When success sucks

A recent conversion with a colleague hinged on women in academia who are single. Although this conversation was based on anecdotal evidence, I would love to collect data to examine some evidence-based trends someday.

Back to the conversation, we felt that there are far more single women than men in academia- women who have faculty or non-faculty careers, women who are highly educated. In the US, I see so many women academics roughly my age who are single. Conversations with more men (those who are highly educated as well) confirm what some of them want- women with jobs but not necessarily careers, women who will have the mindset to shift cities or countries or continents or careers. That is why, perhaps, I see so many Indian men making their annual pilgrimage to get married to someone living in India, but the reverse is so rare- a guy moving with the uncertainty that he may or may not become gainfully employed in the US right away. Count the number of women you know who got married and hence moved to the US, and the number of men who did the same. Not to mention that we shared sad, yet funny stories about women who have been called "too educated," "too independent," "too liberal," and "too ambitious." The same traits like ambition, independence, and education that make men attractive may not have the same magic effect on women. Then again, we are speaking anecdotally here, and trends always have outliers. So for every ten or hundred women who have experienced similar things, one of them will always say that the world is not as bad as we think and they did not have any problems finding their suitable boy or having to choose between a suitable degree and a suitable boy.

This reminded me of a fictitious short story I had written sometime back.

The matrimonial ad said- “PhD, research professor, based in the US.”

“How many responded?” she asked.

“Three hundred,” he said, sipping his coffee.

“How many responded?” he asked.

“Three,” she said. “A schizophrenic, an unemployed man, and you.”

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Impostor Syndrome

“I am a fraud and they will soon find out.”

I have always wanted to research more about impostor syndrome (a psychological trait in which people do not believe in their accomplishments). This is because I know that I secretly suffer from it. It is a fear that comes on accomplishing something, that perhaps it was not deserved, and perhaps someone made a wrong judgment, and soon, everyone will find out that you are not as bright as they think you are. There is abundant literature about how women in higher education feel it all the time. It often comes from not having enough self-confidence, sense of worth, or mentors and role models who are like you (racially, gender-wise, etc.).

Although I suffer from it, I am now consciously aware of it, so that whenever such thoughts cross my mind, I make an effort to dispel such fears. But that was not the case few years ago. When I first moved to the US, it was to study at a top-ranking university in my field. I have always believed that I was perhaps not their first choice, and someone must have decided not to move to Seattle, and hence I got admission. It may or may not be true, but that is not the point. It shows how I never had the conviction that I could be somebody’s first choice.

Then when I got another acceptance for a PhD four years later, in a public ivy school very well known internationally, I had the same sinking feeling once again. I thought that they saw my previous school’s credentials and assumed that I am good, but they do not know that I am not that competent. I write this with a lot of sadness. I struggled through the fear that someday, my adviser would find out that I was ordinary, and be utterly disappointed.

I finished my PhD in 3 years. In 33 months actually. This shows that it had nothing to do with my mediocrity or luck. It was all hardcore hard work and dedication. The problem is that I did not believe enough in myself.

I have often wondered why I had such fears. Interestingly, I never had that fear in India. It started when I moved to the US. Also, I have this fear only with things related to my career. For my personal achievements, I don’t give two hoots about success and failure. But when it comes to career achievements, I feel that there is too much at stake. I wonder when and how I developed such a uni-dimensional trait. Think about it, I have achieved everything based on my abilities, and not any backing. I had no Godfathers in the field. Every college admission, every job I got was because of my own abilities. My advisers wrote me recommendation letters, but none of them used their contacts to get me a job. I have often asked myself, “Then why?”

With time, I grew conscious about it. So every time I would see myself achieving something and belittling my achievements, I would check my thoughts. It might have to do with personal identity. In the US, I never had role models who are like me. What do I mean when I say, like me? I mean, single, Indian, immigrant female. When I met immigrants, they were not single. When I met single women, they were not immigrants. And if they are single and immigrants, they are male. Your personal identity goes a long way in shaping how you see, or do not see yourself. I wish that instead of feeling what I felt, I told myself that yes, I deserve to be here, in this field, succeeding and making a name for myself, and I am not going anywhere.

So why am I writing this? Because I did the same thing today. My dissertation has been selected as among the top three in the US, in my focus area. I was not expecting it at all. So my first sub-conscious thought when I read the congratulatory email was, “They must have sent me the email by mistake.” Immediately, I checked my thoughts. I realized that once again, I was letting myself be a victim of impostor syndrome. None of the selection committee members know me personally, and it is impossible that they are doing me a favor by giving me this recognition. I have been selected in the top three, but they give only one award. So next month, they will let me know if I won it. It is a big honor. Yet momentarily, I forgot about all the hard work and dedication I put in my dissertation. I forgot how I strove to be the best, and produced a quality manuscript. Writing a 300 page document was no fun, but I forgot all about it. Instead, all I thought was, “Perhaps they sent me the email by mistake.” Later, I was pretty mad at myself for feeling that way. The conscious, saner side of me was rebuking the darker side for belittling my achievements all the time. It is as if I am my own enemy, seldom recognizing that I am capable of reaching professional milestones.

So this is for all of you like me, who suffer from impostor syndrome. Believe in what you achieve, and do not attribute your success to anything other than your own hard work. And learn to celebrate your success. It is so important, although I am guilty of not doing it. 

On a different note, I always felt bad that I do not have an "Awards" section in my CV. I have never really won any awards, barring winning a science quiz in the sixth grade (that I participated in because I had a crush on one of the boys), and a Sanskrit calligraphy competition in the seventh grade. I often eyed the awards section of my colleagues' CV with greed. You can imagine, being selected the top three was equivalent to winning the Miss. Universe crown for me (and I did not even have to lie about how I am going to save the planet, and donate all my money to the needy).  

They will let me know next month. If I win, I will be presenting my research at the conference in a few months. And even if I do not win, I get to start a new “Awards and Honors” section in my CV, and add a line there. I’m almost tempted to do a happy dance as I write this.

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In press

            Today, I signed the agreement form for my paper, the first one to be published where I am the first author. And while I should be doing a victory dance, tap dance, lap dance, any kind of dance, I feel neither happy, nor sad.

            I had written this paper two summers ago, and ever since, it has seen multiple rejects. The reviews were pretty harsh every time, and I still vividly remember the first time it was rejected. Call it professional naivete, but I had a misconception that this was a great paper, my first and best brainchild, and should not have been rejected. I cried, consulted, went and talked to people about their first rejections, and some of them said that they still have papers sitting on their shelves that have never seen the light of the day (and probably never will). My heart sank.

            Since then, I pledged that I will try my best to get it published. I gave it a few months of break, and took a stab at it with renewed vigor. I rewrote it almost entirely, added some more data analysis, and emotionally distanced myself from it, my theory being that things happen when you detach yourself from the expectation of outcome. Not entirely scientifically proven, but I believe that if you can actually distance yourself sufficiently from an outcome (and not just pretend that you have distanced yourself), your failures will stop bothering you, and even if they don’t see fruition, you would have stopped caring by then. And then last April I went to San Francisco for a conference, met an editor (another reason why you should not spend time sightseeing during conferences), and things fell in place. After five more months of back and forth correspondences and editing, it finally got accepted. It might not be in one of my dream journals, but it is still something worth a few lines on my CV. And by now, I have matured enough to know that this paper is not my best work either.

            All this makes me think about the futility of using the number of publications as a productivity measurement currency in academia. Years go by from the time you conceive an idea in your head to the time you see it in print. The process is arduous and painstaking, to say the least. I am not even considering fraud where someone in the lab steals your idea or takes undue credit. And then we critique other people’s papers in classes, saying they did not do it well and the study is old and will not be relevant ten years down the line. No experiment is perfect, even the world we live in is not perfect. This is social science research after all, and people change. Then what is the point of using publications as a yardstick to measure success? It takes years of mastery, rounds of edits and rejects, heartbreaks, and tears, and this research may not be relevant in the future anyway. Then why not measure a researcher’s worth using more tangible measures?

As you can see, I’m rather feeling philosophical today.  

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United (Airlines) We Stand

Dog tired. Dehydrated and feverish. Too exhausted to think and too eager to get home. The long journey had not exactly been a smooth ride. Occasional air pockets. The chicken for lunch at the airport that could be mistaken for leather. The constant fear of dying midair after reading a book about the exact mechanism by which people die during an air crash. The well built man on my left, whose occasional and unintentional brush of the femur sent faint shivers down my spine.

Long flights were not my forte. I would be too glad to reach home, ensconced in the familiar comforts of my bed. After a wait of a few hours, I was only too happy to be able to catch the last leg of my flight back home. I heard an announcement that didn’t exactly ring warning bells first. The flight was overbooked, and they were looking for volunteers to take the flight the next day. In exchange of wasting my time, they would compensate me with a travel voucher of $400, plus free accommodation for the night. Naah, the offer did not seem lucrative enough to tempt me. Spending the night in a hotel, with the knowledge that my luggage had reached somewhere before I did, and was lying unsupervised, and the hassle of clearing security again, wasn’t good enough to tempt me to volunteer to take the next flight. Why did you overbook your flight dear United Airlines? Don’t you always do it? Last time, you were going around offering almost double the amount, begging people to stop their work and be jobless enough to spend nights in hotels. Why were you so greedy?

No one volunteered. Which responsible person with work commitments would? The boarding started, and I confidently walked toward the aircraft. They scanned my boarding pass, and there, the familiar beep of the scanner was playing out of tune. This is not exactly the chord you sing in, dear scanner. They asked me to step aside, as if I was a convict. It seemed I was a few of the “chosen ones” who would not be allowed to take the flight that day. Since I did not volunteer to miss my flight, the system did a random search to see who had paid less for their tickets, or who had booked their flight long back. I was paying a price for planning my trip early enough, because that is how I paid less for my ticket according to them. This wasn’t good news.

To cut a long story short, they did several things that did not seem right. The women at the counter were curt and rude, and cared least about my work priorities. They did not oblige even when repeatedly asked about what was happening, and why was I picked not to board the flight. Wait, this gets even more interesting. My luggage was already in the plane, and the lady looked at me accusatorily when I asked if I could at least have my luggage, because I did not have any change of clothes with me, and because I was not comfortable with the idea of my bags lying unsupervised for the night. She rudely asked me if she wanted to stop the plane, take out all the suitcases, and find mine, as if I was responsible for my luggage making into the flight, when I was not allowed to. Then she just asked me to sign somewhere, and gave me a gift voucher of $400. Note, when I asked if I could have cash instead, she refused, with her “take it or leave it” tone. Basically, she was giving me a voucher to be redeemed within the next 1 YEAR ONLY on another UNITED AIRLINE FLIGHT ONLY. So if I had pneumonia and could not fly for a year, or if I decided to fly somewhere United Airlines did not fly, for example, directly to Kolkata, my voucher was doomed. I later came home and did some reading, only to understand that the customer has the right to information. Here is what their website says,

“If you are involuntarily denied boarding and have complied with our check-in and other applicable rules, we will give you a written statement that describes your rights and explains how we determine boarding priority for an oversold flight. You will generally be entitled to compensation and transportation on an alternate flight.”

Another website claims the following:

“The airlines are obligated to offer you either a travel voucher *or* cash compensation (in the form of cash or check) up to a certain value … Most people are unaware that the airlines have to give you that compensation in cash if you so wish. In fact, most gates leave off that little nugget of information in hopes you’ll simple take what they’re offering as a voucher. And most do.”

No wonder they did not bother to explain me my rights, and I would obviously not be reading stuff off the internet the moment they denied to board me.

They offered me a hotel voucher too, a hotel outside the airport. How I got to the hotel, and how much I spent on transportation, was not their headache. Thankfully, I was a few hours driving distance from home, and sometime during my life, I had done myself a favor by learning to drive. Hence I politely declined their hotel voucher, and rented a car out of my pocket. It was more important that I reached home, than stay at a hotel or at the airport for the night. I drove for the next few hours, picked up my luggage abandoned at the airport (unlike their claims that someone would keep an eye on my bags, they were lying unsupervised at the airport), and reached home long past midnight.

United Airlines, you were not flying me in for free, were you? What kind of a service was this, especially after I was denied boarding? I had heard the story of United Airlines breaking guitars (do watch the very enlightening video). If I was creative enough and had the time, I would not just write a song, I would make a movie out of the episode.

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The Big Three Ohhh !!!

You would foresee it years in advance, coming at its own slow pace like an ominous red signal prepping to stop everything fun in your life. Like a morbid, fear instigating animal sprawled on its limbs, slowly crawling and showing its claws and tentacles from a distance, you will never be more aware or petrified of something approaching. It should not be a big deal after all, it’s just another birthday. But then, it ends up being a big deal. In a way, it’s a milestone reached and crossed, a milestone after which you are no longer considered in the bracket of energetic, enthusiastic, eligible, and highly coveted age group that you call the twenties.

They say you do not hit thirty, thirty hits you. Whoever this “they” is, they could not be closer to the truth. Like a whack of reality on the head, it hits you hard. So what changes so drastically in that one day? Everything actually. You go to sleep being 29, and then you wake up the next morning not really knowing what hit your life and changed it forever. That is called turning 30.

I have been dreading this birthday even before I was 27. Call it social programming, cultural upbringing, whatever. It feels nothing close to the energetic Jitendra, white shirt, white pants, white shoes and all, gyrating his hips while playing badminton and popping those “30 plus” pills by the dozen. When I was a teenager, anyone 30 years old was just OLD. Plain and simple. When I was in my mid-twenties, I would not even look at anyone 30 years or older. Little did I know how I would feel while I approached that age.

The interesting irony is, I do not ever remember being so petrified of entering the twenties. Heck, I do not even remember my 20^th birthday. Back calculating, I know I was in Kolkata, somewhere at the fag end of my undergraduate education. However, I do not specifically remember the 20^th birthday as being a big deal or a milestone. If anything, I was happy to be done with my teens, and hoped I would be henceforth taken seriously and not be dismissed from adult conversations and asked to go entertain the kids of uncles and aunties who visited us.

So how would it feel like being 30? I thought I have two more months to find out, but I think I know the answer already. You have perhaps never been more aware of your bones creaking every time you try to shake your hips to the beats of Beedi Jalaile at a dance party. There are imminent health issues and you have suddenly entered the “more at risk” category. The acne and oily skin nightmares of the twenties are replaced now by the wrinkles and white hair nightmares of the thirties. In fact, you would be lucky to have whitening hair, which means you still have hair on your head to boast about. Some unfortunates with receding hairlines and balding issues will not even get a chance to color their hair.

99% of your friends are married by now, and you cannot relate to 99% of them. The career and job-hunting uncertainties of the twenties are now replaced by “mother-in-law is a pain in the ass” issues, “my husband never throws the trash” issues, or “the child needs to be reared well” issues. Your friends discuss alien topics animatedly, alien to you at least, which include, but are not restricted to paying off mortgages for that house, getting a citizenship, or investing in the college education of the child who is yet to be born in 3 months. Although you are in the age bracket eligible to be the president of the United States, you realize dishearteningly that you were never bright enough to be the President of any country, not in this lifetime anyway. It is a big accomplishment training the domestic partner to vacuum the house bi-monthly, let alone having big aspirations for changing the world. A moment of truth, faced with certain stark realities, you realize you have grown more respectful towards your parents, whose opinions never mattered to you before this.

Your worst nightmare is no longer related to maintaining a perfect figure, you are long past that age when you could even hope for a presentable figure. Now, you are worried about sagging bellies and mammary glands, dysfunctional hormones, plummeting sex drives, approaching menopausal issues, and imminent health issues like cholesterol, blood pressure, and cancer. You hear horror stories about someone’s colleague’s relative who died of a heart attack on his 32^nd birthday in the process of cutting the cake. Blowing 32 candles with gusto just proved to be fatal for him. Going to the gym is no longer optional, it is the only option you have if you do not want to die like that colleague’s relative. Every time you try to sit, stand, or start fantasizing about running that half-marathon, your knees make a funny sound, mocking you. Your biological clock is not longer just ticking tick tock, it has gone berserk like the shrieking alarm that wakes you from your sweet slumber every morning. You are no longer a badass hiking the rocks of Badlands in South Dakota on the weekend. You are a well-settled, domesticated member of the species with a family to shoulder the responsibility for. Accept it, you are no longer the lion or even the wolf of the jungle, hunting singularly and living singly with pride. You are now a cow, a big, fat cow that only mingles with other cows and chews cud with other cows in herds. Your belligerent personality is gone. The mountain bike has been replaced by a family size SUV, strollers and diaper bags and all. You are found spending the once adventurous weekends (when you hiked 20 miles or had 20 straight tequila shots in a row without falling sick) at the farmer’s market or at Chuck E. Cheese.

To avoid complications, repercussions, and outcries, I will keep this as gender neutral as I can, which will still not dissolve the bleak clouds of possibilities the gates of thirties open for you. You can hate me for this post, or make strong arguments, which will only establish your lack of humor, or lack of understanding of humor as you approach your thirties. And it’s not only the lack of humor. You are slowly approaching that age of hormonal lull, and these days you can fall asleep, snoring and drooling and all, even in the middle of watching porn. You are more philosophical, sedentary, hang out in packs or herds of other people similar to you, and while you spent the previous decade being a party animal dancing away to glory high on alcohol, you feel more at peace singing bhajans and devotional songs in “satsangs” and learning the art of living (pun unintended), breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, to keep expectations low, anger in control, and to adopt pain, suffering, and the lack of materialistic greed as a means to obtain nirvana in life.

I can imagine how many people I have pissed off with this post. You would argue saying, “Hey, they say 30s is the new 20s”. Whoever these “they” are, they are a bunch of morons who either failed their math class or made a life out of bullshitting. 30s can never be the new 20s, you learnt your math way back in elementary school. If anything, thirty would always be forty minus ten. So if you are an optimist like I am, your only consolation is you are not turning 40 right away, an impending doomsday that would be approaching in a decade anyway if the world doesn’t lose you to heart attacks or high cholesterol. Although I would rather be in my twenties than in my thirties, I would any day be in my thirties than be in my forties. So I’ll stop inviting the same feeling of helplessness that I get when a dentist comes near my mouth with an injection, his assistant strapping my limbs so that there is no escape and I bear my pain and torture in silence, and stop resisting something that is so inevitable. I will try to stop mentally resisting turning thirty. For I have a few more months left to cherish the last bits and pieces of my twenties, or whatever remains of it.

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Pants down Hands down

The other day while crossing the subway in one of the metro stations, I saw a man peeing 2 feet away from where people walked. Not a single person stopped to complain.

While traveling in a metro, I have found puke on the floor on 3 occasions now. Someone must have overeaten and felt unwell in the stuffed underground metro and have thrown up. While I sympathize with the person, I don’t understand how the person just got off the train and walked away without informing the authorities to ensure it was cleaned up. People made a face, but no one really did anything about it.

But what happened today surpasses everything. I was on the train when I saw a bunch of women and children get in the train. One of the women sat next to me, a toddler in her arms. A few minutes before the train started, much to the horror of everyone, the woman pulled down the child’s pants, instructing the child to pee right inside the metro compartment. The child obliged. Within minutes, there was a pool of water on the floor. The woman looked unperturbed.

People, myself included, watched in horror as the episode unfolded. I felt like retching. Unable to control myself, I confronted the woman. To which she argued about “What was I supposed to do? Get off the train? The child would have peed anyway”. People got some entertainment for the next few minutes, some even smirked and made a face. Worse, a man joined the argument, supporting the woman and alleging how I could behave so insensitively with a child. Still, not another person had spoken up. Finding support in numbers, the woman and the man (a stranger to the woman I think) kept shouting, arguing, and asking for sympathy from other passengers, asking them “How could this woman behave this way with a little child. The child had already done what she had to do, what was my fault in this”.

I haven’t gotten myself into a confrontation with strangers for a while now, and I don’t know what I could have done differently. First, it was a deliberate attempt by the mother, not an “accident” like she kept claiming to get sympathy. And to see something happening and people watching silently, having some drama and fun it in their otherwise boring life, I couldn’t imagine things have come down to this. Was I wrong in raising my voice? Could I be a silent spectator and watch as the woman instructed the child to pee right in the metro compartment? And a man, a rather creepy one indeed, telling others what an insensitive woman I was to misbehave with another woman and her child?

I wish I had taken a cab today. The reason I didn’t is because metro is fast, economic, and environmentally friendly. But is it conducive for everyone to let in people who have no civic sense? And for a society that reacts at the slightest provocation with slogans of “cholbe na cholbe na” (won’t do, won’t do), a city that has seen three bandhs in the last 3 months, for a society that is vocal and opinionated about everything from politics to football, I wonder if the people had lost their voices when I was the only one confronting the woman.

I won’t really conclude by saying something like “India has gone down to the dogs”, or “No improvement can happen in Kolkata”, and I insist you don’t do it either. Perhaps the metros should have public restrooms. Maybe such actions should be reported and heavily fined? Or maybe you could argue, “But what could the poor woman do? She cannot afford diapers, and she could not afford to get off the train”.

I don’t really know. All I can say is, I am deeply disappointed and disturbed.

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Death and its Manifestations

All this while, I was under the impression that Charlie had died a natural death. That one fine morning, he was discovered breathing no longer. Today I came to know that Charlie was euthanized. He had an abnormally enlarged liver, water retention in the belly, had stopped eating or moving, and it was suggested that he be euthanized than suffer. And that got me thinking about a lot of related things about death.

I know this debate of death versus euthanasia is an old one. In fact the various manifestations of death- natural, accidental, suicide, euthanasia, abortion, come with their own set of ethical issues. Of course there is nothing to do for a person who dies naturally, or has an accident. But does a person have as much right to not live as he has the right to live? Is it ethical to end someone’s life who is already in a vegetative state and cannot make decisions of his own? Is it okay to give birth to a baby if one is not ready for it? I do not know the answers to these questions.

What I know is that it must have been really tough for G to decide to euthanize Charlie, making a decision to end someone’s life who you have loved dearly, who has been with you for years, even knowing that this would lessen the suffering. It must have been hard to hold him for the last time before giving him away, knowing that he will never be seen again. It is a depressing thought. I am sure it was a good decision to end Charlie’s pain. But if I was her, would I have the courage to do it? I do not know.

Death in all its manifestations is a concept that still remains fascinating to me. After all, it is more I do not know about than I know about.

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