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.