Everyone Is A World

 This morning, as I was cycling to uni I passed a little girl walking the other way with her Mum. She was grinning from ear to ear, possibly because it was her first day back at school after lockdown. When she passed me,her smile widened and she waved to me ecstatically, as though I were Mickey Mouse (or whoever drives kids crazy). I have written about this before, and unfortunately, I can't find the blog. There are few things more heart-warming than a child smiling at you. If you are fortunate enough to get one in the beginning of the day, the memory of it is enough to keep your spirits up for the rest of the day.

But, after that aside, coming back to the topic at hand. Every person is a world by themselves. We are only conscious of our own world and others appear as objects in them. But, each of those objects is a world by themselves. When we interact substantively with someone we are entering their world, and they ours. We are altering their world, and they ours. I have an image in my head of people with globes on their heads which meld when they speak. Of course, some globes meld more than others depending on the closeness of the relationship. Would we interact differently with others if we looked at them as other worlds rather than just as objects? I realise that this is an extremely abstract post, but that is what a personal blog that no one reads is for, right?

How India Treats its Women

Today, I came across an illustration of a young women dressed in a white top with small pink flowers printed on it and her hair tied up in a ponytail. She is being pecked from all sides by TV channel mics in the shape of vultures. The picture portrays the girlfriend of a Bollywood actor who died by suicide nearly three months ago. There was nothing to suggest any foul play or abetment,, but the ruling party int he actor's home state wanted to curry favour with member's of the deceased actor's caste, and the media readily obliged. There is nothing that Indian men and many women like seeing more than an independent, good-looking women being torn to pieces. I haven't caught any of the TV coverage, but even accounts of the coverage have been nauseating. All ethical rules have been broken, nothing is sacrosanct. And media ratings are through the roof--the public seems to be watching it with the rapture reserved for porn movies. And, I am sure some men are getting off on this. A toxic cocktail of misogyny, envy, voyeurism and asexually repressed upbringing sexual repression. Just when you think India couldn't hate its women even more, it manages to surprise you. 

Post-PhD Life

 The question of what to do after my PhD isn't looming over me yet, but I can see it on the horizon. Today, a friend asked me I planned to apply to a prestigious post-doc in Florence. I told her I had considered it, but dropped the idea because I couldn't find any faculty member whose research interests matched mine and could mentor me. It turned out she knew of a faculty member who works in the same broad research area as me. I am not right up her alley, but close enough to at least explore a mentorship. 

The thought created a bit of a flutter in my head. By all accounts, Florence is gorgeous, the post-doc is very prestigious and it would be great to be a part of a scholar community, which I have sorely missed during my PhD. I like Bristol, but I haven't been able to build much of a social life here. With my closest friend due to leave soon, my social life is likely to become non-existent. That doesn't really bother me so much--I have a PhD to finish and a pandemic to survive. But, it doesn't change the fact that there is nothing holding me here. Many of the major changes in my life have come  about as a result of me running away from something or some place, rather than running towards something specific. I jumped into journalism to get away from engineering, and I decided to do a Master's degree to get away from India and journalism. My PhD is something I actively chose to pursue, and I will be eternally grateful that it worked out in my chosen field and chosen supervisor. being clear about what you don't want is possibly as useful as being clear about what you want. But, wanting to run aay from something is not a good reason to run towards something specific. As today wore on, the Florence idea began to lose its lustre, not least because I don't want to divert my energies from my PhD towards the post-doc application. I don't know what to do, so I will sleep on it and see how I feel tomrorrow.

Cold Showers

 I have been having mostly cold showers for the past two months or so now, but today I may have taken it a bit too far. I washed my hair with cold water, and two hours are later my feet are still cold. Through most of the summer, I showered with hot water post exercising to relieve my sore muscles, especially my stiff right shoulder. I didn't realise that the reason I was so stiff was because I was doing something wrong while working out, and eventually the shoulder and elbow pain caught up with me. But, that is another story, and it will be a long and whiny one. 

I recently discovered that cold showers are better than hot showers to relieve post-workout soreness. Also, since it was summer I thought I would get in the habit of cold showers and carry it on through winter. Boost my immune system and shorten my shower duration. Hot showers also dry my skin out. So cold showers seemed like a win-win all around. Until I took it too far, of course. 

David Graeber

 David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died today. I first heard of him as the guy who had come up with the siren slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement "We are the 99%". Shortly after, I came across his magnum opus "Debt: The First 5,000 Years", which is as the title suggests, a history of debt and a reflection on the nature of money. While some sections of the book went into more technical detail than I cared  for, it opened a new world to me. I read it at a time when I was bored of my job in Mumbai and was trying my best to move overseas. One option was to go abroad to do a Master's, possibly in Economics. It would be an exaggeration to say that the book inspired me to take the plunge, but inspired me it definitely did. It sparked an interest in economic anthropology in me because anthropology seemed to have a broader and more interesting scope of vision than economics. I even considered doing a degree in economic anthropology before discovering heterodox economics.

But coming back to Graeber, I then came across an article by him on "Bull-shit jobs" which got me thinking about my own previous job as a financial journalist. While I tell people, somewhat pretentiously, that doing the job taught me a lot about how capitalism actually works, that, in itsel, didn't make the job socially valuable. That article inspired me tow write a post for the ISS blog. I was rpetty happy with the post, but when I went back to it today, I found it underwhelming. Hopefully, I have higher standards, now that I am a PhD student. 

David Graeber was one of the greatest intellectuals of our time, and had an influence on fields far beyond his mother discipline of anthropology.  And, debt was the only book I lugged all the way over from India to the UK when I moved here. 

Hot and Bothered

 Over the past few months, I have realised that when I feel animated--usually with anger but sometimes with excitement--I get hot and even start sweating. The most recent instance was about an hour ago while watching a particularly gripping scene of a TV series. This didn't used to happen to me. I'm not worried about it but just curious. Is it that I have become more emotive, and if that is the case is it due to the pandemic or is it because of my emotional and spiritual awakening over the past few years? I have always thought of myself as a sensitive person,but someone with a sensitive head rather than a sensitive head. That emotions would roll around in my head, but I wouldn't feel them in the body. Of course, my brush with anxiety was so distressing because it was such an intensely physical experience. Feeling emotions in my body is something I have become used to, and the occasional wave of anxiety doesn't bother me much any more. I have also become conscious about the possibility of using physical responses as a guide for action. How doing something makes you feel in your body as a barometer for whether you should continue doing it or not. For an over-thinker like, who spends a lot of time in his head, listening to my body is a novel experience. Yes, there is a risk of reading too much into fleeting sensations. Or mistaking physical illness for emotional distress. There are no easy answers. Trying to keep an open heart and an open mind is all we can do. 

First Day Back and Renewed Sense of Urgency

The uni felt like a ghost town as I cycled in today, and our building was no different. Some empty buildings grow larger when empty while ours seems smaller (it also seems smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside, so I guess that's says something about the architect). I had budgeted for not being able to work in the first half as I got acclimatized,but it still felt weird sitting in what felt like an empty building. The weirdness dissipated as some people from my office came in. Our officious grad school head conveyed the social-distancing instructions to us with great fanfare, taking 20 minutes to show us our seat allocations, which is 16 minutes longer than she should have required. She then treated us to coffee at the starbucks in the main building, and to pay for it we had to listen to her prattle on about some really random subjects for close to an hour. I remember being annoyed but also conscious that I needed to get used to being around people again. In other words, to get used to getting irritated.

I dropped by my supervisor's room and we had a short chat in which she told me that there might be some job openings soon. That news zapped away any lingering weirdness and animated with a new sense of urgency to finish my PhD. I have been animated by a deadline once since the pandemic began but I struggled to meet it and ultimately gave up. Its not even that I finished after the deadline, I didn't finish and just submitted what I had. I didn't get into trouble but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I have set myself another deadline, and hopefully I will be able to meet it. Again, the world won't end if I don't meet it, but I am getting impatient now. yes, I want to enjoy my PhD, but I feel like I will enjoy it if I move faster.