Like many of my contemporaries, I’ve lived my life so far as the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Lucky enough to go to an undergrad university that opens doors because of what its called (independent of anything that might be taught or learned), I have since proceeded to drift determinedly from one place to another. Things kicked off with some initial jumping up and down as I pondered whether to become, what in IIT Delhi lingo was called a ‘Consulteer’. That morphed into a near escape from philosophy at oxford. Finally I ended up in a masters programme in engineering, funded largely by research on India’s population (don’t ask – this is grad school).
The masters degree was enjoyable, but one particularly miserable winter spent watching the rain drip slowly off eucalyptus trees in funereal Escondido Village was enough to generate a sort of black, unadulterated dissatisfaction with life and unhealthy amounts of soul searching and angst. The natural reaction was to go back to India and engage in save the world activities instead. This involves a few clearly laid out steps^
- Pick a cause. I chose energy and environment. Why? As a certain professor of mine used to say – “There is no good reason for anything”*
- Pick an NGO (a non-profit). Make sure its beautifully located in a big city. This is because the best grassroots work gets done in New Delhi or Bombay and real change always comes from the top.
- Find a nice part of the moral high ground, pitch your tent there and practice a patronizing smile. Once you’ve got the smile down pat you can use it to great effect on management students, consultants, and of course i-bankers. The smile is often accompanied by the words ‘how interesting’ when you ask what they do, but if you’re really good you shouldn’t even have to say anything. Plus if you ever go on to become a PhD student you can continue to use this on those same three groups. So the investment pays off.
- Become strongly left liberal. Of course it helps if you truly believe the ideology you espouse, but its not particularly important, and would probably make you something of a minority. A few simple rules make this part easy. Anti big-dams, pro tribal rights, pro reservations (an Indian variant of affirmative action), feminist (bonus points if you’re male and still go around claiming to be feminist), anti ‘war in Iraq’, anti Indian military action in the North East etc etc. I think you’re allowed to be libertarian though, so long as you’re pro social security of some kind for the downtrodden.
- Dress appropriately. Kurtas and jeans are ideal for most days, though theres some leeway. If you’re female, carry a jhola. Indulge in kajal. And remember that bright colours are good.
I never quite made it to the perfect kind of NGO, having joined something that suspiciously resembled a big think tank / environmental consultancy instead but came close enough. Then found myself drifting again – this time into a PhD degree – more save the world stuff, to be precise ‘energy and climate policy’.The point however is this. A few days ago I decided to go skiing or, more accurately, to learn skiing. And as I cut my way down a gentle green at Kirkwood, gathering a fair amount of speed and coming to a smooth stop using my well honed technique (namely falling down extremely hard on my back and missing someone else by inches), I realized that there’s this common thread running through all these career shifts. Its this moment when you look around and hear everyone talking earnestly about something, and you listen to yourself say the same things, and you realize you don’t believe yourself, and the guy next to you doesn’t believe what he’s saying and even the paper you’re discussing is rich with the inner skepticism of the authorial voice. Its a much milder phenomenon in the sciences but its not non-existent, especially when you’re working on an epsilon importance problem and having to make it sound like a matter of life and death. If you’re in the field of climate change its particularly bad since you’re constantly having to battle the sinking feeling that no one is going to make major lifestyle changes, carbon emissions are not going to drop to stabilization levels and if there is light at the end of the tunnel it lies in either being wrong, getting lucky, or toughing it out and surviving as best we can. You can’t say this of course and so reams of paper are spent discussing targets, and options, and wedge based reductions and costs and being optimistic in general.
Unfortunately, most of us aren’t doing anything life changing and wouldn’t know it if we were. So this constant need to play up the value of research or work to gain funding, tenure, recognition, admission to b-schools, and so on is really rather silly. With which deep insight I shall return to my work. Its forgettable, certainly not life changing, very possibly wrong but still satisfying while it lasts and better than average. Definitely worth a PhD and funding for a number of years no?
*NB: As you can imagine this particular teacher never had any trouble answering questions in class.
^Ok, so this is hopelessly cynical and obviously only half true. But it is half true.
