New Scenarios

One of the things we recognise as we grow older, is that time has a different connotation. When we are young, we have so many responsibilities. For women, particularly, the day unfolds with a myriad things to do, as they are responsible for the routines of the house and all who belong to it, or are passing through. Every day is marked by a need to perfection, and we bungle along in our 20s feeling that we have to keep integrated, keep everyone happy. There is a startling sense of solitude, because others are intent on the same task. As Ph.D. students, we find that the world begins to close in on us. We meet our friends, fleetingly as we run to one errand or another. The isolation of the Phd student is a well known factor, for the gang life of the M.A and M.Phil is over, and now they have to prove themselves by original work. For social scientists, this is hard. There has been so much that has been written on any subject, that making a dent in the discipline is impossibly hard, and yet, it is the only way that they can write about what they are inspired by.

Now that I am in my 60s, and look at the young people around me, I recognize that their challenges are much harder than mine. The milieu is such, that the State,  actually imagines that academics when employed in state run institutions,  are government servants.  It is true that the older generation does have the privileges of  free speech and medical benefits, pension and so on, but the abilities and orientations of academics  as a tribe are  generally different. An academic is someone who recognizes the importance of freedom of thought and ideas. A bureaucrat recognizes that responsibility to the institution he serves is paramount, he or she must deliver to the people, and explain to the politician that his/her wishes are subservient to the order that he serves.

Now, the problem with politicians is that they come and go. They recognize this, and it makes them nervous. Bureaucrats who serve politicians, rather than the constitutionally bound statutes of the sovereign republic are even more nervous, because they are bound to the whims and fancies of the orders they receive from the political party and its representatives. The documentation of their anti constitutional activites are now recorded so steadily by multimedia that we have no cause to fear that they go unnoticed or unrecorded.

The output of a Ph.D. student depends on many factors. For a Sociology student, the very preoccupation with finishing on time is the only marker of his success. If he or she misses the date of submission, then the work of the last eight years is gone! The problem with our bureaucrats and politicians is that they are so overwhelmed with the success of the West in the indexes of everything, but human rights, they spend all their time trying to imitate them. So by taking away the flexibility of the time that a doctoral candidate can have, the student is constrained to a new way of doing things. The first thing that goes for the Sociologist in the new system is of course time spent in the field. The old battle between deduction and induction, time honoured in terms of the pressure to use questionnaire methods within four months, rather than interview schedules running into a year and a half of interactions, which in turn,  can change the relationship between the social scientist and the respondent, is probably the most vivid aspect.

The discussion on the  ethnocide of marginal communities, the push toward structures which can only be supported by electricity, the inability to accept that farming communities must not be brought under industrialised systems of farming, but must have the support to grow food for themselves and the market, is now continually on the anvil.  Ofcourse, that there is no water, and that electricity is always desired but one of the most vulnerable of resources,  complicates the story somewhat. The Death of the Village is now so elaborate a myth, that it fuels the desire to move the entire rural population out, and have planet earth emptied of its native populations, so that a chosen class of people can survive the impending meteor crash. advertised by NASA. Because ideologies, Left, Right or Centre, push for industrialization, they mark indigenous populations as not in synchrony with the race to keep up with the West. The West itself is rethinking its orientation towards industrialization by marking out the East as the site of its sweat shops. Whether it is human labour, or the garbage and industrial waste disposal systems,  the site of praxis constantly moves Eastward.

All of this means that the  social science Ph.D. student has to rethink the parameters of his/her own commitment to understanding what the present is. It is constantly changing, and the reflexivity of people and occupations depends on the right to life. By taking away the academic’s preoccupation with changing structures and social dynamics, by fixing him or her to clock time, and office hours and a notion of governmentality that is contract bound, the singular ability to think outside of the box is threatened. What is required now is to understand why a new army of ideologically influenced university bureaucrats  think that because they are representative of a new world order which smacks of authoritarianism and hierarchy, they really think that the academic can be boxed in.

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