Living with contradictions, discomfort, and anger at injustice

Introduction

Since this is my first blog post, I would like to use this to put myself and what I write in context. I am now almost 31 years old, and I work as a researcher in a scientific research institute in a prosperous Western European country. My work is broadly in the field of climate change impacts and social justice.

However, the focus of this website (and this blog) is not about my professional profile or output but rather my own thoughts. To be honest, it's not easy to disentangle my work from my personal thoughts. There is no clear boundary. The difference is rather in how I think about them.

In terms of my professional engagement, I use mathematical models to understand the land-energy-climate impacts of human decisions, policies, and actions. At a personal level, I think about the world, human society, history, geopolitics, and justice, but from a more qualitative and emotional perspective.

My journey

Early life and schooldays

It is cliche to think about life in terms of a journey, but it's also a widely understood metaphor. I was born and brought up in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. I have been deeply influenced by my family, and I've been fortunate enough to meet all four of my grandparents. Unfortunately, three of them are deceased - only my paternal grandmother is still with us. She has, and continues to be, a very important figure in my life.

But the most influential figures are my parents. My mother has a PhD in physics and taught physics in a high school for 24 years before she retired. My father has been a political journalist for all of his working life (which started very early, he dropped out of his Master's in physics and got a job at a newspaper). My mother introduced me to scientific rigor and the joy of learning. From my father I learned about the world and society. Of course, that's not all they gave me. Mostly they gave me lots of love and shelter and protection, and I had a comfortable childhood.

But my upbringing was also strict and I was expected to be studious. I was a dutiful son and student for the most part. I studied in an all-boys Catholic missionary school (mostly because the best English-language education in my time was at these schools) and while I loved learning and my friends, I did not enjoy the forced prayers and strict, almost militaristic discipline. Out of everything that I got from school, those friendships are fundamentally important. To this day those boys - now men - are my closest friends. They are the ones I can call and talk about everything.

I've always loved reading, and from a very young age I've been encouraged to read. Unfortunately, I have read far more English books in my life than Bangla books, which is why when it comes to reading and writing, my English is much better than my native language (in terms of speaking, I would put both on an equal level). During my schooldays, I mostly read science fiction. I enjoyed authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and the idea of futuristic, techno-optimistic worlds with humans spreading out across the galaxy deeply appealed to me. These books also served to fuel my starry-eyed dreams of studying fundamental physics and cosmology.

College - coming of age and freedom

After school, I got the chance to study basic science at the Kolkata branch of a prestigious chain of public education and research institutes. Although the institute contains "Kolkata" in its name, it is actually situated a bit outside the city. At the time, it took me about 2.5 hours to travel from the institute to home, door-to-door. Commuting might have been possible, but just barely, and even so would have been a massive waste of time. However, the institute offered hostels to everyone, and as a result I moved into the hostel, my first ever experience of living away from my home. The distance meant that I could go home every weekend if I wanted to, which I did for the first few months, before I became more involved in the hostel activities.

My course was a 5-year integrated Bachelor and Master program, so I was at the institute for a long time. I used the time to explore co-curricular activities such as music, drama, quiz, and sports. In classes, I quickly discovered I enjoyed some subjects very much (math, physics) and others not so much (chemistry for example). I found a pattern emerging where I put most of my effort into subjects I enjoyed and barely getting by in the others.

A lot of my friends and cohort-mates took the summer research projects seriously. I didn't. I put effort into the classes and lectures, and even then, selectively. I was (and still am) close with a few of my professors. They all observed something similar: I was bright, but I didn't put in the sustained effort needed to truly excel. I asked thought-provoking questions in class, but I didn't always have the motivation to ace the exams and perform solid research outside of the classroom.

As the semesters and years passed, I couldn't maintain the laser-focus on academics and career progression that some of my friends managed. Eventually in my 5th year, I chose to do my Master thesis at another institution, and graduated. But unlike most of my friends and cohort-mates, I didn't know what to do.

While I wasn't spending all my time on academic pursuits, I was certainly expanding my horizons through books. One of my beloved professors introduced me to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. When I read The Annihilation of Caste, I was very angry, I knew that caste-based discrimination existed, but in urban Bengali society, it stayed in the shadows, manifesting mostly in matrimonial choice. But Ambedkar's seminal work made me acutely aware of the realities of life in India. I felt like I knew only a very tiny slice of my country. Another book that left a permanent impression is Debt by David Graeber. That, and The Dawn of Everything opened my eyes to the possibility of other forms of social and political organization beyond the post-colonial nation-state order that currently exists. And finally, I read most of the Incerto cycle by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The most crucial lesson I learned from Taleb is that real life often diverges from books (and by extension, traditional academic thought). In such cases, it is more wise to learn from life than from books.

But no book could tell me what decisions to make about my own life. I spent a year at home, considering alternatives to the standard academic career path most of my friends chose. However, I didn't find anything (or maybe I didn't look hard enough). Eventually I applied to, and accepted, a PhD offer from a research institute near Vienna.

The PhD disaster

If college was my first time living away from home, Europe was my first time living away from my country. I definitely felt a culture shock. One of my college seniors had once told me that no matter how Westernized I thought I was in India, living in the West would be an entirely different experience. Moving to Europe, I felt the truth in those words. I had always imagined myself as fairly Westernized (or more precisely, Anglicized - reading English books, watching Hollywood movies, listening to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Tool rather than any kind of traditional Bangla or other Indian music). However, while those interests gave me conversation openers, they had not (and could not have) prepared me for life in Austria.

The institute I had joined was a small, cash-rich institute on the outskirts of Vienna. It had been established 10 years prior to the year I joined, and when we interviewed, it was still making a name for itself. One of the reasons I had picked this place was because they had paid to fly me (and about 200 other interviewees) out to Austria to conduct interviews in person. There, the main PR person of the institute called it the "best place to be". While it did seem to me that a truly great place to be wouldn't need to advertise itself so blatantly, I reasoned that it was a new institute, and therefore wanted to publicize itself.

From the very beginning, I felt out of place. It seemed that everybody had a plan, and a purpose. I had none. I wasn't sure what I was doing there, and my mistake (which I realized much later) was to believe that my proven aptitude in classroom learning would transfer to research.

In our first year, we were required to do three lab rotations. I did so, and ended up choosing a combination of the second and third groups to affiliate with. The principal investigators (or PIs) in question had never worked together before. That was the second mistake, choosing two supervisors who did not yet have any working relationship.

But the third and most important mistake was to commit to a PhD without a good reason why I was doing so.

The research journey started in a way that I learned later was unusual. I was given the freedom to decide my own topic of research. For many people, that would have been a blessing. I didn't know what to do with the freedom. While I did manage to come up with a topic, I lacked the experience and maturity needed to pick a good one, and ended up choosing a scientific question of very little value to anyone including myself.

At the time I was choosing a research question for my PhD, COVID was in full swing. It was my first time living abroad, and within six months of immigrating, my host country shut down. I was lonely, purposeless, and depressed.

One of David Graeber's books that I have not read, but want to, is called Bullshit Jobs. As the name suggests, the book is about unnecessary jobs. Throughout my stay at the institute, I felt my job was a bullshit job. It created absolutely no value for anyone, least of all myself. The scientific research question was ill-framed and pointless. I know this because after I dropped out, the project died with me. If it had value, some other student would have been asked to take it up.

I realized I could not live like this. In the spring of 2023, I broke down mentally. I spoke to both my supervisors and they were encouraging. Then, I had a change of heart. The prospect of being without a job terrified me and I went to them and asked to stay on. This time, my primary supervisor was not so nice.

I do not have much to say about the secondary supervisor. I had limited interaction with him while at the institute, but afterwards he helped me out a bit, for which I'm grateful.

Confusion and understanding, breaking and remaking

The summer of 2023 was eventful. At one point, my parents had to fly me home for psychiatric treatment. They were incredibly loving and supportive. Once I started medication (SSRIs), my mental health and outlook improved.

From the whole ordeal, I learned that I should have asked myself the following questions both before, and continuously throughout my PhD:

1. Why am I doing what I do?

2. Who is paying for it?

3. Who benefits from it?

I believe these questions pertain to anybody who works for a living, no matter what their job may be. At the small, cash-rich institute, only the 2nd question had a clear answer for me - my primary supervisor was responsible for funding my employment. As mentioned previously, I had no clear answer of why I was doing my work, nor who (if anyone) would eventually benefit from it.

At the time, I lacked any system of habits and discipline that might have ensured my mental peace and productivity even in the face of existential malaise and confusion. I had tried to confide in my supervisor but had been strongly discouraged. It seemed he was very sure of the value of his work.

When I had mentally recovered enough from the PhD ordeal, I started to apply for jobs in research. Most of the openings I found were PhD positions. I applied to twenty such positions. The only institution that offered me a job was my current place of employment.

Currently, I find my workplace and work very meaningful and fulfilling. But it is academic research, and I would like to contribute in other ways as well. While I am convinced of the importance of interfacing with global and international organizations such as the UN, the IPCC, and IPBES, that alone is not enough. Definitely, we need strong, globally influential institutions for international cooperation and coordination regarding issues such as climate change, biodiversity conservation, and other matters that affect the whole world. At the same time, I believe that the most meaningful change will come from the people who are most at risk. Living in comfort in one of the most "livable" cities in the world, it's easy to think of myself as playing a vitally important part in contending against the polycrisis. But I've always lived in relative comfort compared to most people in the world. Fortunately, I've had the privilege to be exposed to people living very different kinds of lives, in very different circumstances.

I've had the chance to accompany my friend (a climate journalist) to islands in the Sundarbans which are breaking away and sinking. The picture on the main page of this website was taken there, and it speaks to the hopelessness and abandonment that those people feel. Each time there is a cyclone, each time the soil erodes and the river claims more land, they are forced to break their houses apart brick by brick, move it all back away from the water, and rebuild. But the river is winning, and their island is small. Beyond the next few cyclones, the island will cease to exist.

The fate of those people is emblematic of a wider disease - the current dominant system (geopolitical, socio-economic, cultural, military, whichever of the inter-connected aspects we emphasize) is built on extraction. Naked, shameless extraction of the Earth's value, of the value of women, and the poor, the disenfranchised residents of the Global South (who comprise the majority of people in the world). This is a deep sickness. It is like a cancer, growing for the sake of growing, extracting life and value and creating a deathly world. In very literal terms, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. The Earth, abused and under constant attack, has developed a fever, which we call global warming: the increase in the global mean surface temperature. The current system is fundamentally cruel, unjust, and unsustainable, but the fear of the unknown makes us retreat further into either delusions or despair.

The worst time in my life (until the present) is when I was in the process of quitting my PhD. The fear and confusion I felt, the sheer hostility that my former supervisor had for me - all of these were unprecedented in my life. But I'm glad I lived through those. Certain parts of my being were broken, but now I am in the process of remaking them. It's a cliche that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. I'm not sure I am stronger for having faced that suffering (self-imposed and brought about my my own actions and inactions, but still suffering). But I am deeply changed for it.

The way ahead

As I near my 31st birthday, I feel it's time for me to be more intentional in terms of what I put out into the world. Based on my life journey, what I've experienced, and the mistakes that I've made, I have decided to devote more time towards creating content (I mostly envision written text, but it could also be images, videos, music, or any other media) on subjects including, but not limited to: climate change, justice, land, history, geography, linguistics, and anything I think needs to be said and there's nobody else to say it.

If you've read this far, thank you very much for visiting my website! I am in the process of building it and adding content, so please do come back from time to time :)