On Coming to Terms...Part 1...The Preamble

I have been meaning to write this post for a while now.  The demands of work have not allowed me the luxury of writing it.  Now that I am unable to do much else on this train, thanks to a obstreperous fellow passenger who is bawling into his smartphone interminably I cannot seem to do much else besides typing this post.

It is that time of the year when talk of promotions and other career milestones enter the corridors of organisations and the consciousness of people who work there.  Some are at the receiving and some at the awarding. 

When I joined academe I was hoping that I was leaving these silly seasons behind me.  I thought I was entering a world of perennial spring, of intellectual engagements, devoid of the messy business of performance measurement, punishments and rewards.

The fourteen odd years that I have now been an academic institution – note that I am careful not to describe that as fourteen years since I became an academic – I realized that I thought wrong.  Academia too has its share of all these complexities, although the monstrosity of these exercises is not as gargantuan as the slugfest in the world of business.

So when the Office of the Dean recently asked me for my updated CV I realized that there was something going on.  True to form, offices of authorities never reveal why they do what they do - even if it involves the career or other aspects of well-being of the individual in question.

For my part I chose to turn in the CV without asking what it was being asked for.  First I felt awkward to ask, for fear of being told that I could not be told, as indeed I had been rebuffed once before by the head of the department.  More importantly, I felt I had reached an age and stage in life where it did not behoove me to be so anxious about promotions or other career outcomes. 

I consoled myself that unlike in a corporate organization, in an academic institution merely being asked to turn in the CV might not harbinger proceedings to let go of me.  They would have to establish criminal or other improper conduct to sack me, I pacified myself.

But then the incident set me thinking about such issues as career and so on.  And that is the long prologue to these posts.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...