Ahankaar

Ever so often this past week, I have been surveying the ruins of this year. I draw solace from my use of the word survey. It means that I have been able to prop myself up enough to at least see the decimation and attempt a tentative jab at the foundations to test the tensile and see what can be built back. 2015 was a battleground and I did not win. One might argue that wins and losses are relative terms and only time can determine what certain episodes can mean in the narrative of your life. I will accept that, but for the moment this is a very depleted me and I accept that, first.

Academia, research, and its processes, has a way of showing you your aukaat at regular intervals. It demands rigor and deep study. You then make intellectual claims of having understood something and you send of your work to be reviewed, commented on, and judged. You do this every time knowing that the stakes are high in terms of what the results will do to your confidence and how you think of yourself. Especially this year, when I have spent the better part of the year battling two bloody battles that had already left me wounded and diminished. I was also trying to swing two jobs and while it is always an honor to be asked to teach as a visiting faculty and shines your CV, it sapped every bit of me in trying to balance the responsibility of shepherding a class even though I enjoyed it.

So, I have been thinking a lot about ahankaar because that was at the crux of why things spiraled away. Isn’t it always? And because I believe that things happen for a reason, I do know that getting to watch Katyar Kaljat Ghusli yesterday, only means that I need to pay heed to, interpret, and translate what it is going to mean to me because it was the most important film I have watched this year. If you are unfamiliar with happenings in Marathi cinema, KKG, originally written and performed as a play, is a visual and aural treat – especially if you are a music lover of any persuasion. And if you are a Hindustani classical music lover, it is nothing short of a fiesta of epic proportions. Each song in the film is a finely crafted piece of work so much so that there is a move by UNESCO to draft KKG as an artefact of immense cultural heritage value. It made up for every Sawai Gandharva Mahotsav I have missed these past many years. Wah. As a film, it could have benefited from a little bit of curtailing because it begins to drag towards the end, but as a feat of music and cinema it moves you tremendously and this is Subodh Bhave’s directorial debut! Sanjay Leela Bhansali needs to watch this on priority to see how the rendition of a period piece can be rightly done. Critically though, you can question religious stereotypes because it does beget a bit of bigotry that is shown to be only partially redeemed.

Offline life, aside. I was also thinking about ahankaar with respect to this blog when I was watching the film. The statistics that WordPress has fed me this year are stunning. I notched a record number of posts this year. In fact the blogging of all my years combined are perhaps still less than the posts I wrote this year alone. I came to this space because it allowed me to feel okay about being me and though I was largely private about the hell that I was attempting to ford, my posts did come from a place of attempting to cope and normalize crises of self-doubt and confidence. I also experienced what it was to have readers.

I have been blogging since 2005, but it is only over the past year that I realized that I was writing to an audience. This combination of needing to cope and having readers was potent and encouraging, but not always pretty. I cringe at some of the things that I have written over the past few months and the amount of artifice in some of my posts and have told myself to stop. I recognize that impression management and performing are an integral part of any human interaction and online social interactions be it on Facebook or blogs, feed off on this in a huge way. I have no qualms with it and often wonder why Facebook gets such a bad rep about being exhibitionist because over a period of time, we really don’t behave any differently on any other platform. Our mediums of communication don’t change what we want to communicate about our SELVES in any drastic way though the structure and content of WHAT we are writing may differ. It is as it is and I am a part of it, but it has now started feeling like a burden given my own investment in this space and I feel like moderating it a little.

That said, this blog and receiving a response to what I was writing helped me weather some of the storm and since I am back to relatively calmer waters, I won’t be using this as my crutch anymore because lately it has stopped putting me in a happy place. I also discovered that having readers is not always a good thing even though I LOVE receiving comments. Some, I have enjoyed interacting with. Some, I sigh over. Some have dug deep through the archives leaving me unsettled with how much I have put out there for strangers to browse through and read. I don’t wish to withdraw anything and having done this myself with bloggers I like, I totally get that this is but normal behavior and can even be a compliment. Some, flattered to deceive and disappeared. I will admit that I was bewildered at this and wondered a fair amount about what I could have written or said that was so offensive. This sent me off on another round of self-doubt and I understood then that I really need to have more equanimity and balance in understanding why I write, what I choose to write, and for whose benefit this is all about. After all, nobody owes anybody anything and lest this be construed as passive aggressive, I am grateful that it pushed me to introspect.

I have always enjoy writing and find that it is the only constant and absolute thing of certainty about myself that I carry forward with me from this year. Everything else is shaken and stirred. I am thankful for this touchstone and really need to return to approaching it with honesty irrespective of having readers or who they are. It is integral to who I am and for something that I so deeply cherish, it deserves nothing less.

This is my X’Mas gift to myself. And if you are a music and cinema lover, Marathi cinema has this gift for you.

 

Nothingness

Firstly, as promised a shout out to SA who caught me loafing on Twitter last night. As is my wont, I am most active on Twitter when I am trying to write because it helps me immensely to tweet nonsensical things that only make sense to me, but which really reflect my state of mind. It is why I am anonymous there and prefer that nobody I know professionally finds my account. So, there I was dawdling over the concluding sections of my paper and finding nothing profound to say, so was instead sending tweets into the black hole of Internet void. My tweets if strung together will definitely not be as entertaining as AIB’s video on raag Salman Khan below, but still it will be enough for the research community I belong to, to classify me as a flaky nut. To add variety to cope with writing pains, this time around, I even had Instagram. I mostly followed every Bollywood person I could find and was kept entertained by their pictures. I plan to find some of you who I know are on there and follow you now that I am slowly inching towards being social again.

It is exactly 10 hours to the submission deadline and I have nothing more left to say in the paper. Not even add another citation because I have done this four times already and given how ACM formats its papers, have to go back and renumber every single reference again. I think I am referenced out at long last. This is the first time that I have finished something so early, but I have still not submitted it to the portal. I plan to revisit it one last time later this evening before I send it off on its way. All 11,398 words of it. For a reader it might look like a paper on social search, but it is really composed of 9 months of work, 3 months of not having a single day off, three weeks of intense writing, tears, fears, my refusal to bow down and let a bully have her way, an arrogant fellow worker who circumstances demanded be allowed to act like an entitled privileged soul, days and nights of despair, panic attacks, and coping with uncertainties that still remain unresolved. The subject itself was challenging. It was a scary task to bring order to the data and pitch the paper in the context of past research that has been done on the subject. There were countless moments when I doubted the validity of the research design and what I was doing and though there is a logic to the paper now and one that I have managed to explain and can defend, there is still a long way to go before I can confidently strike the nail with my hammer. The novelty of what the research deals with makes me wonder if I have done anything right at all.

I wryly observe that since it has been 9 months, it is high time I deliver this baby that represents so much that went wrong this year and whose outcome I am still uncertain. I enjoyed working on it so though I don’t know what this piece of work’s eventual destiny will be, it will always remind me of so much that I learnt about myself. Chief among which is that if I am convinced about the righteousness of something and you are nothing but a playground bully, then there is little chance in hell that I will bow down no matter how hard you arm twist me and eventually succeed in breaking my arm. Since, the only regret I have is sadness at having encountered said person, not sure if I should be happy about this characteristic of mine. I have reflected often that if given a chance would I do anything differently with the bully and I hear my soul return me an emphatic resounding “no”. So, that’s that, then. I know all pieces of work have their own invisible stories of sweat and blood that we seldom hear of. This is mine and it is meaningful to my personal arc in many many ways. If anything, the angst and the pain of it all makes me embrace, cherish, and protect it even more fiercely.

To top this all, I have been teaching a full credit course on qualitative methods as a visiting faculty and that brought along its own set of responsibilities, demands, and some measure of drama when I found a few students being unethical in their assignments and shot of an angry email to the class. The 13-student class has three grey haired senior working professionals on a career sabbatical and two advanced students all of whom are pursuing their PhDs, while the rest are fresh entrants to a Masters program. All of them are engineers so explaining the paradigms of qualitative research to their quantitatively oriented worldviews has been an interesting experience. The first day I saw the grey hairs in class, I wanted to flee and never return. Though elderly students are quite common and were my classmates in grad school, I never had to be the one teaching them so I was quite nervous and thankful when the first class ended without incident. To be honest, they are way easier to deal with than the younger millennials.

I decided to write this post by way of a summary for my record and also to document that at this point in time when I am one step away from the submit button, I feel a sense of nothingness. Also that I kind of expected to feel this way though I wonder if it will change after I hit the button. There is tons of pending grading to be done after this so am back to work now. Stay well.

Access denied

All attempts to log on to Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook failed at the University of Pune campus. When I used to teach here a while ago, Orkut was blocked at the height of its popularity. Better sense prevailed and access was restored after a month. Regressive steps by an academic institution to control what sites faculty, staff, and students can access from campus.What if social media is the topic of research? Even otherwise, what if a student needs to access Twitter for information. C’mon UoP. Hindering free flow of information does an academic institution no good. Especially since the office staff at my department here just bought a huge bouquet to gift to the Vice-Chancellor. Ostensibly, congratulations are in order since the UoP retained its ‘5-star’ status after being assessed by NAAC earlier this month. I see no cause for cheer. NAAC is another exercise in futility. Another post for another day. Bah.

The curious incident of the typist in the daytime

Somebody in my neighbourhood has a typewriter. I know this because I wake up most mornings to the sound of typewriter keys hard at work. The typing is incessant and not altogether unpleasant. It lasts between 10-15 minutes and while it continues, I usually lie in bed thinking of who the typist might be and what is it that is being typed. Given that I live in student housing, that the typist is a student can be almost undisputed. But, in this age of snazzy touch screen interface devices, why a typewriter? What quaint charm might this antiquated piece of technology hold for a student with its inability to cleanly backspace, delete, copy paste, format, display word count, run spell checks, track changes, rewrite, rewrite, and oh rewrite; all so essential for the modern day dissertation or paper writing endeavor? 

I always imagine this typist to be seated near a window with white wispy curtains that blow about merrily as they gently stream the morning sun into the room. In my head, all these are essentials if you are writing at an early hour in the morning and more so if you are working on a typewriter. Further, the typist has a very large desk on which are scattered various paraphernalia alien to most work desks today. These include carbon paper and typewriter ribbons such as the ones that gave me black smudges all over my clean frocks during my heydays of poking around in the father’s office at age 7. The typist is also a solitary being who has lucid crystal clear thoughts that brilliantly voice the arguments of the thesis being presented. The typewriter stands ready to capture them and neatly pin to paper as words. The typing can be ritualistic in its repetitive motions and like most rituals is accompanied by the hypnotic cadence of sound. Here it is the clackety clack of keys. Even the words produced from an iMac no less – as mine are right now seem wishy washy and weak as I imagine a comparison with the strong bold strokes of a typewriter’s keys. Words cannot be pinned to a computer screen. They are ethereal and can disappear as easily as they appear. They are untrustworthy in the inherent ease with which they can be obliterated.

In contrast, the typewriter deals with words that do not require revision. These are not words that one would think up off lightly because the paper on which they are pinned would have to be balled up and thrown away. I do not think this typist that has taken over my imagination would allow that. These words are different. They are well thought out and precise. They know exactly what they have to say and how they are going to say it. So they stand out starkly black against the white of the paper – proud and refreshingly productive in the deliberate antiquity of their chosen mode of production. No blinking cursor pauses in midsentence trying to find the right words to say. Fingers do not wander off to switch between tabs and indulge in the temptations of Twitter, blogs, YouTube and prolonged procrastination. No ‘windows’ of internet connected computer screens inveigle one to stand and watch the world go by with almost always nothing to show for a day’s worth of work.

No, the typist does not have the patience or time to expend trying to work on modern-day tools. Additionally, there is something to be said for the fact that the word typewriter is the longest word that can be typed on a single row of keys. You don’t mess around with legacies like that.

I think I need a typewriter too.

I know my Mac can be trusted to function as a reliable backup. Just in case.

Sakhi

It is no fun when you have the swing all to yourself. The playground was a fun place to be in. The pushing and jostling and racing ahead to grab your place and then swinging high above the ones you beat that day. It wasn’t always you though. Some days you were the one left standing impatiently trying to beat down that frustration of having to wait this round out. Seeing your playmates claim their share of the pie, only increased your urge to go beat them at this game time and time again. Competition is fun. It is inspiring. It is motivating and spurs you to give your best.
So, I look around me today and the playground of my growing up days is empty. Sure there is a lone swing still occupied. But, I can comfortably perch myself on the other one. There is no more jostling, no more spurring. I can swing myself without having to be on guard from that sneaky little A who was marvelous at taking you by surprise and never failed to amaze with her intelligent plays. But, I don’t really find myself going as high as I would have gone were you there too. It would be so much fun. Sometimes spiteful, but most times healthy and we learned so much from each other.
A and the others like her have all deserted the playground. P, on the other hand did the unthinkable and allowed that damn water tanker to run her over just when she and I had decided that the top place is going to be hard fought one. And on the last day of the first year exams at that. What irony. Without the dueling and the nimble footwork of worthy classmate, I was no longer interested. What a waste of talent, of ambition and spirit. I mourned for all that when you went.
I miss them. It is no fun playing all alone when the rest have quietly retired to home and hearth. I give a little less of my best at times when I know you are not in the game anymore. I wish you would peek out at times. It keeps me on my toes, you know. And it is amazing, the things we come up with when pushed to give our best. I wish some of you were still around. I do have many others. Connections forged later in life. The many bios and about mes that I read and being in graduate school tells me that there are many who are busy trying to carve their niche just like me. But, it is not the same. I miss your brilliance, the contexts that we all shared and fought for. I wish you would return.