As dusk dissolves into the night, I count the number of days left for me to cast off a vocation that has definitely been among the most dreadful accidents in any one’s career: My wandering into academe
My mind dithers a lot on how I should spend these remaining days.
I wake up every morning, determined to make up in the months that remain for all those articles, scholarly and otherwise, that I did not write, but should have, to stake a claim at legitimacy among all my distinguished colleagues.
And then as the sun moves up, ever so hesitantly, reluctantly these wintry days, realism takes hold. I remind myself that in the twenty odd years I have been here I have not done anything to dispossess myself of the image of a renegade practitioner. To be counted among those who are qualified to say a thing or two in my chosen discipline.
So may be I should really spend my time, however irresponsibly, doing things that give me joy rather than seek an elusive legitimacy. Where I do not feel accountable in terms of having anything to show for how I spent my time, even as I bask under the glory and glamour of a put on intellectualism that I rent from this institution.
It is in one such moment of irresponsible reading that I read a review of Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything. It is a telling comment on my ignorance and poor erudition that I had not heard about Graeber or his book until then.
One thing led to another as I indulged in even more irresponsible hyperlinked hopping around, like an aimless sparrow. I read about Graeber himself. I read that he was an anarchist who had an uncanny knack for not keeping his jobs. I recalled that Suresh has his book on 5000 years of debt.
I found a soft copy of his book, Fragments from an Anarchist Anthropology. It is likely that who ever put it up is a Luddite in the world of intellectual property.I was reminded of the few academicians / intellectuals I had read of. Kolmogorov. Ramanujan, the mathematician (not the litterateur). And there are the usual suspects that every student of science is required to have read to be able to claim that his education in sciences is rounded and complete – Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Kekule, Oppenheimer. Most of all Grisha Perelman.
As yet another year draws to a close, as families thumb through their android albums of times and members that were there in the past, or how those that are still there looked in their prime as they welcomed a world of expectations, in sharp contrast to their current tired looks, worn down by care, I think of how twenty years ago I walked into academe, head well inside the clouds.
I think of all of those people I would have liked to be, but could never be. I think of Mariana Mazzucato’s attempts to bring back the role of the state into the discourse on science and technology with her New School brand of economics. But then I realise I have a problem. She is funded by the same forces that she disapproves of. I think of Harari. Then I get a feeling he too has been bitten by the bug of academic entrepreneurship.
I think of what I read about Graeber. I think about Perelman turning down the Clay Institute award. People who live or lived life on their terms. In an undiluted pursuit of what they considered as truly important. And then I say may be there is still a corner in academe where people are not drawn to the finery of success and fame. Where people are not judged by the suits they wear to a meeting or a classroom.
And I hope that there is still hope as my friend Prakhya warns me often: If you wanted something badly in this birth, but could not get it, there is always another one that one would have - to have one’s desires to be fulfilled before one can be finally liberated from all desire.
On that note of optimism I start to draw the curtains on yet another year, another forgettable year… 😊
Nanni... Namaskaaram...
