My Cats

'nother old un with some changes included. Written in Jan this year.

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Over the years I've grown fond of cats - at least some cats.

I've had a strange relationship with this particular feline species. I disliked cats intensely as a child and while growing up but in a very unreal way. I didn't like the idea of cats and I don't think I ever saw a real cat until quite late in my life, and if I did see a cat I don't remember it. Yet I also remember when I was 5 or 6 or thereabouts I wrote a half-page 'autobiography' about a cat and drew a cat as well. Why a cat when the pretend story could have been about anything? I don't know. Maybe it's because drawing a cat is very easy.

At some point - when I was quite old - I started hissing at them. I didn't ever dream of hurting a cat but I hissed at them and they hissed back at me and we were quite settled about our mutual dislike. And their eyes - unblinking and sharp and piercing and quite inhuman, so I told myself. I believed in this too. I also believed that they were not particularly fond of humans or of company. That they were not just solitary creatures, which I may have been able to accept and even admire, but also slinking, mean creatures and pleasure loving and pleasure seeking creatures in very narrow and self-centred ways. I saw them as nasty humans. Nothing like dogs, and I loved dogs - I was sure that I loved dogs and disliked cats, and that cats and I would never get along together.

The hissing at them went on for a while, and in one of the places that I lived in Calcutta - there were both cats and rats that ran around in the compound. The rats were bigger than the cats. I don't know whether the cats killed and ate any of the rats but I had the strong suspicion that some of the rats may actually have eaten some of the cats. The hissing and my deep dislike for cats continued until a young girl who used to teach at a college listened and told me, "read this". I read it. It was Jeanine by Paul Gallico. And I stopped hissing at cats. It happened - just like that. It was looking at the life of a cat from the cat's perspective (sure, it was written by a human)...who knows exactly what clicked. (Years later I was taken aback when a friend, no longer a friend, looked at me like I were an idiot and dismissed my point by saying with a tsk-tsk, "Shilpi, this is not an intellectual issue for me. It's not something that a book can change. It's a deep-rooted dislike and I don't like cats and I never will." Whoever said that books just made an intellectual impression on the human being though?).

I stopped hissing. But I still was extremely wary of cats. In the last place I lived in Calcutta there were many well-fed and seemingly happy cats that prowled around the complex. Their eyes I found just as lifeless and expressionless and yet unnervingly penetrating somehow. And all my "kitty, kitty, kitty" calls (and I did try every now and again) went unheeded. Some of them would look at me and then walk off with a look of complete arrogance and another one would look at me with an intense gaze almost saying, 'Good God, do you have to embarrass me and my friends?! You're a freak. And do you think we don't know? We know you hissed at cats! Just because you've stopped now, you think I'm going to walk over to you, softly purr and rub my coat against your legs? You've got to be kidding." And with that it would give me a long and sudden hiss and saunter off - and yes, insouciantly.

And so that was it until the last four years. First came the big grey tabby. I'm bad at figuring out the age of cats. I honestly assumed that he was a kitten and wasn't too sure about his sex either (which is a difficult thing anyway because most of the stray cats are neutered or spayed, given that they had an owner at some point). He came to the porch one day - somewhat scarred and scruffy and with one eye that was scrunched up and with one eye giving me the 'look' of what I cannot really say. But that look hadn't been expressionless. A glowing jade eye and he had spoken to me with that eye. A gruff, "Ah, I know you". But he turned around and off he was. I'd been leaving out food for him on the porch which he came and ate and he would, I noticed be on the look-out for me. If ever I made the mistake of going out to the porch, he would bolt. But he made fast friends with our neighbour, Kim, and he would sit with quiet Kim whenever Kim would be sitting on the porch on early mornings with his notebook and coffee. I would stare at the grey tabby, from the window, who would be petted by Kim, would settle on Kim's lap or settle amiably next to Kim - and sometimes the tabby would make a fat-face at me but he'd not stay for a second if I tried going outside. There was his pink flat nose, there was his alarmingly large but very well-shaped head (I don't know how he balanced it on his rather thin and battle scarred body) and his noble chin and that scrunched up eye and that amazing green eye which seemed to see, know, and observe. Guha came back from India after a month or so, observed the cat, and quite against his principle of not bringing in stray animals brought the grey tabby in as soon as the tabby came along hopping on the frost covered grass in November.

Then a little over a year, there was a kitten. Not exactly a tiny kitten. But a 9 month fairly chubby kitten who had had a temporary home but was now homeless. His mother and brother had run off and he was there out on the porch on a cold January very early morning, and he looked inside. I remember his look with his head slightly tilted to one side. The grey tabby now sitting on the table in front of the window saw the kitten outside and miaowed and said, "my hedgehog. That's my hedgehog. Please bring my hedgehog inside. I need to take care of my hedgehog." And so Guha very promptly went outside and brought that kitten inside. The kitten is now considerably larger and tubbier and far more mischievous than the grey tabby whose eyes are both in fine form.

Cats do not have expressionless eyes. The grey tabby (Barty/"Baati"), whose name should have been ideally, "Kettle", has the brightest, greenest and most beautiful eyes that I've ever seen on a non-human animal. They are bewitching eyes too. They speak. Sometimes he can make them go all liquid and big and keep making them bigger and he will look up with the expression, "are you going to pet me now? Plea-a-se?" Sometimes it's harder to figure out what he wants me to do when he gives me the look. Sometimes he'll be gazing out of the window with such a faraway expression in his eyes that it seems to me that he's seeing his own planet. Sometimes he'll be looking at me from his place on the counter-top with the regal expression, "I'm king of my castle." and yet at other times he'll shut his eyes tight and open them wide and do it again, and he'll expect you to do the same. It's called a winky-blink - a sign of love and affection. I'm not kidding. Sometimes though he can look quite unreal. His liquid eyes go all black....he never looks mean but he does look quite dangerous. Yet at other moments when I talk to him in gobbledygook, he looks at me with almost ancient fondness "These humans - I have to humour them." while at other moments he'll look at me with, "No, not now. Please not now. I'm having a moment here. Please don't talk with me if don't have anything important to say."

The Kitten (Max/"Ghoti") who should have been ideally named "Bundle" has grown up but never really seems to have grown up. He has his kitten waddle and doesn't know that cats are supposed to protect their tummy at all times. He sometimes exposes his tummy (much like a dog) and expects you to rub him down, pet him, and cuddle him. He's naughty too. Loves to jump on the counter-top and lick a bit of this or that that's been left out on the counter. He'll try and drag a bag of cereal that's bigger than him (although he hasn't done that in a while) and once he tried to take a whole loaf of bread back to his hide-out. Yet the funny thing with him is that he keeps turning around waiting to be caught. And he never tries doing any of the naughty stuff when I'm not at home. It's almost as though he's hatching his plans so I'll go running after him, "Max. Max. Drop that. Now." Or else, "Max. Max. Ekhuni pituni debo," ...and he's thinking "well it gives her some amusement I think, running after me and chasing me around". Max loves running and hiding into the wardrobe. He has a little shelf inside where he sits and waits and sits doing god knows what and all my asking him to come out doesn't work at times, especially when I tell the rare guest that he'll be out in a jiffy (I'm terrified I'll shut the door and he'll be there for half-a-day...one day he'd been trapped in the refrigerator for some minutes but that's another story). The kitten does have the grace to look quite guilty when he's scolded for real. His head drops and he still looks up from his eyes while somewhat guiltily pushing at the floor with his front paws...so I don't think that it's true that cats have absolutely no conscience either. They do. I remember the only time that Barty ever tried to take something with him was a big piece of chicken. He'd never done anything of that sort and later he looked like a sad and old gentleman who'd been caught in a frightfully embarrassing position.

And cats are not unsocial. They look forward to being petted and they make space for you on the bed and sometimes they'll come and snuggle right next to you...and that is one of the nicest feelings in the world. The grey tabby grooms me. He grooms my unruly hair and bites my head just the way he keeps the kitten clean. Sometimes he gets so focused in his grooming regimen - his eyes are closed. Even if I try to shoo him away, he comes back. He wakes me up in the morning or just keeps looking at me even when I try to snuggle under the blankets so that I get out of bed and get to work after feeding him and the kitten. The grey tabby sometimes becomes crotchety if you don't play with him or sit with him or spend some time with him every day and the kitten will refuse to face you if you ignore him for too long. He'll sit with his big bum facing your face. Quite rude but he doesn't care. The grey tabby sometimes does get a scolding from me because he needs petting right when I'm trying to work or getting something done. He sometimes gets quite clingy too....but not if he's given a bit of attention for bits of time...the chicken/kitten is actually a more self-reliant cat although he goes through his odd phases...and he still likes being picked up and carried around the house while he stares intently completely motionless and transfixed at the ceiling and the walls, and at my face for some seconds as though it's terribly interesting before squirming to get down to the ground and go about running off again. Kettle hates being picked up by me.

P.S: Sometimes I think that all they have is a roof over their heads and some water and food.

(Early Jan 2011). Edits October 2011.

On Knowledge: the wider and the personal II

...There isn't anything wrong with having specialized knowledge as long as it doesn't make a human being wear narrower and narrower blinders...and as for the PhD, I don’t think that getting a PhD should be a joke. I think it should mean something. And I am sure I'm not the only deluded student who thinks that the process can be meaningful, that it can be a labour of love (no matter how slow and monochromatic one might be), and that no matter how much one tells oneself that it's 'just' a PhD, one cannot help hoping all the while that even the outcome should matter - that it should make a positive difference to at least one human being...

...To digress a bit, I am reminded of the joke in one of Asimov's books on humour. I think it goes something like this: There's a white haired and white bearded man - flowing white hair and flowing white beard....and he's standing and pointing to a spinning globe - a man and a woman and an apple tree and an apple and a snake...the earth, sky, stars, sun, the moon, oceans, majestic nature, humans, sentient life form....and so on...and out of the penetrating void comes a booming voice, "And that's all you did for your PhD!'

Being a sociologist I can’t help asking: if the PhD degree were seen to have some independent value then why is it that no university or college will hire a sociologist with ‘just’ a PhD degree any longer? Because that’s what it is. It is just a degree. Even colleges and universities (the very places handing out the degrees) know that the degree is merely a ‘necessary but not a sufficient’ cause to hire someone to even teach 17 year olds! There are other issues too but let me not venture too far.

..I probably sound like I'm complaining and I am. But to make it clear, I'm complaining against myself more than anything else however. I've taken a bloody long time to realise some things, and nobody else but I can be blamed for the same. And yet this too was like one of those many things that I felt I'd known for long enough. A very peculiar analogy came to my mind one day: ...to maintain one love, and then to go and be infatuated every now and again for some days or weeks in a row...Being in academia I knew I should have found one area of specialization and stuck to it, chosen some hoops to jump through with a smile, and I should have done so back in the first year of my Master's (while dabbling in this and that and the other), while not just writing quick papers but doggedly trying to get them published or at least going to five conferences in a year. And I had the chance to do precisely that. Dabbling in this, that and the other and having an exceptionally short-term memory for most pieces of facts and information and readings does not work one way or the other. Indeed most of my knowledge regarding academic sociological material that has been best preserved is the stuff that I read and learnt during my undergraduate days in Calcutta...close to two decades ago, and the rest of my knowledge that has held me in stead for this long did not come from academic books nor from stuffy academic articles nor formal classes.

I know I'm not gifted or clever or intelligent by any stretch of the imagination but if one decides to play within the system then one plays by some rules, and then some of the other rules may be bent a bit, bit by bit. If not - one stays within as long as one can and is able, and then looks for alternatives. And I'd thought I'd known this from the time of my undergraduate years in India (in fact when folks studying in college and the university used to complain about what a warped system it was, I used to raise my eyebrows: if you don't like it and are clever/intelligent/gifted enough - you can leave; but if you choose to stay...well, you must grit your teeth and get along with things; now look who's raising their eyebrows!). And even if it were in a completely different context, here I was complaining again, and recently that an Ivy League professor took so long to figure out that he couldn't talk with people from a different social class....well, at the very least, he has a job and has finished his PhD, and can now pontificate.

I remember some of the things that Rand talked about as though I read her yesterday (about Rand some other day). I know it’s not possible that every human being should or could become a myriad minded man or woman or be exceptional. But what can we say about a world where we lose the sight and senses to even be able to admire and value such men and women – no matter how rare and no matter how far out they lie on the tail-end of the curve in a statistical distribution. It’s one thing for us not to be able to reach the heights of the giants but what can we say about a world where we cannot even admire and value people who can and do? It takes eyes to see and ears to hear and the required senses to understand...

And this in the same world where some half-nude celebrity – whose only claim to fame is that she was born a rich girl – gets paid some million dollars to make an appearance in a night-club for crying out loud?! And this in the same world where we automatically sit up if a person has the formal ‘degrees’ and has received the formal accolades, no matter whether they know what they are talking about? And this in a world where individuals are requested to lend their expert knowledge into turning a nation into a knowledge economy (no less), and are requested to do so because they made some clever and smart moves in spreading the net of mobile phone communication?! And this in a world where a grubby software expert who has made some quick money is the one who manages to get his book published by a prestigious publishing company (most likely even that was ghost written) as he pontificates upon the social, cultural, political, economic and educational aspects of an entire nation and gets dubbed a ‘visionary’?! And this in a world where a certain kind of rhetoric gains enormous significance within academia ('critical...', 'communicative space', 'dominance', 'engaged activism', 'interdisciplinary interaction', 'democratic participation', 'protest and resistance', 'hegemony', 'marginalization', 'parochial', 'subversive', 'structures', 'silenced voices' ...and yes, I'll leave out the rest of the words in the academic dictionary), while we forget sometimes what 'knowledge' itself means or what 'thinking' means or that the world may not be explainable by our pretty and 'radical' little world-views or that our jargon-ridden parochial and increasingly fragmented theories that we so passionately hold dear are sometimes hopelessly ill-suited when it comes to understanding individuals of remarkable versatility and phenomena of non-quantifiable nature (which we then dismiss importantly as being socially non-significant or unimportant), or even how much pure grit (leave alone other traits) it takes to achieve some degree of emancipation while living in the real world as an individual and not within the safe perimeters of an institution or a specialized community where almost everybody solemnly agrees with everybody else and one's daily bread is guaranteed as long as one has got one's body through the door and doesn't rock the boat too soon. And this in the same world where millions of dollars are spent in researching different aspects of self-esteem...And this in the same world where we have closeted conferences and academic journals publishing articles regarding 'highly specialized' branches of knowledge which are being understood by fewer and fewer and fewer human beings and are accessible to only those who are tied to formal academic institutions, and which deal with such fragmented issues that they have incredibly little bearing ultimately, and for the most part - in the space of real living and living in the external world (and people think I am mad)....

The degree of freedom that people within colleges and universities get to experience I sometimes think and if they go along with some stuff sensibly is of an unreal level (given that one is within an institution), and there are some mavericks in the different fields still: those who know, connect, and remember moderately well….and yet, I can’t help thinking that the brightest stars aren't there within formal academia. They would not have been ignored if they had been here, and if such folks who see education as an inter-connected enterprise were around they would have received their due and done what they needed to, and would have been much appreciated, I think….but they aren’t here. It saddens me this, and every year it saddens me a little more and rankles that much more although I didn't think it was possible. It's such a waste - and with such fine resources...

...and I have been blind and exceptionally slow in seeing what I thought I had 'figured out' a long time ago: that if one chose to play within the boundaries of a given social system for a given period of time one had to jump through some hoops quietly and diligently and with minimum fuss, and with a smile - because it certainly isn't bad if people can do that and early enough, and I had the formal chances. And I wonder too how much time I wasted and what else I may have already lost in trying to find and understand matters (which I thought were of cosmic significance) while missing what was right there and in front of me and what was gifted to me...and these are the times when I wonder what came of all the introspection, reflection, reading, thinking, writing, wondering, and going inward, and the years of isolation...

So what exactly do I know ?....

... - if it matters, it matters no matter what...; fingers clenched over thumb, walking and doing and being while a being makes me wonder, smile, and be quiet while the sand runs fast and hard through the hourglass....and that's that for this and now.

On knowledge: the wider and the personal I

There are a couple of thoughts that I’ve been having and they’re somewhat linked. There was Pupu’s blog-essay on knowledge and then there were a series of recent essays on Suvro da’s blog regarding human beings and their ways, the rise and fall of civilizations, and education, and there have been other essays, a couple of well-written biographies, and some academic articles that I’ve been reading and re-reading, and there was something that was bothering me but I’ve not had the attention required to actually organize my thoughts well but I was wondering and thinking about knowledge again, and in a formal way this time, and within academia.

Over this last year I realise something which took me a very, very long time to realise… although I felt I’d known about it for a long while when I read Pupu's essay on being knowledgeable: It’s not just that people do not know but it’s that people aren’t interested in knowing any longer; that human beings simply aren't seriously interested in anything, and knowing anything that matters. But this thought kept niggling me for this is what is even within formal academia and at higher and higher levels or so it seems to me. Knowledge: the sort of knowledge that I used to and still think and consider to be valuable, and the general mark of being educated seems to be rapidly losing its value. Knowledge of history in its many-layered connections, knowledge about the social world, knowledge of the natural sciences and the natural world, geography and the political and economic conditions of nations, of great people and their works, of philosophy, of humour, psychology, the environment, knowledge regarding works of literature and poetry and religion.....and the ability to meaningfully connect all that one learns, and to share some (not just collecting and reciting disconnected heaps of information or to spout some random bits of reading).... even these seem to matter less and less... Not only is knowledge of this sort being valued less there seems to be an invisible resistance to this sort of knowing…people aren’t even interested in such connected knowing any longer. And I'm not lying but I knew a couple of students - they were class-mates in school - who read more when they were in school and high-school than some of the people who are doing their doctorates. It actually embarrasses me to say this but even I read a wider range of stuff than most people in my department do.

I'm thinking of generalized knowledge and people who gather PhDs. It’s probably bad manners to say this – but it’s a joke. How can it be that a person receives the title of ‘doctor of philosophy’ (no less!) and yet is expected to know almost nothing outside the wee-bitty area of specialization, which is what a PhD has become…? (I won’t get into the questions of how much ‘research’ work is of genuine worth, meaning, and displays some level of originality). Now I don’t think it would be marvelous if all folks had opinions about everything – it’s better sometimes to have no opinions on things because one simply doesn’t know, and to speak only about that which one does know. But mere opinions and informed knowledge and the ability to build bridges amongst bodies of knowledge are not the same things. And I do admire highly focused scientists or workers who know not much about everything but simply focus with passionate intensity on their own area of work. Marie Curie, from the bit that I have read about her, was not interested in expressing her views on anything much, but – before people start thinking of her - scientists, social scientists, and other PhD pass-outs are not budding Marie Curies. So I honestly can’t see how knowing less and less and writing less and less, and being less and less interested about interconnected matters can be a great leap forwards …well, it might be a great leap for sure but into what exactly?

....I often think how professors could use poems, stories, anecdotes from the lives of great men and women, speeches, and quotations within sociology, and meaningfully along with all the regular 'items' that they use...Yet remembering these are not even considered to be particularly valuable any longer within education as a whole, leave alone within a social science discipline. Meaningfully quoting from memory, connecting it to the matter in hand is not really viewed as being something worthy of admiration or respect or of significance. It’s one thing not to know or not to remember – but when we say that it’s no longer even important or worthwhile, and this within an ideal-type portrayal of education (because memorization seems to be bothersome) that’s when I think there is something 'off'. And yet what happens? We also forget that memorization, and at different levels, is possible. And so it’s equally true that some Indian graduate students with their ‘amazing’ memories are sometimes venerated because people, on an average, seem to have forgotten that memorization is indeed something human beings are capable of doing. It doesn’t even matter what some of these students rattle off (sometimes it can be parroting senselessly and without comprehension from a text-book) but others look on with admiring astonishment as though the person were as marvelous as some rare prophet walking on water…

My own prof. who recently retired was exclaiming with somewhat restrained but visible anger and annoyance that sociologists don’t even seem particularly interested in history, and that we had decided at some point that knowing or talking about history was not considered to be relevant within sociological studies….

Even if I take the matter of social psychology – a specialized area …or let me re-frame that: it was considered to be an area of specialization, and with reason once-upon-a-time. Social scientists believed that a discipline that combined the understanding of the internal processes of the human mind and the external structures and processes of society would be a discipline that could draw from the best of both worlds. And now one needs to simply read what the long gone original masters of the discipline – like William James (on the varieties of religious experiences) and Maslow (self-actualization) and Mead (‘I’ and the ‘me’ and the ‘generalized other’) and Cooley (‘looking-glass self’) wrote, and even Erving Goffman (who wouldn’t be considered to be a dinosaur exactly) to what the new social psychologists are writing about, and how. Some of them even imply that James was too ‘broad’ and non-empirical, so now we split up the discipline finer and finer and finer till we have ten million people working on the head of a pin (and ten hundred of them are cited in every paper). So we split up the study of ‘self and identity’ (a sub area, or maybe even a sub-sub area of specialization within social psychology) from the study of emotions from the study of awareness from the study of personality from the study of motivations from the study of deviance…well maybe I should stop right there. Deviance is of course another area of specialization and of course the quantitative experts aren’t on talking terms with the qualitative experts. And one mustn’t even talk about cross-disciplinary flowering. If one starts getting into talking about the ‘self’ in philosophy – the social psychologists and the philosophers are not on communicating terms….in fact even the psychologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’ are not interacting much with sociologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’….

Knowing, remembering, connecting, and sharing are gradually being seen as impossible tasks for the meagre human mind, and so since people who can remember and connect and who do have large bodies of knowledge in their heads are such absolute and utter rarities – we’ve come to the smart conclusion that we do not need to remember ‘lots of stuff’ any longer. That recent study conducted – with some flaws – and the comment by the researcher, that remembering is not as important as building connections, and that 'knowledge workers' these days are somehow more ‘refined’ because they ‘connect’ amongst knowledge bodies (really? - all that connecting falls flat when one doesn't remember history but is teaching a course which requires and demands remembering, at the very least, world history far more than sociological theories of different brands...), that there is always ‘google’ to check up what we don’t know and can’t remember (that there is: I sometimes wonder how many instructors would be out of their temporary jobs without being able to access google), and that we are simply being more ‘sensible’ somehow by knowing ‘where’ to look to find what we can’t remember – that single study is an illustration enough of something more pervasive, and something that has been steadily accumulating over decades. And one can observe and look around, and people doing their PhDs too can look and see what is expected, and indeed admired within their own areas and from their own discipline and from their own disciplinary specialization...