Things we say
A month
into my fieldwork, during a time of deepening confusion and what I would later recognize
as despair, I received an email from a student at my alma mater. She represented
an on-campus publication which voices the views of students, alumni and faculty
from our department. She sought my reflections on the Masters program which I
had completed and which she was still in the midst of:
Did I enjoy my time at
the institute? Were there things I would do differently if I could go back in
time? What is life after graduating like? Did my education prepare me for the
life I have begun to lead?
These
were charming questions even to my muddled, fraught mind. Charming because they
were naiive and almost unanswerable. They were questions that I too would have
asked as a student – at a time when, seen through the prism of holidays,
internships, and summer schools, life beyond university seemed to contain
endless possibilities, when the horizon of the years ahead glittered, sun-like,
with secrets. In my reply to these questions, I tried to refrain from
platitudes, I tried to write the kind of answers that would have encouraged me
as an earnest student with mutable hopes.
What is
life like after graduating? Much like life was like during or before college, I
said – just as resistant to summary definitions. Which was and is the truth.
But there were parallel truths I could have conveyed. That my experience of
exiting campus-life as I knew it, and beginning a PhD, has been nothing like I
imagined. That I have had a first taste of how lonely one can feel, how lost
and jaded. That I felt as though I had, without knowing it, been on a
conveyor-belt headed somewhere, and that suddenly some part of me – a limb,
perhaps – was dangling ragged off the belt, wizening me to how close I was to
falling off, how close I was to dissolution.
There
are things we say. There are things we are silent about – because they render
us inarticulate, or because we feel that the mundane horrors of our lives would
serve no purpose being told. What fascinates me sometimes, what holds me in its
thrall, is the idea that someone who is herself fraying – whose thoughts are
ill and confused – can proffer advice to someone at the other end of a cable, and
quite possibly as distressed. What fascinates me is the idea that they can help
each other.
Well written. More often than not people who ask such questions expect only routine answers. Absolutely the conveyor belt. And yes, PhD is a lonely planet.
ReplyDeleteYour prose reads like poetry, dear Prax. I echo, Trinath - well written! And yes, Ph. D. is a journey meant to be lonely and weary. Glad to have crossed that phase or wait, it was a lovely journey in spite of being a lonesome one.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Susie and Trinath, and for signalling to me that what comes across to one as the lonely wilderness of a PhD is actually inhabited by various other people doing their PhD!
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