England Exits

I had planned to see the England-Croatia World Cup semifinal match last evening, but when it went it to extra time I decided that I had had enough of football and went for a walk by the seaside. On my walk there, the roads were quite deserted and I felt a faint sense of solidarity with the few souls out and about who didn't care about England's football fortunes. 

The tide was up, so the jetty I usually hang out on was submerged. I had to settle for a bench looking out on the sea. I learned that England had lost when two teenage girls loitering on the  beach started cursing loudly (the English are extremely polite until they have a drink, after which they become extremely loud). 

I have no loyalty towards England and I don't see it as my adopted home. I have very few friends in England and given that English football fans are legendary for their terrible behaviour, I was not-so-secretly hoping that they would lose. Racism in England rests on nostalgia for empire and a fondness for the monarchy, but both these are far removed from everyday life. Football seems to confer a legitimacy on the expression of racist and nationalist sentiments. Sport often unleashes passionate sentiments and impassioned people feel emboldened to express latent sentiments that remain tucked away in periods of sobriety. Of course, football doesn't cause racism but it gives people what they see as a legitimate outlet for their racist sentiments. The anonymity of the mob provides excellent cover and encouragement for people's baser tendencies. In the heat of the moment, people forget that modern technology renders anonymity near-impossible. Passion for football is a socially sanctioned form of passion which often goes out of hand.  

Personal Columns

I don't envy people who have to write regular columns for newspapers and suchlike, especially personal columns (as opposed to columns on specific topics such as financial markets or sports). Mining your everyday life for your column is a risky exercise as the people you write about might not appreciate being written about or what your write about them. The quality of your columns is likely to fluctuate wildly even if you have a talent for spinning mundane events into interesting stories. And, it is difficult to guard against sliding into self-indulgence and unabashed navel-gazing. The English media is full of such faffing and the fact that most columnists tend to be posh white men makes the columns even more tiresome. Even professional comedians are not that great at squeezing comedy or profundity out of everyday life. Only write in a public medium if you have something to say, is what I believe. If you really love navel-gazing, why not maintain a personal blog that almost no one reads?

Back To England

The first and major leg of my mini-summer break is over. I wasn’t able to get away from my PhD as much as I wanted, and spent the first few days of my holiday moping over my PhD progression viva. I suppose a PhD is so all-consuming that there is no way to completely disconnect from it, especially if you don’t have a partner and family or other responsibilities. But, I saw my sister and her family and got my share of hugs to sustain me until the end of the year.

Saying goodbye to my sister is never easy but there are two occasions I remember in particular when it was particularly difficult. One was the day she got married and was leaving with her bridegroom after the ceremony. We both tore up while hugging, both (or me at least) struggling to grasp the momentousness of the occasion. The second time was when I visited her in Mexico in February 2013. She had come to drop me off at the airport at the end of my visit. Mexico is the other end of the earth from India and my U.S.-Mexico had filled me with a strange restlessness. I would spend the next year-and-a-half doing my best to move out of India. My possible work destinations would include London, Hong Kong and Qatar before I would decide to take a break from working and move to Holland to do a Master’s in August 2014. She and her family would spend a few months in India before I moved to Holland and then they would move to Brussels in the following year, which practically would practically make us neighbours. But, I knew none of that when I was saying goodbye to her at the airport that morning.

I suppose the difficulty off goodbyes also depends on what you are going back to. When saying goodbye to my sister after her wedding, I was going back to an engineering course that didn’t excite me and a hostel where I struggled to find people I could connect with. The first signs of my alienation with engineering had started to show, although I would only feel its full force over the following years.

From that Mexico trip, I was going back to a well-paying job that left me feeling unfulfilled and a deep desire to move out of the city that I had grown up in but had never managed to grow fond of. It was, of course, nice to be living with my parents but I always knew that my destiny wasn’t in Thane/Mumbai. The question was when, not if, I would move out.

To be honest, I have nothing to go back to in England except my PhD. But that is a good enough reason. At no other point in my life have I felt more satisfied with what I am doing. And my inward journey, of  which blogging is a big part, continues.

On Art

I have never been much of an art person. I find myself scrutinizing paintings till my eyes water to find something of significance. My appreciation seldom moves beyond the aesthetics of a painting and the fact that I usually have something to say about a painting is down to verbal dexterity rather than artistic temperament. I wonder what it feels like to be transfixed by a painting or sculpture, or even moved to tears.
But since it is obligatory to visit the most famous museum of the city you are visiting, I found myself in the Prado museum in Madrid. The museum is a labyrinth of caverns and we never held hope of covering even most of it. We decided to stick to just one of its three wings.
Even with such low expectations, we felt overwhelmed by the amount of art that was on display. It didn't help that my nephews made no secret of their wish to leave as soon as possible. But, today, I felt like I was able to appreciate art more than ever before. Some paintings, especially Goya's Black Paintings, stirred something in me, although I can't find the words to express those stirrings. While looking at some paintings, I felt for a few seconds like I had almost entered the painting. I also found myself drawn to the backgrounds of paintings, particularly the skies. Questions such as how does an artist decide about the lighting in her paintings and keep that consistent throughout the  painting kept popping up. Also, which vantage point to use and can there be multiple vantage points in a single painting? I found myself transfixed with the sculpted folds of cloth and the calves of the sculptures. I feel calves are the most difficult to sculpt as they are featureless, yet have a distinctive form.
But, despite my newfound artistic sensibility, I had had enough after about two hours of browsing. I will stick to being moved to tears by prose and poetry, and the rare song.

Smart and Funny People

I think it was Jay Leno who said that to find a comedienne or comedian funny, you need to like her or him first. It is neigh impossible to find a person you dislike funny. Yes, comic timing and delivery matter--how you say it (and the personality of the speaker) matters as much or even more than what you say. But, likability matters even more.

I wonder if that is also true for judgments of intellectual output, especially in the social sciences and humanities where brilliance is in the eye of the beholder. Where the questions you ask are often more important than the solutions you propose. It is  very  difficult to keep aside your perception of the author from your judgement of their work.

Of course, in an ideal world, you judge a piece of work on its own merit. Authorship is a trivial question. But, in economics, especially, invisible epistemic boundaries abound and one finds oneself crossing them frequently. How do you judge a piece of work that is built on different epistemic or ontological foundations than yours?

I suppose that is why judging a piece of work is often an act of faith. One often says to oneself "This seems like a pretty ordinary piece of work but what do I know? People who I think are smart think this work is great, so it must at least be good". 

Whether someone is smart or not is a question I wrestle with frequently. Maybe it is a peculiarly male habit to make judgments about a person and use that as a lens to view their work or actions. At the risk of sounding essentialist, maybe women are less prone to snap judgments. Judging someone as smart puts them on a higher plane of existence and makes you more tolerant of their shortcomings. Of course, there is a theatrical aspect to it and some people are just better at sounding smart. 

But, a heterodox argument from an established "smart" author is much more likely to find a receptive audience while the same argument from a newbie might be dismissed as flaky bullshit. 

I have more to  say on this subject and shall come back to it again.

In Defense of Chores

I was helping my sister with chores today and thinking about how much easier life is as a single person. No adult should complain about having to wash, clean and cook without assistance. Occasionally,  chores can get tiresome but I see them as a nice break from thinking. PhD students spend so much time inside their heads that it is refreshing to step out and work with your hands from time to time. Chores and walks also help you think by distracting you just enough to facilitate free thought. Chores generally do not require your undivided attention. Since thinking is not your primary task while doing a chore, it is less forced. And, it is not uncommon for a light bulb to come on in your head at such moments.  

Chores also take up time that you (or at least I) would otherwise have spent idle. Choring is time spent purposefully and productively. Doing chores is the simplest way to contribute to your life (and those of your dear ones if you are not single). It is the least complicated expression of love towards yourself and those around you. Simple expressions of love are not trivial.

Alien Epistems

It has taken me a few days to get over the disaster that was my PhD progression viva and the bitter taste it has left in my mouth hasn't gone away. The trouble with not having anything else in your life apart from your work is that you become too emotionally invested in it. Professional setbacks feel like personal setbacks. I thought I was okay with social isolation but I felt an intense feeling of intellectual isolation after the last viva, which was more difficult to come to terms with. The way I saw it there were two possibilities i) Either my work was poor or ii) what I thought would be a sympathetic audience turned out to be close-minded and canonical. Neither possibility is pleasant. But it is what it is and definitely not the end of the world. Poor work can be improved and close-minded people can be kept at a safe distance.

It helped to be away on a holiday with family. But, it was all the work of time. I didn't learn any profound lessons about research or life except that it is really simple to criticize someone else's work, especially if they come from a different epistemology. In other words, if the way they view and make sense of the world is different from yours. It is difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Much simpler to dismiss their ideas or find holes in them, especially if you are in the privileged position of the audience. I have been guilty of this in the recent past, and I have promised to myself to be more conscious in the future. Yes, maybe what they are saying sounds like bullshit to me, but what do I know? Constructive criticism is serious work. How does one critically engage with someone's work without destroying their self-esteem?

I have always looked at myself as a critically-minded scholar, but I don't see that as an amazing attribute any more. Some people are personally more inclined towards critique and deconstruction but that doesn't necessarily make them better academics. Academia needs all sorts and there is nothing to say that one sort is better than the other. Critically-minded people tend to be loners who instinctively feel out of place in groups and their work can make them even more socially excluded. This can encourage a superiority complex in that they feel that they are marginalized because they are just too smart compared to the people around them. And when the world repeatedly fails to acknowledge their superiority, they fall to pieces.

In the end, it all comes down to the stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves in response to the events in our lives. It is a human coping mechanism that is very hard to abstain from. "X happened, which means I am Y and my destiny is Z". So, instead of forcing myself not to spin stories, I am trying to accept my human habit of story-spinning and see the stories as just purely that. When the going is good, we spin a particular kind of stories, when the going is bad, we spin another type of stories, but they are all just stories.