...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.
No comments:
Post a Comment