It was twenty years ago to this day that I drove into IIMB to start a new phase in my life. It was not just the start of a new career.
It was Kannada Rajyotsava day. As my black ambassador, as old as myself back then, rolled through the streets of the campus, directionlessly because I did not know the way, it may have been a curious sight to the few residents who may have been looking at the streets.
Cars were relatively few on the campus in those days. Television had invaded the Indian home deeply enough by then, which meant that there were not too many of them looking out at the street.
Twenty years is a long time in any one’s life. It has been a third of my life in this world and close to half of all the years that I have worked. Yet it has flown by so quickly that it does not feel that long. I have to think of the many things that have happened in my life and in that of people close to me to get a sense of how long it has been.
This has been the longest I have worked in a single institution or organisation all my life. It has also been the longest spell with few transitions in terms of level or positions. Academe in any case does not have too many levels. It is relatively flat in terms of hierarchy. What it lacks in terms of hierarchy it makes up for in terms of a finely stacked intellectual pecking order.
Academic journals and citations allow you to draw up that pecking order. It starts with the name of the journal. And there is the question of whether you solo or co-authored. And if that was not sufficient there is the question of whether you are first named among the list of co-authors, whether you are the corresponding author or not. There is a similar elaborate set of measures that help calibrate citations. Not all citations are equally valuable.
So on that pleasant evening, as dusk was falling on the campus, quiet but for the shouts of children savouring the last minutes of play for the evening, we finally found that place that was tucked away on a short street, where a few residences sat together in a small pocket of sorts.
My wife, my Dad and I set foot in that place, right foot first in true South Indian tradition, with the Lord’s name on our lips, into what would be our home for the next twelve years. The place where we would go through many moments of joy, anxiety, expectations, disappointment, frustration, fulfilment, envy, smugness and every other shade of emotion that makes up this kaleidoscope that human life is.
Looking back, I feel I had strayed into academia, quite like an innocent child wanders into an interesting looking place, not knowing what to expect or how to deal with it. I had somehow developed a fancy for an academic life. And I was lucky enough to find an open door to walk in through. Or, was I?
I had nursed the desire over many years. Throughout that process I had no inkling of what it meant to be an academician. I had no idea of what academics did. How they spent their average working day. What made them tick, to borrow a metaphor from the organisational behaviour. How did they measure success?
I would be on a never ending quest to figure out answers to these questions through the years that were to follow at IIMB. Twenty years on I continue to seek those answers. Some answers came in the form of happy discoveries. Some as harsh realisations, by which time it was too late to set the clock back.
That is the strange thing about life. Happy moments are like a fix. You do not ask yourself how you landed there. You just savour the moment, expecting that it will be there forever. The sad and the harsh ones are like the day after the hallucination has worn off. Makes you want to run away. To roll the clock back to those halcyon moments that just passed by. To ask yourself how did you let yourself into this dull post-high ache.
Twenty years on, as I write this post now, I am in that post-high moment of asking myself how I landed myself where I am. In perhaps a not so appropriate analogy I feel like the character that Gene Wilder plays in the movie Woman In Red. (You can read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Academia to me was the like the Woman in Red. I knew nothing about it. But I somehow was smitten enough to think it held the keys to my kingdom of fulfillment. Before I realised it I had jumped through several impossible hoops, transformed almost entirely the man I had been and travelled a long way towards my object of desire.
And here I was perched perilously on a window sill, embarrassingly clothed, running the risk of falling off to a hopeless, messy end several dozen feet below. As I stood there, not having attained the object of my desire, like Gene Wilder, I could not help wondering: Just a few days ago I was a happily married man with a wife and children. How did I land here now?
The Gene Wilder analogy is humorous exaggeration. An one sided account of my life as someone forever aspiring to be an academician and never attaining that goal. It has not been all as hopeless as the story of Gene Wilder in that movie though.
There have been the happy, bright interludes. They have all been on the personal side though, by God’s grace. What one lost in the swings one sort of made up on the roundabouts, to borrow a favourite metaphor of Wodehouse.
There is much more to say about these years at IIMB. Lots more. But I have to stop now. With a class to teach in a few hours from now I have miles to go before I sleep, to steal a line from Robert Frost.
Nanni…Namaskaaram…
Dr. G. Sabarinathan is Associate Professor, IIMB.