Keeping the head down

Several years ago, I started my first faculty position. Like many others in this position, I faced a wide variety of situations for the first time: developing an independent research programme on my own, balancing research and teaching with service duties, being responsible for students as their advisor, juggling administrative committee work and learning to interact with colleagues (the nice ones as well as the not-so-nice ones). While navigating this new territory, I learnt a lot of things, made progress, but also slipped, faltered, took wrong turns, not infrequently. In sore need of an outlet to express and make sense of it all, I started writing this blog pseudonymously.  The blog found a handful of readers [mostly young postdocs in North America], who engaged regularly.  For a year or so, I don't think that anyone outside of this small group knew about it. My colleagues certainly had no idea.

Then, thanks to a rather kind post by Professor Abinandanan from IISc (the author of Nanopolitan, one of the most popular academic blogs in India), this blog suddenly saw an exponential increase in engagement by an Indian audience who could more easily relate to what I was writing about.  Blogging became an enjoyable activity amidst the isolation imposed by being at a temporary campus of a new institute in rural West Bengal.  I continued to document several experiences, including the move to IISER Pune and starting all over again.  By then, it no longer made sense to keep the blog "anonymous".   

The blog was updated for a few more years, but I started falling short of generating genuinely new posts. As I grappled with professional challenges that I was no longer comfortable talking about, this blog started turning into a repository for posts written for other portals as well as guest posts or links to posts by other academics on topics such as science communication, outreach etc. Occasionally, I resorted to writing Scoopwhoop type of posts as well. This was also a time when many people were gravitating towards Twitter for social media interaction and this seemed sufficient for my "self-expression" needs as well.  So, sometime in 2017, this blog was taken offline without much ado. This time seemed appropriate to simply "keep my head down" and focus completely (and silently) on professional goals and challenges.  

Keeping one's head down has many advantages: there is an entire category of Yoga asanas called "Inversions" that emphasize on keeping your head down (more technically, keeping your head below the heart).  The "harder" inversions include shoulder stand, head stand, elbow stand and the hand stand.  Our Yoga instructor ensures that we perform some inversions in every class and also encourages us to incorporate them in our daily practice.  Apart from physical benefits such as improving balance and core strength, learning and practising these asanas also helps to strengthen concentration and mental stability (for obvious reasons: doing a head stand with a distracted mind is not recommended and an inversion can only be held as along as the mind is stable). When she started introducing these asanas in our classes, my first reaction was that of fear. But, we were taught to build our strength step by step. We started off by taking support from props (eg, for the head stand, one learns to position oneself in a door space or between two walls in a narrow corridor).  Then, as core stability improved and the fear reduced, we started requiring fewer and fewer props. Some of us can now do a complete head stand without any wall support, while some require a wall to position their heels. Each member of the class has had a unique learning curve and learning pace in this regard.  Some of us, who would feel dizzy at the very thought of placing the head down, can now hold a head stand for several minutes.  We got here by not giving up and by staying regular with our practice.  In moments of weakness, our instructor ensured that we did not give up. What's more, in this class of responsible adults, we learnt to focus on our individual asana practice without the need to diminish that of the others or comparing ourselves to others.

This has so many analogies with an academic journey.  An academic career (any career, really) is impossible without learning to "keep one's head down".  We build up our "core" research programmes by focusing on our own work and by pushing ourselves forward, one step at a time.  Proper administrative structures and peer support at the workplace provide us with the "props" to do so.  In moments of weakness, some of our colleagues inspire us to continue the journey by providing mentorship or in some cases, by simply lending an ear . With these in place, we just need to stick to our programmes quietly and for long enough without comparing ourselves to anyone else.  Then, we realize one day how far we have come and how much strength we have to move further ahead.  We learn to appreciate our own expertise without diminishing that of our colleagues. Anxieties and fears get replaced by a sense of balance. 

These are some lessons I have learnt in the last four years.  So, the blog is ready to go up again. What occasion better than our 75th Independence Day to do so?