I give a pat on my own shoulder

In my long academic journey of forty years as college/ university teacher I spent nearly a quarter century in different colleges, which of course included four years stay at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics for M.Phil and PhD studies in Pune.That was a wonderful golden period in my academic life. Beyond the narrow confines of Ph.D. project, I had wended into an extensive reading and hence the completion and submission of PhD thesis was delayed for more than a decade.

It was only during the mid 90’s I joined the university environment and after living and laboring here for seventeen years I gave a pat on my own shoulder for having survived thus far, amidst all chaos of office politics/ campus politics; treachery and gross insensitivity towards colleagues

Indeed, a lengthy monograph on this campus politics has been under preparation and almost in a state of suspended animation for too long, given my preoccupation with academic and administrative responsibilities. The book, which is almost a collection of poems- depicting the feelings in free verse was mostly autobiographical and partly fictional and I don’t know where all those sheets are, in my academic godown.They were all written in the 90’s and also in the first half of the first decade of the millennium. At least I must locate the introductory part of that piece and post it in the blog, so that my well wishers and my beloved students would understand in what kind of emotional state, any tortured soul will find himself- be a professor or a banker, a scientist or a bureaucrat. Each sentence in that volume will echo the feeling of any persecuted and tortured soul and all the silent soliloquy that follows that would unravel the untold story of every honest and brave intellectual, locked into any unfavorable work environment but attempting to clean all the dirt and filth in the system. Any institution of higher learning, a bank or a hospital is only a miniature India, where we find petty and mean minded individuals along with some good and nobler souls, bent upon rendering wok ethics, unmindful of all kinds of unpleasant outcomes that might surface on the career graph