Dear Sarvanama:
This perhaps is the last piece sounding like I am obsessed with talking about my KU days. I promise I will try to move up through the ladder of abstraction in upcoming posts. People are like exigencies these days, out of curiosity about how the institution will move with the new torchbearer, and how the emergence of one popular soul shakes the being and becoming of more than half a dozen other popular ones. If I could evade an encounter with any one of them, I would probably focus my ‘scholarship’ to more philosophical musings. But people and their worries and their curiosities and gossip drag me to and hold me at the bottom of the ladder.
Here I come again, daring one more chance to adorn the trifles of my being and becoming at KU. To tell you my heart, I have never been able to draw a straight line between what I have wanted to do at KU and what it has wanted me to do. The assignments that have befallen my shoulders over these twenty-six years sort themselves into four kinds, and each kind says something about the institution as much as it says about me. I do not know how the following sections explain this thesis.
The first kind of assignment involved positions I would have refused had I been asked. These arrived instead as decisions already made about me. First off, I was named Assistant Director of the Student Welfare Directorate in the middle of my PhD research and writing, and the justification offered to me was that if you wanted a thing done best and earliest, you would assign it to the busiest person. Later, I became Coordinator of the BBIS program at a time when it overlapped uneasily with my role at the Humanities and Management Unit. I was made Information Officer although I was not, and had never been, a non-teaching staff member but a faculty member. This profile felt to me an outlandish thing, less like an assignment than a demotion, or at best a deviation from what I was meant to be doing. I was declared Chief of Communications when this was not necessary since I was in any case ready to volunteer my expertise without needing a portfolio to justify it. I was made Head of the Department of Management Informatics and Communication at a point when I had already had too many administrative restrictions and wanted to be out of them, not further into them. And I was made Head of the Department of Language Education when I was unwilling to overtake what I felt was rightfully someone else’s turn.
The second kind of assignment was smaller and simpler: positions I refused or denied outright, not because they came unasked but because I judged myself unsuited to them. I did not qualify for the role of hostel warden and said so. I declined an extension of my headship at MIC once someone else was willing to carry it, since I preferred to return my attention fully to academic work. And I refused the coordinatorship of the Vice Chancellors’ Meet because what I wanted, more than anything, was to see myself replaced.
The third kind was what I did not refuse, though by every reasonable measure I might have. These were the conflict-prone roles, the ones nobody volunteered for, and everybody eventually needed someone to occupy. I can list such traps as hosting programs in the thick of staff and faculty agitation; surreptitiously mediating between the administration and the agitating staff; sitting on committees that looked into violations of the Code of Conduct; negotiating with student political wings, and investigating cases of molestation, admission anomalies, and staff selection. I took these up, I think, because refusing them would have meant leaving a vacuum for someone who was less careful, or less willing, to fill.
Against all this stands one small, petty decision that went the other way. It was my termination from a subject committee at one dean’s discretion. This was a decision whose pettiness I still feel more than I can fully explain, precisely because so little was ever explained to me. Why would a dedicated and fully qualified faculty member be terminated from a role like this? This was probably the first and last of this type of indignation at this institution of repute.
And then there were the roles I never thought of refusing or accepting. They simply were mine by virtue of standing where I stood. These included membership of the Examination Committee; hosting programs such as KU Day and other significant international meetings; chairing and moderating conference sessions; and sitting, again and again, on subject committees, the Faculty Board, and the Research Committee. These I count as de facto, fully accepted, hardly even decisions.
Read together, this is not a tidy record of a career planned in advance. It is the record of an institution that has often known what to do with me before I knew what to do with myself. It is the portrayal of a self that has learned, not always gracefully, when to resist that knowing and when to trust it.
What I outlined above forms the milestones of the saga of twenty-six years. Twenty-six, you can imagine, is the age a child born on the day I entered the office has completed basic education and found a job and a life partner.
I entered through a free competition, waited till my turn for promotion, and experienced a steady and slow career progression. When I look back at the trail of upward mobility, I find myself practicing what I learned from Russian formalism—defamiliarization. I realize I always try to nurture a unique thought. I remain predictably unpredictable, unpredictably flexible for assignments that are in my capacity to perform. My passion for peculiarity in thought and demeanour is constant, while many other inclinations might have faded away with time. I believe in the goodness of mistaking and mainly being mistaken. Mistakes occasionally free me from the burden of being an ally. I cannot afford to be an insider darling everywhere all the time.
A man without determination and a snake without venom are worthless. My grandfather very often said this to me when I was growing up, and when he doubted my ability to retaliate against injustice. One who has come with life will never be blown away by a ghostly wind. My mother said this when she wanted to instill courage and that ability to retaliate. But the awareness for retaliation became only a strategic option as I grew up with more education and conviviality. This sometimes makes me think that education has made me too tolerant and docile to fail the precepts of my guardians.
I have never snatched anyone’s prospects, no matter how my appearances have implied all these years. But I have never renounced a position if it brought a responsibility. I promise not to hang on in a position like a sponge. If I do not know my role, and justify it after knowing, I will volunteer to quit it. And I have never taken the situation of being deprived of a position the deprivation of my rights. Mostly, I have created the path, justified my presence, and opened avenues for others. So, if I am at the giving end, do not ever ask me for a position as a reward. If at the receiving end, do not give me one as a favour.
I enjoy taking responsibilities in an ideal condition. My ideal condition involves a few uncommon aspects. First, the position that brings a responsibility must be deserved by the indispensable few so that if you chose to, you could easily transfer it to one of them, ensuring the incorporation of your visions. This reciprocal generosity would allow you an opportunity to focus on your coveted pathways sans the worries of avoiding matters of public concern. Second, it should involve situations where you are approached as the only option in the fairly Platonic standard. One, you are capable but already engaged more productively elsewhere to the extent of being unprepared to take up a new role. But since you are identified as most competent for the role, a higher authority persuades you to go for it, and you go for it. You could still voice your reluctance on the grounds of losing the projects you are engaged in. You could put a condition on letting it move smoothly with institutional protection. The authorities pursuing you for the new role would be ready to let the ongoing projects continue while you bear a new responsibility. This would not be misinterpreted as bargaining but would be regarded as ensuring that saying yes to one responsibility does not eliminate a more significant venture at hand. In the prospect of acceptance, you are promised an explicit timeline, a clear target, and plainly stated terms of reference. Without these, an assignment would become a fog. You would prefer not to walk into fog merely because you were asked to.
Moreover, you would also caution yourself that you are not so poor and hungry as to desperately need the position. You are not craving its privileges in the ways that would make its preconditions matter to you. You would appreciate it if people accepted you as someone who has transcended the mundane pursuit of wealth and prowess. This would not be taken as vanity but as a way of ensuring that what you take up, you take up for reasons other than desperation and craving. Since you have begun the role with the possibility of ending it any time, you would forfeit the position and return to the original object of your passion. The exit door is never sealed, thus. It is rather the door you are most ready to use at your will. Underlying all this assumption lies the ideal that leadership is not so much about gain as about welfare. It is the welfare of those you mean to serve. It is not for the promotion of the work you were doing before taking the new role. It is for creating new avenues, new opportunities, and newer roles.
I hated vegetation most of the time and therefore desired movement. But movement did not come at my will and in my schedule. It came as a necessity, a type of compulsion. At KU, four times I ended up being appointed to a new position in a new school. I became a permanent Lecturer at Science, Assistant Professor at Arts, Associate Professor at Engineering and Professor at Education. I would have desired to move to different cultural venues separated by reasonable geographical distance. It was not in my luck, though, because of KU and my discipline being confined to limited locations.
Like many, I also thought at times I deserved better because I had the potential to achieve more; I could achieve more if certain things were different. Like many, I thought my foundations would have been stronger if my parents and their parents had been able to alter their foundations during the 70’s and 30’s, respectively. But unlike many, I have accepted my circumstances without blaming my ancestry and my decisions to join this institution. No doubt, though, the initial landing and subsequent transitions were less desired in their processes than in their products.
I have only a little more than half a decade to serve this esteemed institution. Because I might not have the zeal to write my realities again, I venture to narrate this aspect of my professional life here. I carry the inspiration from this institution’s founders. Though some of you may have only heard their stories in varying lengths and depths, I have lived with them and their offshoots. I have not only overheard the myths they supposedly created but also inquired them about the roots of those myths plus the related sagas. My upbringing is organic because I have spent mornings, evenings, and sometimes nights with the makers of history. I would love to hear the authenticity of your ideals in terms of the claims for leadership and selfless engagements if you have any. But I belong to the generation who grew up hearing from the forerunners this timeless mantra: “Who will take the responsibility if not you?”
These days I think of the institutional entities I collaborated to create. I rejoice for the programs I struggled to launch and the beneficiary offshoots that have scaled the world in the ensuing days. I think of the degree certificates that entered ordinary households and the subsequent livelihood opportunities those certificates ensured. I think of some of you who spend the most fecund days of your professional/personal lives in the environs produced or preserved by the unconditional pursuers of the founders. And I feel pained by the fact that you are not ready to own the history of struggle that founded the environs.
No matter what, I have this acute desire to transition into a new world and never expect an unwarranted favour of extension and ennui at this institution. When my turn to exit comes, I must be replaced by a more fecund and functional entity with no prospect of consultation if I have lost my worth by the day. I must be left to lead my fate after I collect my shares and clear the liabilities.
So, Sarvanamas, if you claim your worth, claim responsibility where there are conflicting demands and resultant pressures. Take this to heart: any frog can build castles in the air when it is in the comfort of a tiny puddle. The actual worth of a builder is tested on a dry sandhill.