It’s been well said, by one grand writer that one needs 'time and patience' and more than medicines to cure a sick person. Two utterly unexpected phone calls out-of-the-blue, towards the end of the week, last week, from my old friend miraculously cured me
of the lingering after-effects of the nasty flu and hopelessness in a way
medicines or even extended sleep or even attention to work could not do.
It’s been two years, two months and two days since my
homecoming. After being in Wonderland and with my best friend for a whole day and a whole night, within a space of 24
hours, I was in the city where I’d spent 9 years of my youth. I am reminded of
how I walked from Esplanade to Nandan and found a place to sit next to the unruffled
pond of water. It started drizzling soon after and I was sitting in the shade
of a tree and smoking. I think people who have stayed away from their country
give out some odd vibe for there were random people, I remember, who asked me
whether I was a tourist and where I was from. In my head I was thinking of the
line ‘This world is not my home…’ and yet I didn’t want to leave the world
right then for I knew I had promises to keep and so instead of being a smart-alec
I’d said that I was not a tourist. I sat at Nandan and wondered and rather
pensively about what was to be. I’ll take the risk of saying that I’m in a
better place than I had been while sitting there in front of the pond and
smoking.
I had left my country 11 years ago. When I’d left I
hadn’t foreseen any reason that I would return for good. In fact I had
absolutely no intentions of returning for good. And yet I knew of one happening
that might have made me never leave. That did not happen. And so I did leave
the country and on one very early morning. Like thousands and thousands of
youths do worldwide as they travel to the US as eager and bright-eyed Master’s
or Ph.D. students. I must say that this was one of the things that I had obsessed over when young and I can still remember the sense of relief with
which I boarded that flight westwards. More than a lot of my concentration was
directed towards one of the things I would do once I got to Purdue and yet that
did not directly have anything to do with Graduate School or being in the US –
or so I had assumed. It did and would have much to do with knowing, knowledge, and being in Graduate School too and beyond Graduate School but I didn't know about that back then. Back then, I'd seen it it as being inextricably linked with a couple of my childhood years, my long and awkward adolescent years and
of curious and uncanny happenings which unfurled during my early youth.
By the time I was in middle-school I’d gotten to know
that people could go and study in the US for higher studies and could get full
funding to study and a decent amount which covered living expenses and even savings. I’d
actually secretly wanted to go to England for higher studies but back then and
through my college years, I was told that people did not get funding from
universities to study in England. So I’d decided that I would go to the US –
and to study and to really know about
all that perplexed me. If I’d told anybody in middle-school that I was going to
engage in higher studies – I would have been laughed at. By the time I was in
Class X, I’d managed to flunk every subject with the exception of History,
Geography and Physics and maybe Biology but I can't be too sure of that last one. Maybe nobody flunked those subjects in school. Yet in
spite of my bad performance in school, knowledge and knowing fascinated me. I
hungered to know and know more of what really matters and to 'follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bounds of human thought...'. I was particularly fascinated by human beings, human
minds and human behaviour and about what made human beings different from one
another and sometimes not-so-different. I knew that sex, age, race, ethnicity,
class, religion, national origin and none of those social markers separated the
extraordinary human beings from the ordinary, trivial and evil ones. Yet quite what
it was – I did not know. I was quite sure it was something peculiarly
individual. Then there was – from the time I was in college – the haunting and
persistent desire in wanting to unravel the ‘theory of everything’. One elegant theory
which could explain the purpose and the reason of all life and bestow meaning upon this otherwise rather bizarre concatenation of features which marked life and existence on this planet. I was
sure I could discover it and live like some messiah come to save the planet.
Maybe I should be embarrassed to own up to this – but I’m not. I didn’t
actually discover the theory of everything but I did discover my own meaning and
purpose in life, which is not anything remotely trivial or ordinary. And I know I am walking on the
path to fulfill that meaning well and truly…
But to go back to the curiosity otherwise I’ll be
traveling on another path. I was sure that even reading alone
would not help me in discovering or cracking the puzzle of life. Here, I was
merely keeping in mind my own limitations – the fact that I couldn’t read a huge
lot and digest all of it. But even so – I had heard and read and even seen
documentaries on the fabulous libraries in the US and I’d heard how people
could study what they wanted to in the universities and the whole deal sounded
much like a good dream and I was determined that I would go to the US to know
and learn and live like a human being who had chosen to be a knowledge hunter.
I was interested in making money but I had had the feeling that if I could
exploit my own skills which seemed to be in the area of understanding and
explaining social and individual behaviour and engage in work that was
interesting to me – I would neither be poor nor make a poor living. As for love and
human relationships – since I had found out by my early twenties that I was unbelievably
awkward in that racy, fine and sublime area and made more than most people
uncomfortable by my presence after a bit of time, I had reluctantly decided
that I’d have to leave that aside. I preferred keeping a stiff upper lip about matters of the spirit and God and letting them be, by then: my individual attempts, in early youth to pierce the veil and to understand the mind of God had driven me barmy. Fate of course most likely said a loud
‘ha!’ at my neat little decisions that I’d made upon the beginning of my
travels towards higher knowledge like a scholar who had it ‘all figured out’ or
so she thought.
My discipline was Sociology. I studied Sociology for
my Bachelor’s by a process of elimination. I didn’t have Sociology for my
high-school years. But just before applying to colleges in Calcutta in 1994, I was given some money to buy a
few basic books. I got a feel for the discipline. What had fascinated me back
then was that the discipline contained almost all the social sciences within
its folds. As a social science discipline it had branches which related to psychology,
politics, economics, anthropology, religion, literature and even biology. It
was also, I could see, overwhelmingly concerned about the external social
forces (family, schools, teachers, religion, media, class, gender and so on)
that act upon an individual and how those structures ‘determine’ and shape the
individual. And the topic of social determinism and human freedom kept me
engaged in college. There was something in me however that strongly resisted
the idea of social determinism. In this sense, I never quite became the
conventional good sociologist in the twenty years that I was in formal academia
but I certainly stuck to my guns. I argued vehemently that the individual was
of importance and the exceptional individual was a case to be studied in and of
himself and could not be seen as just another statistic. While most of my
intelligent friends in college became ardent Marxists of various hues I became just
as much of a militant too – about individualism – although I liked to think
that I was not a militant. The matters of values, mental health, choice-making,
creativity and intelligence, among other matters, interested me deeply. Now it
feels a little strange to think that I managed to combine various aspects and
do my Master’s and then my Ph.D. on topics which kept nudging me to think and
held me completely in their thrall as a willing accomplice for a long, long
time before I’d ever really known that I would engage in higher studies some
10,000 miles west.
Life in the US was more of a superb and somewhat
disjointed dream for the first 9 months. I flew through the coursework without
batting an eyelid and even managed to ace statistics – my bête noir. However, I
had not known for a few months that we actually got grades in Graduate School.
It was only when my old friend reminded me of ‘straight As’ that I went on to make
enquiries and got worried that I hadn’t been paying attention to how much I was
scoring on different exams and papers. I didn’t need to worry though on those
grounds. I aced everything without a second thought those first two semesters. I
read much. I typed a lot. I wrote not a bit in my diary. I was quite
gregarious. I had made more than a few ‘friends’ and of different sorts from
different parts of the world from our very mixed and rather mad dormitory
housing. There was Irini, Clara, Eva, Miguel, Yanni, Domingo and Bean and others. Smoking brought together a bunch of people from the dorms – and there
were plenty of conversations, debates, discussions, arguments over cigarettes
and coffee and sometimes even some alcohol on the stairs of the dorm under the
night sky if we didn’t meet at the coffee shop. The campus was very pretty – so
I felt all along although many fellow students snorted at me. Friends said that
Indiana University, Bloomington was pretty. Purdue was not pretty. I still went
with my views on these matters. The lawns were a delight. The gym was huge and
there was an Olympic-size swimming pool. What took my breath away was the absolute
cleanliness and order and basic decency in public surroundings and the
wonderful libraries. This is what makes the country, in spite of the dark and
dirty and growing underbelly, still great – I think. For some reason, more than
a few Indians didn’t care for the cleanliness. I had a vein in my head
throbbing with anger when a couple of Indians said that the US obsession for
cleanliness in public surroundings felt too sterile and antiseptic. More than a
couple of Indians said the same thing and I had duly yelled my head off at them
and most sarcastically. Apparently they all loved some smelly place in New
York. It had felt like ‘home’. I never got a ticket for speedy driving but one
day quite some years after the first 9 months, I had been staring at my 10th
floor corner dorm window with longing and with surreal memories knocking into
me while crossing the road and a very smart cop crossed a road himself,
approached me and scolded me for not walking carefully on the road. Right till the
end I could never go to the school library without feeling that I was entering
a cathedral. I remember some moments of holding books there and with different thoughts
chasin my mind and of feeling like I was holding in my arms an incommensurable human life in that sacred
silence. I used to go for long walks around town and especially to the river
and to a hill. But it wasn’t all this and actually it was none of this that
made those first 9 months a dream. That is another story that I've written about here and there and elsewhere…
The second year was a ghastly nightmare. I hope I don’t have to
re-visit that time and space ever again although I’ve had the terrible fright more than
once. I won’t talk about the why here but that second year was worse than horrible
and there was not a thing that I could do about it even though God knows I
tried. A couple of my department mates noticed the change in me and tried
keeping me company for an evening or so during the week. They lived in
apartments and I had had to shift rooms and was staying in a dark and gloomy dorm
room that year. But somehow they came over to that dorm room and sometimes
armed with alcohol and songs and we spent very long evenings in that room. I
used to smoke in the dorm room. I did that in the first year too. I have the
suspicion that the Resident Advisor knew about my misdemeanor but she and I
used to get along well and so she overlooked my impudent breaking of the rule.
I didn’t smoke at the beginning but then one day I set fire to a frozen waffle
when I’d put it in the microwave for too long and by the time I got it out and
doused it there was dense smoke in the room but the fire alarm didn’t go off. So
I knew that a mere cigarette or two or more with the window open and with
my head very near to it while sitting in an armchair couldn’t set off the
fire-alarm. I got along very well with the cleaning maids who used to come
around and one of them had very kindly lent me a thick blanket of her own
accord and told me to put it up against the bottom of the door. She told me
that it would prevent the smoke from escaping. I wasn’t so lucky in the second
dorm. Every single thing was off that year. And when an anonymous complaint about
‘someone smoking’ went through I knocked on the door of the uptight Resident Advisor
and told her that it was I who smoked and made sure that I moved out of the
dorm as soon as my contract was over. The two friends who used to come over – Beth
and Lorrell – sometimes pestered me to go out with them and on a few evenings I
did. One evening, Lorrell after she got to know that I didn’t know how to drive
insisted that she would teach me. We had gone bar hopping and afterwards we
went to a deserted carpark and I drove for 15 minutes round and round and round
the carpark while Beth had lain flat on the backseat worrying that a cop-car
would spy us and that a cop would nab us. One late night Lorrell wanted to get
a bottle of vodka and so the three of us went over to a pharmacy store (the
pharmacy stores sell liquor too). The security guard took one look at us and
felt that we were trouble. He insisted on following me around the store and I kept
acting like I was going to do something amiss. Beth went red in the face and
kept telling me to stop acting suspiciously. She was sure the guard was going to
take out his gun and just blow my brains out or something. I told her not to be
silly. I was just helping out the security guard. The poor man was following me
around and if I didn’t act a little suspiciously – he would have felt miserable. It
wasn’t really his fault though. The three of us – Black, White and Brown
respectively – had walked in late at night in hoodies, jeans, sneakers and bloodshot
eyes. We didn’t look very respectable as a group and didn’t look like
law-abiding people.
The nice thing about renting a place there was that
the apartments came with all the basic stuff and the Purdue University tag
helped. Apartments had water, electricity and cooking gas connections in place.
Most had central air-conditioning and every apartment had heating. Some apartments
even had basic and nice clean furniture. And almost every place had a fridge, microwave,
washing machine and dryer. So one’s own expenses were limited. I moved around
apartments a fair bit in the first four years but stayed in the same place for
the next six. Gosh yes – it was a decade. I had been absolutely sure that I
would travel in the US. I had very badly wanted to go to Yosemite and The
Redwood parks and the Grand Canyon before I had left for the US but I didn’t
travel. It was too painful to visit terribly beautiful places without one
friend. It didn’t make sense to me somehow. People will call me stupid and mad
and obsessed and I won’t argue any more – but I can only accept that I had become
a different person after the first year of Graduate School. I simply felt like
a disembodied being for years even in little Lafayette and West Lafayette and
while wandering around that pretty town and so I stayed put in Lafayette and
traveled a whole lot in the mind. I had sometimes discombobulated and very
interesting mind-trips even if I say so myself. Once I learnt driving I did
make lots of driving trips to the airport to drop off friends or pick up
friends. I think I may be the only Indian who stayed in the country for a
decade and never once visited NYC. I did however change tyres on a car twice,
went to court to file a case against a man who had threatened to slit my throat,
went with a calm friend Beth to a piano concert in Chicago and I drove a u-haul
truck through the Appalachians when a sane friend, Guha, moved to Maryland.
For some years in the middle I had utterly lost my compass
and anchor. I swung this way and that and I helplessly watched sand run out of the hourglass. My old friend had once told me that all people
should count but nobody should be allowed to matter and I had tried to put that
in practice. I inadvertently put into practice the line from Kipling’s ‘If’ – ‘all
men should count but none too much’. I paid a horrible price for it after those
magical first 9 months. I should have known better but I had had the cocky
belief that I didn’t need anyone in my life to live well but I had been
mistaken about that. The pain that came with the realization that I had made
the most horrible blunder in my life made me realize too of who and what really
matter. I never did forget after that even if I became a trifle more weird. It
also made me by-and-by eliminate all that was unnecessary from my life. I
finished my Master’s a couple of years behind schedule but it was a nice little
eccentric study once it was done. One of my professors kept hounding me in the
corridors to publish my paper and others and I kept running away. For all
aspiring academics I will say this: publish papers when you are graduate
students if you are interested in staying and thriving in academe.
I started teaching courses from the third year and
that was enormous fun. I remember though that on the first day of classes in a
huge gallery, my legs were shaking like jelly as I faced some 90 students or
more but my voice was very composed. I remember my favourite student from that
first class. The Sociology 100 Introductory course was my favourite teaching
class although students liked me in the Sociology Theory class. One semester,
not a few of the students liked me even better than the professor. I rather
liked the professor though. He and I got along fine even though he came across
as being socially awkward to many people. I’d been teaching for three years
when there was an urgent notice that came to the Department Chair which stated
that I had not taken the mandatory English Test that was required of all
foreign students who were teaching. The Department Chair and our Graduate
Secretary were more annoyed with the notice than I was. Both of them grumbled
saying that I had superlative language skills and yet there were those silly bureaucratic
procedures that would have to be fulfilled. I took the test of course and it was
fun actually. When the scores came in our Graduate Secretary had grunted and
said that it wasn’t a surprise that I had scored full points for the exam. She
had added that I could go and teach them a few English skills if need be.
I took quite a few extra courses through my Master’s
and Ph.D. and when I was finally entering my Ph.D., a few years late, the
paperwork I noticed stated that not all the courses I had taken would count
towards my PhD. That was a bother and so I took some more courses that I simply
wanted to take and not because they were related to my Ph.D. One course was on ‘Nation
and Nationalism’ but about that some other time maybe. I worked on a completely
different topic for my Ph.D. for quite some years in the middle. But then the
sun shone in utterly out-of-the-blue on one fine day in 2007. After a very
awkward year and three more years of wandering around the other topic on
environmental values and scientists, I finally zoned in on my choicest Ph.D. topic. I had a very clear sleep dream which made me change my topic. Many
people in the department thought that I had finally lost it and that I was mad.
But the old professors trusted me. One old prof with whom I’d never taken a
class told me one day that it didn’t matter if I took awhile; what mattered was
the quality of my Ph.D. My Ph.D. advisor and committee members were fine with
the topic change. The last one and a half years were marvelous in a different
way from the first nine months. A few times I would feel melancholic during the
last lap of my Graduate Studies that I’d lost so much of time. I couldn’t help
thinking that had I done the maverick study within the first few years I’d be
one of those ‘cool’ academic stars and could have made good in a way that could
have made a genuine difference. Still. I made good in one way, I think and when I read this I feel more than vindicated. It’s one thing not to do a Ph.D. but I can’t
possibly imagine having done my Ph.D. on anybody or anything other than whom
and what I ultimately did it on. I remember while there were professors who
literally had shining eyes when I graduated (and not just my advisor), our then
graduate secretary sent me a lovely e-mail saying that she had gone for my
graduation ceremony and she was very pleased to see that I didn’t race across
the stage in my usual style. She was very worried that I would run across the
stage and she said that I had been very ‘graceful’. Me, graceful – can you imagine.
I also know that not a few professors started wishing that some student of theirs
would do a Ph.D. on them! Once I finished my Ph.D. I felt with that strange feeling
inside which isn’t always right that I needed to and desperately wanted to come
back home. I knew, like E.T. exactly what home meant for me: home is where the
heart and soul is. I was terribly homesick. It wasn’t just a childish
sentiment. I knew too and in a very hard-reasoned way that I simply didn’t want
to stick around in formal academe in the U.S. any longer. I was done with the
whole thing. I can very well empathize with Max Weber’s saying that he studied
Sociology to see how much of the world he could take. For me it was the idea of
the anti-climax. Nothing I could do or achieve within formal academe would ever
compare to what I did for my Ph.D. But I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to come back right
away and so I stuck on and with various odd pieces of work and a very odd
existence – academic and otherwise. Call it fate or God!
And then, just as I was giving up all hope I was allowed, indeed told to come back home, back in 2013. I was beyond relieved and delighted. A different story began then. For a few weeks recently, I was wondering whether I’ll be able to truly make good. It haunts me, this. I can't see the reason though for being around unless I can so I can't imagine that I won't be able to make good. I want to and need to make good for this
life and for whatever that follows. That's all for now.
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