Being a research scholar basically is the next best thing to being nothing. At all. It is like being something in the eyes of the outside world, but inside your heart, you bear the guilt of being nothing and doing nothing. There are no definitive progress reports, other than the phony, jargonized parodies of it that you hand over to your supervisor after a week of contemplating and he doesn't show the slightest interest in reading it. "he must have realized by now that my research has no purpose, I am doing it just for the sake of doing." The terror of being rendered useless, after all this time of working with motivation that diminishes with each passing day, is comparable only to the feeling one gets when, in an Indian primary school, out of the blue teacher decides to check your notebooks, and as she moves towards your seat, you, with incomplete homework, realize that an unwarranted apocalypse right now will be better than this impending moment of shame.
And then there are kitty parties. Academic kitty parties. Or the gatherings of professors, senior research fellows, research fellows, post docs, and some clueless PhD scholars. In other words, seminars. If there was Hell, and if there was justice in hell,then Hitler would be appointed the chairperson for an unending series of seminars on Contemporary Theory. Till eternity. He would sit through the long and tedious theories of Contemporary theorists who theorized their theories while negating other theorizing theorists (who landed in hell for obvious reasons), and the seminar drags on and on, and just when it is his turn to finally address his distinguished audience, something resets Hell's clock, and there he is again, sitting on that chair as the chair person, all his sins coming back to him as he suffers in silence.
An academic seminar is much comparable to Indian kitty parties. Of course, they are comparable to any kitty party in the world., but I would like to infuse my narrative with exoticism if you please.
More on this later.
And then there are kitty parties. Academic kitty parties. Or the gatherings of professors, senior research fellows, research fellows, post docs, and some clueless PhD scholars. In other words, seminars. If there was Hell, and if there was justice in hell,then Hitler would be appointed the chairperson for an unending series of seminars on Contemporary Theory. Till eternity. He would sit through the long and tedious theories of Contemporary theorists who theorized their theories while negating other theorizing theorists (who landed in hell for obvious reasons), and the seminar drags on and on, and just when it is his turn to finally address his distinguished audience, something resets Hell's clock, and there he is again, sitting on that chair as the chair person, all his sins coming back to him as he suffers in silence.
An academic seminar is much comparable to Indian kitty parties. Of course, they are comparable to any kitty party in the world., but I would like to infuse my narrative with exoticism if you please.
No comments:
Post a Comment