What are words worth?

One of the coveted prizes of an academic life is the visiting fellowship/professorship, that plump offer of a time and space away from the routine of one’s regular job, away from the politics and pressures of administration, teaching and advising. This is given in the assumption that it stimulates reflection in an environment that allows for varied intellectual discussions and possibly (for the Indian academic, particularly) access to resources and people who can help fill the gaps of one’s research.  These ‘visitorships’ come in different forms. Some require that you contribute to some teaching or even teach an entire course, but the attraction of this is the opportunity to try out your skills and ideas in a foreign environment and thus learn something new about pedagogy. Others might relate to an ongoing research project or collaboration and specify goals and outcomes for the visit. But there are also those that simply offer a protected stint, with access to all the pos...

One of the greatest joys and simultaneously greatest sources of confusion (and sometimes, frustration) is that mysterious pact that gets made between a PhD candidate and their guide. Okay, it’s not a pact, it’s never quite worded as that, but it is an agreement of sorts. It’s a relationship. But like parenting, it’s slippery and shape-shifting twin, it is something we rarely learn through instruction and more often by experience and emulation. That’s what makes it tricky. If we’ve been parented well (or, more correctly, in healthy ways—my, what loaded words!) we may ourselves parent well. But there are an infinite number of variables that might intervene and moderate our translation of being parented into the act of parenting. Supervision is something like that, but on a much smaller scale and much more limited in temporal and spatial terms—even though some might say that it can be as life-transforming a phase for the supervisee. But then is that even the appropriate analogy? Th...