On the day the New Education Policy was announced, a friend texted me, “The government has finally got back at you – they’ve discontinued M...
On the day the New Education Policy was announced, a friend texted me, “The government has finally got back at you – they’ve discontinued M Phil altogether.” I was then on my second M Phil course. Unlike my students whom I had just finished teaching, I was never really keen on writing statements of purpose for possible summer internships which could add to their CVs. Dissatisfied with my job after I had finished my first M Phil, I had decided to apply for another one, knowing that it would hardly mean anything for my career.
More than a year into my second research programme, I had become used to the surprise by now. Why would anyone do something that would mean nothing tangible for their careers? Why trudge through an ever-increasing list of books for what people in our world call “literature review”, download PDFs, visit archives, conduct fieldwork all by yourself, often for very little money?
Researchers would find it hard to describe this to others in normal circumstances, but how does one explain this during a pandemic? No wonder we’d like to return cross-eyed from social media posts to the PDF we had taken a break from. When we like...
