Rest Awhile or Stop?

Every time you pass through the woods, you realize you are going in circles, or squares, or rectangles, or some other geometric shape that you couldn’t care less about. You figure that there are signposts you notice at intervals, and then you suddenly miss them. You go through the exact same feelings at different points - nostalgia, anger, frustration, joy, ecstasy.  You realize that these emotions could be, in some sense, classified into two different (mental) blocks. You also notice that the lengths of feeling these emotions are unusually long. What is fascinating is that you don’t notice this, until a fellow traveler tells you so, and if the fellow traveler is someone you (deeply) care about, you tend to seriously reflect on their opinions. But it’s not just the views of fellow travelers that matter. You could learn about yourself from writers and artists and poets too.

The “normal” view of the world is that the journey through the woods is a fascinating one, and you should work on making yourself better prepared to make the most out of this journey. There are specialist travelers (like hikers!) to help you make the most out of it and then there are other travelers that love you and hold you, when you slip on that rock and are about to fall off into that trench.  There are even better friends you make among your fellow travelers, who pull you off a muddy ditch and help you clean yourself, as you get back on your voyage. The idea of opting out of this whirlwind tiring journey through woods is not one to be considered. It does not exist.

You are as not free as you think you are. Duck Foucault, this is not about him. For all the greatness that you think you have acquired in the years of learning how to become an accomplished jungle wanderer, all that it takes is for a dear fellow traveler to tell you how you are close to madness. You can be reduced to nothingness – all it takes is the ability to know how deeply, deeply weak that shell is, which carries the coat of years of shining brilliance of your traveling skills. And then as you confront the reality about this shallowness or hollowness, you confront your own madness. The obvious solution is to take a break from this wandering around in the jungle. It would be a lie, a blithering one at that if one were to not confess that perhaps, for all that is worth the pain or not, maybe this going about in circles, squares, rectangles, octagons, decagons, and what not, perhaps needs to stop.  The dynamic flow of fluids should perhaps not rest, but cease.

Section 377 and India Shining

Here's my article published in Kafila on December 15, 2013

It is 2004 all over again. India is shining. Such a difference a decade can make. BJP is on the verge of returning to power, Modi could be India’s next Prime Minister, and the many failures of the UPA could give a new lease of life to Hindutva, if it was dead at all. As India shines, the state (its judicial arm, in this case) has abandoned the queers, questioning their claim to the status of “minority”, rendering them vulnerable to brutality at the hands of the hetero-normative society and other arms of the state (police, for instance), in equal measures. Other minority groups, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, fought against the claim to citizenship of a (sexual) minority group, decisively defeating them at the altar of justice. 

Some of us queers, who stuck to every single word that was written in 2004 that went on to show how agrarian distress, farmer suicides, and saffronization of education didn’t quite add up to a shining India, were left puzzled by the reaction of the BJP to the Supreme Court verdict upholding section 377 in its original, pristine self. You’d think that the shrewd right-wing would take on the first opportunity to invoke a very obvious ancient Indian “culture of homosexuality” to make a progressive argument in favor of decriminalization. You’d assume that in a ravaging hunger to return to power, they would try to bring on board every single group that they can, maybe only later to abandon them, but at least carry them along through elections. Alas, no. For the BJP, India is still shining, and this shining confidence is perhaps sufficient to help them march into 7 Race Course Road, next year. 

India is shining in a Brahmanical interpretation of Hinduism that in line with puritan Victorian, Christian arguments on morality, is unwilling to even read its own history. For the BJP, after all, India’s history was the history of struggles to form a Hindu right-wing political identity, not some obscure subaltern history of peasant and laborer struggles. In that moment, I wonder how the queer groups would have fought off a BJP argument against homosexuality, had we not had an ancient history to fall back upon. What one means here is that history or no history, arguments favoring rights can only be helped by historical facts and precedents, but history should not be a necessary ground to formulate an argument on human rights. 

As India shines, we ask what’s next for the queer population. Right-wing queers (oh yes, they exist!) are feeling cheated at the hands of a party that was promising gains of surplus accumulation to the urban, middle class. Those of us on the “Left” have been left abandoned by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and other dalit, bahujan parties, whose causes were unwaveringly (and perhaps, sometimes, uncritically) supported by the out and proud jhola carriers. Mostly on account of the political decimation of the organized Left in India and partially on account of their assumed support for all minority rights, no one really cared about what the Left parties had to say. One can only be thankful for the fact that in such hard times, they did not come up with some archaic, orthodox argument favoring class conflicts over every other struggle! The show stoppers were, surprisingly, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). 

The support that has been extended by the Congress and AAP, without much consideration for how their support might potentially erode their vote banks, perhaps tell us one of the two things – there is more to party politics than Machiavellianism or that the Indian voting public probably does not care more or less about this issue than what the BJP makes it out to be. The recent public statement by Rajnath Singh now almost sounds irrational as he used queer politics to demonstrate the gap between India and Bharat. He’d probably hate this comparison, but his unwillingness to recognize the existence of queer people in provincial India makes him sound exactly like the former Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadanijad, who argued in his address at Columbia University that gays don’t exist in Iran! My broader point is that there perhaps might be politically conservative arguments that could be supported by some construction of logic, but BJP’s stand fails any test of reason, “oriental” or “western”! 

A very interesting argument I have been reading, especially from the likes of the delightful Ashley Tellis, is that this is a bourgeois struggle. The argument almost leaves people like us, who opposed and will always continue to oppose the rise of NaMo, who stood and will always stand against the extremely violent Indian state that has been legitimating its survival on the bodies of dead Kashmiris, indigenous Chattisgarhis and Jharkhandis, and Nagas and Axomiyas, who have been fervent allies of women’s movements against barbaric violence, and who have been voracious supporters of campaigns like Right to Food and Work and whatnot, in a state of remorse. Did I not fulfil my duties as a politically conscious individual? Have I not passed some imagined test that confirms to the hetero-normative world that my consciousness is not just colored by my sexual orientation? Is there a chance we could be less harsh on ourselves and just choose one enemy to deal with, especially, when our struggles, in their broadest sense, will only make India (and Bharat) a relatively livable place for lesbians, gays, and trans-people? 

So, let’s, first, just like in 2004, acknowledge that India is not shining and that we have just taken a giant leap backwards. Let’s, perhaps, also see that it is not yet the time to read movement for queer rights in India from the lens of Jasbir Puar’s “homonationalism”. Gay bodies are still bodies that symbolize death in India and are not bodies that are being productively mainstreamed into the processes of capitalist accumulation. Our struggle is more “primitive”. Our struggle will never end, but perhaps we must wonder what our next steps should be as we not just face an uncertain future in India, but a series of heartbreaks resulting from abandoning by fellow minority groups. As Gautam Bhan mentioned in his response to the media last week, “…you know what is daunting? What is daunting is when you’re 15 years old and are terrified of who you are. If we have survived that, the Supreme Court does not know what fear looks like. We know fear… in the long course of human history, dignity moves forward, and it will move forward in this case.” Amen to that. 

Storm in a Calm IIT Campus Over a Sexual Harassment Case

Here's my article published in Kafila on October 14:

The serene, picturesque campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati has been witnessing some very noteworthy events in the recent past. According to reports in the popular media, a professor at the institute’s biotechnology department was accused of sending obscene text messages to his PhD student over her phone. Though the professor pleaded innocence, claiming that messages were sent from his sim card that was stolen, the local police found this hard to believe. The professor has also been accused of harassing the student during other instances on campus. Upon receiving the advice of the ‘Working Women’s Committee’ of the institute, the professor was recently suspended. This narrative constructs for us a simple, fair story of a just state-society system. A person breaks the law, and he is disciplined, as one would expect in a fair democratic society. If only that was the case.

The suspension of the professor was not immediately followed by the submission of the report, let alone the filing of complaint at the institute and with the local police. On August 13, Amingaon police in Assam arrested the professor for sending obscene text messages to a student. The arrest happened because the student had to file a FIR in order to request a telecom company to reveal the identity of the owner of the phone, from where the obscene messages being sent to her, were emanating. The delay in the inaction of the institute administration is unjustified, but perhaps not very inexplicable.

IIT Guwahati, like most IITs, is a space of contradictions. It is progressive and it is regressive. It encourages freedom and disciplines actions and voices. Freedom, of course, aimed at producing laboring bodies that could productively work with and contribute to increasing capitalist accumulation in the country. This process requires specialization of labor, and technology schools have learnt, very remarkably, to seamlessly blend the creative energies of its students with the demand forces of the market. On the lines of most institutions that select students on the basis of ‘merit’, access to the institute itself is highly restricted, and like most IITs, the institute dedicates resources to de-politicize its campus life, because ‘politics’ is constructed and represented as a bad, if not vulgar word in the typical IIT social life – something that staff and students of ‘those’ institutions (like JNU and Hyderabad University) practice. Constitutional mandates and judicial orders seeking justice and accountability, therefore, are accepted with a sense of rejection of the institute bureaucracy’s limits to power. So, for instance, IIT Guwahati, despite all existing judicial advisory, does not have an accessible, public grievance redressal system and does not have a legal representative on its Working Women’s Committee (WWC). For most scholars studying any critical social science, the very christening of the committee as a ‘Working Womens’ Committee must raise eyebrows.

IIT Guwahati does not have a women’s cell, and its WWC has no helpline and no online presence. In a note that was uploaded to an internal, ‘closed’ Facebook group of the institute, accessible to its alumni, the WWC quite lucidly pointed to the flaws in the grievance redressal system of IIT Guwahati. The WWC concluded in its report submitted to then Director of the institute that disciplinary action was to be initiated against the professor and an alternative adviser be appointed for the student. While the institute did show some efficiency with replacing the adviser, the suspension of the professor happened after thousands of current and former students discussed the case on the internal IIT Guwahati group in Facebook, and asked some very difficult questions to the institute administration. The victim also participated in the discussions and quite fervently put her arguments forth, with the then Director of the institute, whose term came to end very recently, defending his inactions and losing them to an increasingly aggressive student body on Facebook. It would seem unusual to imagine a victim of sexual harassment publicly defending her stand, but the unwillingness on part of the institute to act against the professor probably left her with little choice. My experience at IIT Guwahati and my reading of power relations in an IIT system made me doubt if these Facebook protests in a closed group would lead to movement of feet on the ground. I was proved wrong.

Students came out to protest. There were candle marches in the night, protests in front of the Institute administrative building, and the Director had to address the agitating students. This might sound like everyday practice of politics to student in universities, but this was a defining moment in progressive student politics in a system as regressive as the IITs. I term these protests as progressive because these were not students of yet another IIT-style ‘anti-reservation front’ or were not marching verbalizing state propaganda on terrorism or corruption. Further, women students (and staff and faculty members) represent a small minority in the IIT labor pool with little voice, if any, in institute administration. The students must be credited for having used the contradictions that came out in the process of fighting for justice for the victim. The local police (sadly, very surprisingly!) showed competence in moving through the case, right after the FIR was filed. As discussions on the online forum indicated, faculty opinion was split. Very few, but active faculty members protested against the inactions of the Director, who besides not putting in place the mandated grievance redressal system at the institute, decided to treat the WWC’s report as a preliminary report and not an enquiry one, and waited for legal advice, instead of suspending the professor . Most faculty members on the Facebook group, however, decided to remain silent, and to not come out as questioning the administration’s (in)actions.

The state is anything but a monolith. As the anthropologists Tania Li and Akhil Gupta have made us understand, it is an assemblage, and as this event would perhaps tell us, contradictory. There is action (disciplining, protesting) and there is inaction, and this contradiction provides the disempowered the opportunity to have their voices heard. The protests and the narratives that were being woven, both online and offline, were not reflexive or critical. They did not move away from the patronizing rhetoric that operates within the patriarchal structure. The protests happened around the time when the institute Director was almost ready to hand over charge to a new person and the institute was witnessing administrative changes (for instance, the Deputy Director had recently resigned).The institute administration was ‘attacked’ at its weakest point in time, but this was done when no formal student union exists in IIT Guwahati or in any IIT, which only goes to show that perhaps a large, historic de-politicizing machine that IIT bureaucracy is, has its limits, and that students should be on the look-out for more opportunities for ‘action’, if they seek change.

This incident is but one of the many occasions to learn from, that solidarity is not a just a word in queer/feminist theory but lives and breathes in everyday life, and that women struggle through a landscape of structures, and form alliances to attack the structures of subjugation. The immediate task in our hands as scholar-activists, however, is to bring up more difficult questions, such as why is the institute student body still accepting of the curfew that is imposed on the movement of women students after mid-night, and perhaps, what could be the gender-class configurations that lead to the presence of so few women on IIT campuses and how these could be transformed? You don’t have to be at a ‘prestigious’ institution to possess the ability to have your consciousness awaken by bureaucratic inaction in a case of human rights violation. What is a good theoretical question, perhaps, is if there is something specific about the political subjectivities of the people, who control hegemonic discourses in IIT campuses, that makes it possible/easier for students and faculty to ‘come out and have their voices heard’ when the issue is of corruption, terrorism or affirmative action? How is it that after much soul-searching, a community of students do, after all, come out and march for gender justice in a very narrow sense, but do very little about the class, caste, religious, gender, and sexual marginalizations that create the particular political (or ‘apolitical’) social environment at IITs?

Losing Angels - 2

Me: What just happened? I mean what happened through the last six months.

Myself: You were sleeping. You needed rest.

Me: A six-month long nap?

Myself: Do you realize everything you did during the last six months? Those difficult life-changing conversations with family, the reading and writing for thesis, admissions, getting through a public ivy – I mean, you are a superman, you know that?

Me: Bleh, and I have been tired, but why must I have been so drained?

Myself: Perhaps a longer than needed sleep? And don’t bleh me, you find it so difficult to accept any sort of compliments!

Me:  Getting back to the point, amm, all of that happened in six months? How am I alive?

Myself: Tells you something about yourself, maybe?

Me: Why am I drained of all energy though – what happened in the last hour/month?

Myself: It was a dream; you screamed, you laughed, you smiled, you cried, you sighed – all in your dream.

Me: That’s weird

Myself: Isn’t this conversation too, in a way?

Me: Oh well, you know why we’re doing this, and nothing is weird, really.

Myself: Why do I have tears in my eyes though? I guess the dream didn’t end on a happy note?

Me: It’s more complicated perhaps? I mean, it’s a dream, to begin with, and dreams lack foundation – maybe your emotions needed a channel to flow; you needed to scream, laugh, cry, feel sorrow, bliss, happiness, and everything else – and it wasn’t possible to do that in reality.

Myself: That makes more sense.

Me: Oh, and you’ve been losing weight, in case you did’t notice. Congratulations are in order?

Myself: That I will gladly accept; I’ve worked on it, after all.

Me: So you did, for everything I credited you with.

Myself: Okayyyyyyyy…. You’re generous, and thanks!

Me: You know you’ve woken up, right? I mean, the dream has ended?

Myself: I have. Do I erase everything that was my dream?

Me: Why? In all the time you have to spend on yourself and on the things you would/should like to, do you think you’d like to spend your time on that?

Myself: Amm, maybe not. I’ve grown too, haven’t I?

Me: Of course. Jesus, go back to sleep now, it’s late. I mean, just a night’s sleep!

Myself: We’re ready, aren’t we?

Me: We always were!

Losing Angels - I

What must have been the experience of listening to a victim during a normal day-hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission like? What must have been the experience of speaking during the hearing like? How must it feel to speak out and “clear your hearts” of all traumatic experiences, but be aware that the act of speaking would not be followed by action, but by a few sympathetic nods and maybe an occasional tear or two? But the victims have cried quite enough, to stop seeing the value in tears. Is that too harsh on the part of the victims? Is it too harsh and insensitive, in general, to lose sympathy, as a result of suffering violence?

So many of us suffer from violence and do so little about it, but when we do reach out to professionals for help, we go through experiences that leave an indelible mark on us. We suffer from violence – of body, mind, or soul – because we have no control over circumstances that enable the existence of forms of power that cause this violence. Would our lives be any different, if we had control over the circumstances though? I am not saying that we ask to have violence caused to us, but that when we don’t do what we should have done to stop that violence, there are good reasons. While I haven’t read much on it, what could perhaps be the reasons for violence (physical/psychological/sexual) between homosexual couples? Would it have anything to do with a very high level of insecurity of all sorts of living in a hetero-normative society? Despite the existence of these oppressive structures, people do disentangle themselves from the various forms of oppression that they are under the grips of. How?

Finally, what about the violator? It has almost been six weeks since I looked into the eyes of the person who brought down the world on me, and asked them, if seeing me in all my vulnerability and ruins, reminded them of the violence they had once suffered – was externalizing violence on another body, rendering the body incapable of thought and action and in a miserable state – a way of bringing peace to oneself? I am not convinced I got an answer that made much sense, even though I wasn't in a state to make sense of anything anyway.

Suffering has its own way of working for everyone. For some of us, we need to wallow for a bit – a few days, weeks, or months – each time going down the tunnel of pain, until there is no way further down. The most terrifying thing about this journey downwards is that we are never sure when we would hit rock-bottom. The elevator to take us up and away, only starts from the basement and the journey downwards is like a passage through hell – we shed layers of our body and soul, it’s almost as if each passageway to that road downwards requires a sacrifice, and since the way up is through the basement, we rip away our happiness and peace, in a hope to eventually reach a happier place. The length and hardships of this journey, the ripping out of every wound the travelling body had ever suffered from and exposure to fire and spice – all of this, makes it possible to secure happiness, because there is nothing but happiness to be acquired.

Through these moments, you think of love, and the breaking up of love or prospects of love, that actually caused such suffering, and how much you loved, and what love meant for you and what you were made to understand, was reciprocal love – now laying in pieces, now being nothing more than memory.  You want to go back and pick the bottles of the most concentrated forms of acid, and wipe clean your life of this memory. You scrub and pour more acid, and scrub some more. It’s a little too late when you realize that you were not cleaning off this memory from granite but from a living and breathing body. Do you see the blood and guts that you threw away, while scrapping the memory off… has the acid started to cause more pain to your body? I am sorry; this wasn't meant to be so bad. I’m sorry you didn't deserve to suffer. I am so sorry!

Dear Clarice

Still scares me, and brings back many sad memories. Should write about those, or maybe not. Perhaps it will fade away, soon, sooner.

‘Dear Clarice, I have followed with enthusiasm the course of your disgrace and public shaming. My own never bothered me except for the inconvenience of being incarcerated, but you may lack perspective. In our discussions down in the dungeon it was apparent to me that your father, the dead night watchman, figures largely in your value system. I think your success in putting an end to Jame Gumb's career as a couturier pleased you most because you could imagine your father being pleased. But now, alas, you're in bad odor with the FBI. Do you imagine your daddy being shamed by your disgrace? Do you see him in his plain pine box crushed by your failure; a sorry, petty end of a promising career? What is worst about this humiliation Clarice? Is it how your failure will reflect on your mommy and daddy? Is your worst fear that people will now and forever believe they were indeed just good old trailer camp tornado bait white trash and that perhaps you are too…’

Why Hang?

I woke up to my Facebook updates inundated with news about Kasab’s hanging. As someone who had opposed it, and in general, is against death penalty, it is a rather sad start to the day. I am amazed how people celebrate death – in India, and in the US. The Pakistanis and Afghans who are killed by drones are presented in the public imagination in the US as ‘enemies of freedom’ of this country. They hate our freedom – so they should be killed. Kasab killed a couple of Indians, and had the potential for killing several others. Our imagination in the country is crafted with Kasab as the terrorist, who attacked India, and so should be hanged - publicly, preferably. I wonder why a people, who seek inspiration in the likes of Mohandas Gandhi would seek death with blood in their eyes. With the terrorist organization, Lashkar, claiming that Kasab’s death would actually inspire them, we have no reason to believe that death penalty can be a deterrent. What else can be the motive for a civilized, organized state and society to kill someone – en eye for an eye, perhaps? But that hardly sounds like a policy that a society that prides itself for being called civilized, would adopt.

Kasab was indeed becoming a drain on Indian middle-class tax payers, and that could possibly have been a reason to kill him. But if we can’t afford to keep him in our prison, did we not have any option to hand him over to international justice systems? A friend once told me that he should be hanged because he could be used by potential hijackers of Indian planes as a negotiating instrument. I wonder why it would not rather make sense for us to invest in increasing flight safety and security. Theoretically, feminist thoughts give me sufficient ground to explore this ‘desire to kill the enemy’, but I am holding on my reins, until I have discussed my thoughts with an academic. I will continue to think.

Happy Birthday to Me!

It’s August 06 already! I have now been in rural, agrarian India for a full thirty nine days – oh, I should exclude the eight days that I spent in Hyderabad, being nursed by my parents. How time flies, indeed! Time flies, or at least crawls, in Umarkhed too - though it may be hard to believe that this place has moved on anywhere beyond the India of the 1970s. What best describes the political economy of India is its dualistic economy and the deep-rooted inequity, and Umarkhed is a raw example that stands out in that vein. What would I describe the services sector to consist of here? Private, tutorial classes, may be. The children of the men who run these classes can be seen zooming around the town in their Bajaj Pulsar motorbikes in the morning and in the evenings, while a few lucky children of agricultural labourers take the morning, rickety bus to college, hoping to get away from that depressing, underpaid work their parents do and what they also contribute to, at least for a while.

Oh, this blog is supposed to be about my birthday! So, today is the day the US government decided to bomb Hiroshima. History tells us that Japan had already sent out signals of a possible surrender, but they were still bombed, and then bombed again three days later. Japan became the US’ laboratory to test its nuclear prowess. And, in the midst of this depressing period, forty three years later, I was born to a Scientist-father and homemaker-mother. That’s right – I will turn twenty-seven, two days from now. My father, at this age, was already a father to a child (my brother), and was employed full-time in a federal position, and here I am, studying in the final year of an MPhil (British/Indian qualification)-equivalent programme. Well, my father had not worked for two years, prior to earning his MS, so I should count that in my favour and give myself some credit. But then I hardly went through the extremely difficult childhood that he did in rural/shanty town urban India – so that leaves nothing to be discounted in my favour. In a world, where we understand through comparisons, I think I would not be much of a success by many standards. So, I should stop comparing.

In this part of agrarian India, sometimes, capital, in money form, fails to buy out labour. Capitalists – owners of land, in this case, blame the laziness of people unwilling to sell their labour. They remark with a look of disgust on their face that these good-for-nothings would rather play poker on the village corner, and get drunk and beat their wives up, instead of selling their labour to the landowners (at throwaway prices). Of course, this does not go on forever. After all, for how long can you act like an ostrich and pretend that your frail wife can help you meet your household expenses on her meagre $1-a-day wage? How long can you run away from your miseries – the realization that no matter how backbreaking your labour may be, you will not beat the trap of poverty because landowners usually have an edge in depressing wage rates in their village? So, men in the village do end up looking for work after all, and add another two or three dollars to that wage bundle, may be, three to four times a week. That money gets them a semblance of nutritious food on the floor, which they eat. Ah, now let’s leave the details for my thesis, but my point is that at twenty-seven, I have clearly achieved a bit - after all, I did sweat out in order to be born to the right kind of parents. See, it takes a lot of effort to try and not be born as a girl child to casual labourers or agricultural labourers in Umarkhed, where a combination of capitalist agriculture and patriarchy marginalizes them every day of the week, and every second of the hour.

Finally, gift time! I have been thinking of what I could gift myself on my birthday. I just called up my father, and I was telling him that I have finally understood what I want to do for my PhD – not that I have the slightest clue which university will open its doors for me, and which professor will be my supervisor. I used to think of myself as a researcher in urban studies, or may be in gender studies, until I carried out my first-ever, rural, household survey. I fell sick in Umarkhed, went back home, came back to Umarkhed, and started my survey, only to realize that this is the ‘place’ I’d like to learn more about – these occupations of the people, their lifestyles, their struggles. I’d like to add more to the list, but then has this post not become too ‘technical’ already? And now, I need to get ready to leave for my field (Marsul village), for my last visit of the season. I am sure the village government folks will have a nice explanation for everything that I think is way too wrong there. And I will diligently listen to them, and get back to the college. On the way back, I will look at the stretch of lush green fields from the motorbike, that has been created by the labour of marginal farmers and agricultural labourers – those necessary ‘spots’ on that seemingly beautiful canvas.

Regrets, so many

I'm in the library. It's twenty minutes to 2 AM. If I were in IITG, and would have been devoting as much time to academics, I would surely have secured a 10 instead of the 9.6 that I did. I said this to a funny friend of mine from IITG a couple of days back, and she pinged back, asking, if I was interested in getting an 11. Funny, of course! Here, though, every other graduate student ends up securing a 4/4. It now makes complete sense why Oxbridge rejected my application. Those BSc grades and to some extent, even the IITG MA ones, are such a disgrace! Then again, I have no idea what recommendation RB wrote for the Ox application. Amm, again, why did I even ask her to write my recommendation? Ah, that makes me come to the topic for this post - regrets.

There are long-term regrets and short-term regrets. I can't provide a reference for that entry. It's my invention. Quote me! Short-term regrets: For instance, I met TS on Friday evening and blabbered on about how I think most students in IDS programme here have got the wrong idea about what Development Studies is, and how, even a senior administrator at the Center for International Studies is also slightly misdirected. He ended up asking me to forget about the world and do my own stuff, in the gentle-est possible way. I thought, soon as I got out of his room that it was not necessary for me to have discussed the issue with him. Despite the fact that I know that he agrees with me, he'd never bring himself to be so blunt to say that to me, given the way people communicate here, . I regretted what I said, but I have come to understand that incidents such as the aforementioned, help me 'refine' my behaviour, but do not usually end up damaging anything - partly because the other person does not give as much thought to the matter. Phew, I guess I have explained myself sufficiently enough.

Then there are long-term regrets: Breaking off of relationships with SO many people. Out here, in Athens, I did a bit of 'bridge building' exercise recently to bring some of the relations that were on the verge of collapse, back in a stable state. Most worked, some didn't. Lesson learnt: at least as far as relationships go, recovery exercises are not a 100% effective, and if I consider a relationship to be important, I should WORK to maintain it. But I must confess that when I think about the broken relationships, I sometimes start wondering, if those relationships were anyway 'meant' to break. I would have loved to analyse some of them here, but then I would obviously not discuss why my relationship with the vampire that RB is, severed! I would end up discussing about why my relations with some people, who're close to my heart, broke, and I am not yet strong enough to talk about that on public forum. I also sometimes wonder, if I am improving as a person, but then, I doubt, if anyone can be a good judge of themselves. How do you think you're improving, when you end relationships in two days? Even now.

I would sometime really like to write a post that would show myself as being emotionally less vulnerable. I really hope that day comes soon. I do not want to end up being the next McQueen at the age of 41. I really do not.

The IIT Era - My last Year

December 01, 2011

                                                                                                A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be sitting in a cosy hotel room in Boulder, CO and writing this blog post. For that matter, I am not sure if I was so certain of being able to move to the US either. But here I am, and I am certainly not regretting my decision. The only question that bothers me sometimes is if I should have chosen Edinburgh over Ohio. Edinburgh has a better ranking, the programme is for one year duration and while remaining a Development Studies programme, its geographic focus is South Asia, unlike this place, where the traditional focus has been on the African continent.

            It’s snowing outside and what a pleasant sight it is. I came back a while ago from taking a walk towards the university. It wasn’t supposed to be a walk - I had got in to a bus to get to the Geography department, but the driver wanted exact change. I had to get down from the bus, and this is not India that I could have easily located a kirana store and got change. I came back to the hotel and got change from the receptionist, but I was too tired to get back to the bus stop. Also, since Prof. Ritzoweller promised to take me to the department, I didn’t bother to go back. I did, of course, take several photographs of the snow-crowned region, giving the impression to the people here that I was yet another curious Asian tourist! I, as always, didn’t care about what anyone thought. I am sure I will take more photographs during the next few days that I am here.

            I have been thinking of writing this blog for a while but I did not have the time or the inclination to do it. Now, it appears, I do! There’s only so much one can write in a blog without boring one’s readers. So, in this blogpost, I’ll start from where I left last, and end it at the stage of the completion of my MA. A lot changed after the first year at IIT Guwahati. I started off with building stronger relations with more faculty members and lost many friends on the way. That does sound quite negative but I wish I was a screenplay writer of Bollywood films so that I could write make-believe ‘positive’ climaxes! Do I regret losing out on the strong relations I built with some of the faculty members? Except for one, I do not. The ones I lost on the way are hypocritical, bitter and evil. I have no idea how to be subtle about their character description. All I can think is that I am glad I got rid of them from my life and do hope that I never cross paths with them. 

            There is this one faculty member whom I deeply miss being on ‘normal’ relationship with. She was someone I could relate most closely to and we went out of our way to make each other feel comforted in the isolation of IITG campus. I do believe that the kind of relationship we shared does not have a name in the ‘normal’ scheme of affairs. I should say the closest I can get to, is calling each other ‘close friends’ but the more I think about the platonic relationship, the more I feel that the nomenclature does not do any justice. One of the lessons I have learnt from the breaking of our relationship is that arguments, no matter how important to our subscribed ideologies, should not be allowed to come in the way of relationships that we believe are important to us. I did try to salvage our relationship, when I reached the US, but it was too late. All I was able to convey to her was that I was deeply apologetic for what happened between the both of us and requested for things to get back to normalcy. But then, I guess, far too much water had already flown below the bridge.

            In my second year, I also got to meet a person I guess I am going to be befriended for life to. As expected of me, he was from the BTech programme. We got to connect at various levels, especially, fitness! While I do not think that I am now anywhere close to being called fit, those jogging sessions, evening walks in the campus, etc. helped me immensely to beat the loneliness that I was facing back in the IITG campus. Life in Barak hostel was terrible, and I have written about it previously. There was just no one I could connect with, except for the Masters students from Design, but they were pretty much lost in their own cosy space. The only person I could befriend in the hostel was someone from my cohort. In International Trade, they suggest that trade happens between equals. While our relationship was no trade, I think I and my friend from my cohort were far from being ‘equals’ in any respect. He was way superior in forming social networks among folks from our department, while I was not, and I think I was superior in some other respects. Therefore, while we continue to remain friends to this day, we were unable to forge the sort of relationship I was able to make with my friend from BTech.

            In my own batch, I ended up getting on to the wrong side of at least two of my friends, and the reason for this is that I supported a faculty member in the stand she took against these guys. While I do think that the faculty member went too far in admonishing these two students, the students deserve no sympathy of any sort. I do regret acting like a complete jerk, when the incident happened – when I think I should have not ‘got in the middle of things’, I think everyone here - the students, the faculty and me were culprits of some sort or the other. What I mean, in this case, is that I do not regret having made more enemies in that batch!

            A lot of other important events marked my second year. During late 2010, my brother met with an accident, and that was a testing time for the family. While I received immense support from those in my cohort, most of my faculty members and others, I think the event did shake me up quite a bit and reminded me that life is anything but certain. When I came back from home to the campus, I was told that a faculty member had arranged for a test to be conducted for his paper during the week of my arrival. We all knew in the department that this person is a radical, left-wing ‘intellectual’, openly supportive of Maoism in India. When I went to him with a request to postpone the exam for a few days (which, he had the power to do), he said, ‘that’s not possible.’ He knew that I was just back from handling a crisis at home, but he pretty much shunted me out of his room with those three words – no words of sympathy added to that! Oh, didn’t I mention previously that there are quite a few hypocritical faculty members I met in IITG?

            Also, a new, first year batch came in to the department. That was rather uneventful for me because I found, with the exception of a handful, most of them to be boring. All that happened with their entry was that my unique efforts in the department (starting movie screening, initial work around placement, initiating student – faculty meetings, etc.) were shadowed by an impression created by some of the faculty members, who despised me, that the first years, in fact, brought life to the department. My reaction to this remains restrained. I have a long journey ahead of me and I am not going to work towards buying off acknowledgement for what I did some time back in life. In any case, I know that as much as some of them may want to erase my name off the ‘merit-list’, there are other folks there who are more rational and will not let that happen. 

            On another note, I do think my interaction with the BTechs only increased in my second year. My first year went in ‘establishing’ myself in the Institute, and that made me less untouchable for the BTechs. I have mentioned the BTech – Masters divide In IITs in my previous postings. My friend from BTech got me access to an informal group of BTech students, whose aim was anything between preparing for grad school/placement group discussions to getting to understand the society and economy around, more closely. I loved those meetings. For a Masters student that I was at IITG, those were ‘oxygen breaks.’ I was able to use the relations I built during these meetings to organise two ‘parties’ in the second year, where there was alcohol, music, dancing, and an amazing gathering of interesting people. If there is a God, I thank her for these! Also, my systematic planning to get out of the country helped me get admission to more than half of the places that I had applied to. I was clear that getting a good PhD abroad was out of question with my qualifications, and I would have to work to get an MPhil in India, prior to applying for PhD positions in the US/the UK/Canada, and I was sure that I was losing my patience with studying in India. I realised, with the admission results that I can indeed achieve what I put my heart to!

            I did end up graduating with top honours, and it was not difficult in my batch. The only other person I was competing with had a great memory power. Unfortunately, none of her other assets are worth a discussion. I do not think that I did great work for my thesis and in the context of the Indian education system, I certainly did not deserve an A for it, nor did others who got As in my batch (AAs or ABs, for that matter.) That is one of the reasons I have opted to take a thesis-track in my second Masters to figure out what doing ‘real’ research is like. More on this will come in the next posting. Finally, I must confess that it was a mixed ending for my 2-year tenure at the Institute – I made some friends, made some and then lost them, came to love the food and culture of the northeast, and learn – from books, from people and most of all, from experience!