Fly on the Wall

Fifteen years ago, to this day, I started my life as an academic.  I joined IIMB as a visiting faculty on that day. 

I have been known to be careful in making choices in my life, to the point of being accused of “analysis paralysis” by admirers and detractors alike.  My decision to join academe though was perhaps one of the most poorly thought out decisions.  I never asked anyone about what it meant to become or be an academic, let alone the wisdom of it.

As I reflect on this choice and the life that ensued, my mind is filled with a rush of memories.  After all, fifteen years is a fairly large slice of anyone's life.  Yet the net effect of it all can be easily summarized. 

Personally this life has been good to me so far by God’s Grace.  It has given me many moments of joy.  On those occasions that life threw lemons at me, academia allowed me to deal with them in a way no other vocation would have.

Professionally I am not so sure of what I got into.  I often wonder if I would choose academia again if I could roll my life back.  Looking at the way the bars have risen steadily in these years, I am fairly sure that academia would not entertain me either, given the currently prevalent entry standards.   

Definitely top schools in India like IIMB would not.

Speaking of those two dimensions, there are many things I would like to write more about – the happy additions to my family by God’s Grace, about how I stumbled into someone I now look upon as my own daughter, the many intense conversations I have had with colleagues on matters of life, God, religion, spiritulism and so on.  I am not sure I can do so without losing my audience quickly. 

I got a few new friends in spite of not being sociable, to the point of being reclusive or almost “anti-social” as I describe myself in half-jest, referring to my disinclination to be with people beyond the small circle that I am comfortable in.

I came into contact with many holy men and on some occasion women.  Each of them provided me some valuable guide post or the other to manage my life.  Some of them worked real miracles that will be difficult to convince the world about as Dawkinsian fundamentalism begins to establish itself as the benchmark for liberalism in intellectual life.

All this while, the world of academics in management moved on.  After a long period of quiet stability and predictability starting with the end of the second world war, through the oil shocks of the seventies and the go-go merger manias of the eighties to the late nineties of the last century, the world entered into a phase of all-round economic disruption.

Market economics and its political mother, capitalism raced into their worst ever crisis since those Russians embraced Marx’s teachings.  Oh! Those Russians, indeed.  Many theories of finance that dominated mainstream academic thought came into scrutiny as the crisis of 2008 unfolded.  New, influential thinkers emerged, chipping away at the foundations of neo-classical financial economics.

I switched to academia, fascinated by the wave of consolidation and the new ownership paradigm that the growing world of private equity investing seemed to herald.  As an academic I hoped to understand it better, perhaps even make sense of it all and explain it better to the world at large. Now

I guess you understand the true import of what I meant by saying that my decision was not adequately thought out.

Fifteen years after I set out on that endeavour, as I think back of that signature nippy, overcast Bangalore morning when I left my apartment to report to the office of Professor Apte, as a visiting faculty at IIMB, I realise that I have been nothing more than a fly on the wall of academia.

The fly is an important metaphor in Tamil discourse too.  People who expound on spiritualism often contrast it with the discerning honey bee which is single minded in its pursuit of the nectar in flowers.  The fly is the epitome of permissiveness and indiscretion as it makes no distinction between what it feeds on.  My own engagement with academia has been just as desultory perhaps.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…