recommended by CBSE, stated that the best female body shape is ‘36-24-36’. It had created such a furore this year that minister Prakash Javadekar asked schools to ban it. In 2006, a Hindi textbook from Rajasthan Education Board considered women to be worse than donkeys.

Though the board officials deemed it a joke, it was not only in poor taste but downright objectionable. Other examples include slurs on meat-eaters and portraying ‘women as job thieves’.

On the one hand, the government intends to make the country safe for women, and on the other, gender insensitivity is being institutionalised in seats of learning.

That Prof Gupta’s offensive sentence has been in circulation since the book was published in 2005 says a lot about how we are grooming youngsters in the 21st century.