What are words worth?

It’s hard to point to the exact moment when a place loses its strangeness and becomes home, when you can walk into the doorway of a previously unfamiliar room or apartment and feel like you know it: all the switches and plug points and creaky windows, the sound of concealed water pipes and the idiosyncracies of appliances, the smell of the upholstery and the texture of the walls. Or take the streets, where you go from being someone who pauses uncertainly at the pedestrian signal and watch what the others do, to confidently tapping the contraption on the pole like you’d done it since kindergarten. Or the café at the corner where you need to ask, in slow and halting foreign-speak, for the simplest beverage and a pastry whose ingredients are written into its name, but come to putting a couple of coins on the counter and picking up your café crema and walnut br ötchen. ... It’s a beautiful winter morning, crisp and blue, the kind that invigorates and makes me feel like it’s a ...

Now that sounds like I am going into some deep philosophical ruminations on the meaning and consequences of that…what shall we call it… “quality”. But my intention here is somewhat more pedestrian. Personal. Born of this curiosity about something I experience (or some would prefer to say am “victim of”) time and again. Take the most recent case of attempted hoodwinking. I’ve been buying milk from the same person for several years now. For the past year the milk has been delivered by this young boy, maybe around 14 or 15, who comes whizzing in on his bicycle every morning and, once a month, he stops a little longer to give me the bill and collect the payment. Usually, I just take the bill, look at the amount, and pay him. I’ve never checked the bill or scrutinized it closely. This month, my daughter happened to receive the bill and she found that the numbers didn’t quite add up. It was clear that the total had been overwritten to make it a full one thousand over the actual sum. ...

--> There’s been a lot of discussion in recent times about the idea of consent, mostly in the aftermath of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements and the slew of revelations around unwanted or forced sexual relations, even when physical aggression is not involved. The discussions have been complex and have thrown up difficult and messy questions about the gendered ways in which power is assumed, expressed and exercised. In some ways these conversations have made it more possible—not necessarily easier--to deal with or call out when it is overt and its effects visible. But it’s also brought up the stealthy, invisible manner in which gendered power relations operate, seeding and nurturing expectations that seep through relationships of all kinds, working like a subclinical virus that buries itself deep inside one’s body and occasionally erupts into a rash that can’t be seen, only felt, invisible to all available diagnostic tests. We know it’s there, but struggle for a vocabul...

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...

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 co...