The pressure of productivity

It’s a little over a week since my sabbatical leave began. “I envy you,” said a colleague I ran into at a city event a few days into the week. “So, what have you planned?” asked another. “You should just take it easy,” said a third, striking a welcome note but clearly in the minority. I veer dangerously from wanting to take the last piece of advice seriously to wanting to make sure I execute every word of the detailed plan I had submitted in order to win this year off.

A sabbatical is an opportunity to slow down and do the things that most academics complain they never have time to do during the regular school year: read, reflect, write. Those three words that attracted me to this job in the first place. Yes, I love the teaching too, but once in a while it’s good to get a break from the daily grind of lectures and grading. People outside academia look at the idea of a sabbatical somewhat enviously and some see it as an indulgence—time off with pay that doesn’t get counted as leave?—but maybe precisely because of that, there is this added pressure to have something to show for it. The feeling is quite common, so much so that a search on Google using the question “expectations from a sabbatical” yielded over half a million results. Reading through some of the blogposts, Quora responses, and other social media tell me that practically everyone feels that pressure, and even as one welcomes the promise of open time, there is an undercurrent of anxiety. Sara Perry, a senior academic from York University, speaks lucidly about managing intention, expectation and self-worth on her blog, as she embarks on her 10-week sabbatical. Just a little over three months. And even as she confesses that her institution places absolutely no burden of a specific outcome from this break, it’s clear that she feels that characteristic anxiety.

Much of the anxiety stems from what Perry calls the “broader and insidious culture of relentless productivity that pervades academia”, combined with the constant comparisons that academics make—with others in their departmental units, with others in the same domain within the country, with international scholars—to get a sense of their self-worth and the quantum and value of their output. And the digital complicates this need for recognition and visibility in multiple ways. 

Payal Arora, professor of culture and communication at Erasmus University while arguing for a turn to “slow academia”, says that today there’s a  “need to market your work across digital platforms to be heard, seen and cited”.  We see others doing this, constantly tweeting their latest reflections on media trends or pointing to new publications on academia.edu or ResearchGate or posting their attendance at conferences and meetings. A sort of social comparison dogs us, and we think… so much productivity out there, so little here. The amazing work of scholars like Slavoj Zizek, who seem to produce a book or two every a year (we all have the colleague who seems to be hopping from one launch to another) does inspire, but it also daunts, and sets that bar for scholarship that much higher. While we may not all aspire to be Zizek, there’s something to be (not) said for staring at the computer screen struggling to write that paper and having those scores of citations by a single admired author dance in your subconscious…constant comparison? The progressive metrification of scholarship (what’s your h-factor?) doesn’t help. It doesn’t say anything about the hours spent preparing for classes, scratching your voice to a rasp in the classroom, talking to students about good, bad and indifferent work, poring over barely intelligible assignments into the wee hours of the day. So where’s the scholarship, the administration asks. What’s your citation score?

So. A sabbatical is supposed to give one that opportunity to slow down, to take a breath…and yes, produce that scholarship! 

So. Here I am. After eight years in the academy and 34 years in the workplace, a year off from the routine. With pay. What privilege. And what pressure.

So. I begin every morning with a list. Reminding myself of the things I have to do. I write them down with the nearest pen in my lovely Booker diary. And then I pencil in the things I’d like to do. Among the “have tos” are student work to be read and commented upon, columns to be written, books to be reviewed. And the “like tos”? Other writing, other reading. And on a little placeholder on my desk is another list: of deadlines I must not lose sight of.  It’s not so long ago that I was in a somewhat similar position when I took the Fulbright. I should have learned, no? And maybe I have. Maybe I have.

I do have my goals. Long term, and short term. But I’m going to try to allow myself to do that other thing. Sit back. Relax. (if you’re a certain age, you might follow that with “Have a Charminar”!) Read. For pleasure and for growth (isn’t all reading for that?). Take the thoughts slow. Take the writing easy. Don’t overthink or overschedule. And above all, take a break from the guilt.

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The good--and guilty--citizen

A WhatsApp message makes the rounds, asking you to join a candlelight vigil protesting the brutal rapes in Kathua and Unnao and asserting that #thisisnotmyindia. I am held up doing my job, sitting in on student presentations while a part of me chafes, wanting to be where many of my friends and fellow citizens are, holding placards and melting candles, trying to find hope in collective presence. I do not make it to the event, and a part of me shrivels a bit in an unavoidable guilt, while the rest of me tries to make sense...of the need for visible assembly, of the necessity of being seen as part of a group that refuses to be silent, of what we achieve through marking our outrage and articulating our refusal to be implicated in the actions that give rise to it.  I want to be there for all those reasons, and I want to be there to gain a bit of strength from the sense that we share the sense of outrage, frustration and are all overcome with a sense of helplessness while wondering how (if at all) we can identify the ways in which our ways of living, speaking and thinking are responsible for the state of affairs. To sing "Hum honge kamiyab" in chorus uplifts one even in sadness; it gathers the slim shards of hope and ties them into something that glitters, however faintly, in the darkness.

These repeated manifestations of inhumanity shake our belief in practically everything that we are told society, community, religion--humanity itself--and all other forms of organization stand for. The horrors that our species perpetuates on others who are more vulnerable or different are beyond comprehension--or so we tell ourselves, knowing, somewhere deep inside, that they are completely comprehensible if the mythic logic of "received humanism" is thrown aside. So we rush to tell ourselves--and each other--that this is the kind of thing we will not stand for, or be identified with. We rush to stand out and apart from the perpetuation of such horrors so that we are not tainted by the guilt that must wash over all those that remain safe, all those who can go home in the secure comfort that It Will Not Happen To Them. We all share the guilt of the survivor.

And as we flail about in desperation, trying to see what we can do to not only feel less guilty but to stop the things that make us feel guilt--poverty, social injustice, violence against children and other vulnerable beings, war, cruelty to animals, growing mounds of unrecyclable plastic, environmental degradation--it is the symbolic solidarities of marches and candlelight vigils that work to throw us a lifeline, a promise and a hope that other worlds are possible.

What is the narrative of the nation we would fashion for ourselves? Considering, of course that we even buy into the notion of nation (I for one do not but must accept the reality that to some extent nation and state are intertwined and while one be uncomfortable with the former one has to live with the latter as a unit of governance and civic management). Is it possible to grasp the strands of that narrative--of young women who find their future in impossibly hopeful ways, of children who beat all odds to rise above domestic cruelties and deprivation, of people who make space for others to find happiness and fulfilment even as they find their own--and weave it into a strong enough yarn, a rope, that we can hold on to? And then, perhaps, to draw out a somewhat tired metaphor, it can become a fabric that we are comfortable enough to clothe ourselves with.

And then there is the complexity of everyday life we have to deal with. This is so many ways feeds the guilt. How do we eat our breakfast (sometimes spoilt for choice) when we know that for so many, hunger is the only certainty? How do we get into the car--or bus, or cab--when we know that mobility of any kind is a distant dream for such a large percentage of our population? How do we find satisfaction in our work when we know that for a majority of people in the world, it is not satisfaction or success, but just existence, that makes work necessary.

And then there is the guilt of knowing that even thinking about these things--in these ways, in this space, in this language--is a consequence of privilege.

So we take to the vigil, the march, the petition, the rally. These are ways out of the sometimes paralysing effect of solitary thought. When solidarities lead to conversation, they can also open up pathways to change, however small, however narrow. And even as we shore up these energies for the big changes that we'd like to see happen, we can go back into our everyday workspaces to work on the small changes that we know can happen--being fair and open with people we interact with, using less plastic, not littering on the streets, treating animals humanely,...you get the drift.

Good citizens (of the world, not necessarily the nation) can do with some guilt. But perhaps we need to temper it with a measure of doing, in both symbolic and material ways.

An unoriginal soundtrack for my life

I’m in the car with my niece, and we’re listening to one of my playlists. It’s a song from the late 1970s, Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and she sings along to the words, which edge from slow to fast, from somewhat reflective to belted out, all the way to the plaintive last line. She stops, suddenly, and says, “This is kind of pathetic, that I know all the words to songs from my parents’ generation!”

Our musical memory is inextricably associated with the context(s) of our lives, the people who come and go at different points, the places we are in when we listen to something or the mood that specific songs and tunes link us to. Even after the incidents that gave rise to those moods are long forgotten, the sense of feeling lingers, and comes alive each time we encounter the tune. If my young companion’s parents listened to Led Zeppelin when they were dropping her off to school every morning, the song gets imprinted in her mind in a way that is difficult to erase. It probably gets intertwined with other childhood tunes that she may have clamored for, even as she protested the confusing rhythms of “Stairway”, a song that lacks the repetitive sing-along quality to which very young children respond. It becomes a difficult-to-forget strand in the soundtrack of her kindergarten years.

So… if I were to pick a tune for every decade of my life…or maybe every half-decade of my life, would I be able to build a playlist that symbolizes my journey in some way, that captures the dominant mood of different periods? It could be a story, however partial and incomplete, or then it need not be one. We know that there is an impulse to narrativize our lives, to make sense of the randomness of birth, existence and death in some manner that imposes order, that draws a line, however wavy and discontinuous, from one event to the next. Music helps add a layer of spice, a tone, a sensation, a colour, that makes the ordinary somehow more bearable, putting it into a frame that lends memory a shade of specialness. And of course, we are coached into this mode of thinking as we move from movie theatre to television screen, our anticipation stoked by drum rolls and weeping violins, sadness, fear and happiness called into being by the background score.

Here goes. Not necessarily a reflection of my musical tastes, then or now, though I must confess to periodically drawing upon these songs when I wish to disappear from the present into the self-perpetuated fiction of an idyllic—or at the very least, meaningful--past.

Pre-memory: when images are born in the act of re-telling. Athai adi, methai adi

My father’s youngest sister was a college student, unmarried, still living at home when I was born; she often talks about how she played a major role in caring for me as an infant. This was a song that she says she sang to put me to sleep. I now suspect it played more to her fascination with Gemini Ganesan than anything else!

The Disney years, when you wish upon a star and the bare necessities! For no reason other than the fact that movie memories give us a timeline of our lives just as well as anything else. Even though Pinocchio was released more than two decades before I came of film-going age, it is very much a part of the ongoing Disney magic of the late 1960s, when television made the “Wonderful World of Disney” a part of the after-school milk and cookies routine of a large swathe of children growing up in North America. Maybe it irreparably damaged our aesthetic sensibility and our ideas about the world, something that took many years of a critical liberal arts education to undo, but there’s no doubt that those princesses (and the occasional lost-in-the-jungle waif) made winter afternoons in cold, cold Calgary a little bit warmer.

It wasn’t long before long-haired teen idols replaced Mowgli and the Monkees’ Daydream Believer introduced me (with those seriously inane lyrics) to the delicious unhappiness of adolescence. This, mixed in with the dreaminess of Shashi Kapoor in Likhe jo khat tujhe made one want to grow up quickly and join that romantic adult world.

The 1970s were dominated—and animated—by a growing unease with the world, the conviction that we could change things with our words and ideas, our moods reflected in (at different stages) the work of The Beatles (Across the Universe), Bob Dylan (Tambourine Man)  and Joan Baez (Love is just a 4 letter word) , with a little bit of rising feminism thrown in with Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman”.

In the 1980s, subversiveness came in a variety of forms, from Michael Jackson who exploded on to the scene with Billie Jean, to Annie Lennox and Eurythmix, but I stuck with the old sounds of Al Stewart, and his Year of the Cat, and John Lennon’s new partnership with Yoko Ono (Watching the Wheels). But then how could I forget, a live concert with one of my all-time favourites, Simon & Garfunkel, whose Boxer never fails to move me.

By the 1990s I had entered my 30s, and was beginning to be consumed by a sense that I still hadn’t found what I was looking for… and listening to U2 did put me in the zone. This was also when Disney re-entered my life through my children’s listening preferences and thus began another cycle--of being introduced to sounds through other tastes.

This is what led to my discovery of Cold Play (Kingdom Come remains my favourite) in the early 2000s. And later in this second decade of the millennium, the discovery of a completely new sound, Sufi music and Farida Khanum, Coke Studio and fusion of all kinds, young people making music that crosses borders and mixes moods. 

There are of course some songs that run through all decades, that calm me, centre me, and give me a sense of self. Here’s just a few of those:

Kurai Onrum Illai by M S Subbalakshmi

Amazing Grace by Il Divo

What a wonderful world by Louis Armstrong

 I haven't included Abba here, even though they were a big part of our college sensibility in the late 1970s...but I have to say, Thank you for the music.