Life in
academe has held many surprises for me.
There were many realisations that I had not been prepared for. A fuller articulation of those will have to
wait. Suffice it to say for now that
many of my beliefs about my own intellectual ability, both in relative as well
as absolute terms, were shattered.
There is
one thing that I have got clarity on in my head ever since I moved to academe –
as a career I was not going to measure my life in academe in terms of the kind
of metrics that I used in industry. I
was not going to care about how quickly I got promoted, the authority or social
stature that the job bestowed on me or the financial rewards relative to what
my colleagues made and so on.
Instead,
I said that I would measure my happiness, or at least satisfaction, in terms of
my intellectual achievements and the joy I derived out of my work. I would also value the flexibility that it
offered me in scheduling my working life and the relief it offered me from the
many social obligations that came with a life in the world of business.
Without
this resetting of expectations I concluded that academic life was not worth all
the sacrifices one made on many other dimensions, social as well as economic.
With that
as a backdrop I sought to ask myself if I ought to pay much attention to the
season of rewards that seemed to be upon all of us faculty. I said to myself that the answer should lie
in how my life measured against the expectations I articulated in the earlier
part of this essay.
Looking
back at the past fifteen years since I moved into IIM, barring a few
unfortunate incidents I would say that the school has been good to me, even
kind.
When I
look at the many people who joined as faculty before and after me I am not sure
I quite deserve be one among them, compared to their academic and intellectual
accomplishments. The school has offered me the opportunity to engage in as much
intellectual activity as I wished to.
When things turned difficult the school allowed me to make a strategic
retreat in an endeavour to reduce my vulnerability. And then when I was sure that I had qualified
for a permanent position it allowed me to come back.
Ironically,
at every turn there was enough for me to feel bitter over having been
wronged. At the same time there was a
positive outcome at the end that left me feeling happy about having had a
contract having been renewed or a special leave being sanctioned or having been
allowed to retain my campus accommodation or having been taken back as an
associate professor.
It was a
standard package of the Hindu idea of dvandva
or duality. Each of them was a great
example of what we learn about a glass being half full of water. Whether one saw it as being half full or half
empty was a matter of perspective.
Through my
life at IIMB I have derived a sense of satisfaction about my having been able
to indulge in intellectual pursuits of a kind that I may not have been able to
elsewhere. I have been able to ride
through personal challenges that may have been far more difficult in a business
organization.
I have
had a quality of personal life that has been unparalleled so far. The sylvan surroundings of the campus, the
attention that I got from the students, the sense of satisfaction I got when
students came back to me and spoke about the difference that I had made to
their professional lives as a teacher and above all my ability to be a better
son, spouse, parent, sibling, uncle, son-in-law or brother-in-law.
Isn’t
that a lot more than what a man in his forties could ask for from a second
career that he started in his late thirties?
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
No comments:
Post a Comment