Recommended Reading and Viewing

….Part of the problem for academics is the mythology of their career is not celebrated to an even reasonably comparable degree as that of the professional athlete. On my first day of graduate school one of my professors said, “Congratulations on being accepted to the program. While most people will not understand it, you have one of the greatest jobs one the planet. People are going to pay you to think, and I think that is pretty cool.”

I think it is pretty cool too, and while at face value that statement no better reflects the reality of graduate school anymore than Summer Catch reflects the realities of the Minor League baseball system, it is an important to remember what an academic career is really about: to be one of the world’s best thinkers, period. The original article attacking academia never considers this point, and rather places doctoral research as any other kind of on-the-job training. The fact is, there are very few people who will successfully navigate their graduate program and be hired as a tenure-track faculty, and even fewer who will go on to be successful academics. It is an environment where a very specific set of goals blended with unique intellectual, interpersonal and labor skills are needed to flourish, not unlike many other highly specialized careers.

Pundita –The ghost

….The true Pakistan is a ghost, a ghost of the British Empire at its most glorious.Westerners can understand, I think, what the most informed Indians already know: that without the help of the ruling families who supported the British enterprise in India the British couldn’t have lasted there as long as they did. The ruling families were the British Raj. So it was a symbiotic relationship, not a parent-child one, a relationship that created a lifestyle of timeless order.

The order was an illusion, just as an unsinkable ship is an illusion, but that was seen only when the British could no longer afford to maintain the illusion. Yet the illusion was so powerful that Pakistan’s rulers didn’t see Partition as abandoning the motherland: they would go on ruling, as they had always done, and the mighty British Empire would continue to remain their protector. The second great European war was a blip, as the first great European war had been; the British would bounce back and everything would continue as before.

When the illusion vanished Pakistan’s ruling families were left with the outward forms, the mannerisms of Pax Britannica: cricket matches, marching bands, a patronizing contempt for Hindus, high tea. That’s what they gave up the motherland for and they know it. That’s why it could take Pakistan’s ruling families another generation before they’re able to let go of a past that is more real to them than anything around them today.

That’s it.

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