Why all these questions?

The following are real titles for articles in the landing page of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
Are Colleges Complicit if They Fail to Keep Students From Defaming Professors?
Why Elitism Makes Elite Schools ‘National Treasures’
Does Higher Education Perpetuate Inequality?
Can Starbucks Save the Middle Class?
What Critics of Student Writing Get Wrong
Want to Improve Your Teaching?

To which I have a question of my own: WTF?!

Whatever happened to professional publications presenting analysis and commentaries in a sober, measured, calm tone?  What is the deal with such cheap prostitution?

I suspect that we will soon see titles like in Cosmo:

Ten ways to please your dean
What color is your aura?
Seven teaching tips you definitely need
20 philosophers you forgot won the Genius Award
How YOU too can win a Genius Award
The nine best yoga poses when you are in the classroom

Btw, the aura thing is a real title--at Cosmo, not at the Chronicle, thankfully! ;)

It is awful that everything has to be catchy.  Sexy.  Else, apparently it won't "sell."  Even in academia!

As another academic year begins, I know I will be confronted by these kinds of issues.  Even more than in years past.  This dull and boring man will continue to be dull and boring, however, and continue to rant even when nobody is listening.

“There’s a level of bullshit that the culture is now embracing.”  You got that right!

If only the world had listened to me!

Many moons ago, when about this time of the year I had started planning for the migration northward to Oregon, I was scanning the local, downtown, community newsletter of sorts--I think it was called the Village News, perhaps modeled after the Village Voice.

In that, and unexpectedly, I received one of the best compliments that I have ever received.  The editor had noted my departure from the university and the town with a comment that the area was losing a public intellectual. I was pleasantly shocked.

It was all the more wonderful because it came from a person whom I had never met. This meant that she had based her comment strictly on my op-eds in the local newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian.

I knew even back in my teenage years that my life would be in the intellectual arena.  Further, I knew that I wanted my intellectual activities to be in the public, and not in some obscure office, not because of a need to be in the spotlight but because of an obsession of sorts to understand social issues and to discuss and debate with others my understanding.

But, of course, I had no idea then of a phrase "public intellectual."  It was one of the many new ideas that came to understand over the course of six graduate school years.

A couple of years ago, a student told me that he wanted to engage in the kind of public discussion of ideas like how I do, and asked me for suggestions on how he could go about it.  That stumped me.  I had no idea what the formula is.  I agree with the author here:

The phrase has come to mean an academic who occasionally addresses a general audience, as if all academics were intellectuals, and some of them were also public ones. In fact, academics and intellectuals are antithetical types. An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”

I love that description of "years of undisciplined preparation."  I might never have come up with that phrasing, but that has exactly been my life until now.  Undisciplined preparation. 

The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates. As Kazin also said, an intellectual is someone for whom ideas are “instruments of salvation.” Becoming one requires a little more than setting up a blog.

Indeed.

Engaging the public has been far more productive in terms of creating and sharing knowledge, than my formal scholarship can ever be.

Back in graduate school, I was cautioned against gong this route by one of my graduate school professors.  Jim Moore applauded my passion for this approach, but warned me that academia would care only about the formal academic inquiries via the publish-or-perish peer-review process, though they would certainly get jealous about any notoriety that I gained from my approach.  Jim was, and is, correct.  But, it would not be me, and not my life, if I did anything other than what I wanted to do.  I carried on with my Quixotic tilting at windmills.

Every time I visit India, my father asks why I don't write for the Indian newspapers.  I have found it difficult to explain to him that the op-eds in the newspapers there are not the kind of the public intellectual discussions that I favor.  Often they are filled with jargon, written by experts and not by intellectuals.  The writings often seem to have an undertone of the specialist having decided that the ignorant public needs to be educated with his/her expert opinion.  As if the public policy issue would be solved, and solved easily, if and only if the public listened to that expert.  That does not strike me as the role of the public intellectual. 

There is so much to talk about ... never has there been a better time.  It will also be nice though if people listened to me! ;)

Assholes-R-Us

Academic conferences are more than merely for intellectual exchange.  They are also where we network, we connect with people, get energized by younger colleagues doing amazing work, ... and also get to hear horror stories from other campuses.  It is like a big counseling camp ;)

After listening to one of those horror stories, I shared one of my favorite comments about faculty: A significant percentage of them, if they were not in higher education institutions, would be locked up either in mental institutions or in penal institutions.  This is one way that society keeps antisocial assholes locked up.

Most academics do not seem to want to systematically develop within themselves two virtues that mean a lot to me--empathy and kindness.  Bullying, being a jerk, and engaging in immoral and illegal activities perhaps happen more in academia than elsewhere.  If you do not want to believe me, read this essay, where the author notes:

In a popular 2013 post, “Academic Assholes and the Circle of Niceness,” Inger Mewburn, who blogs as “The Thesis Whisperer,” considered whether jerks really do get ahead in academia. Relying upon Robert Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Mewburn notes the advantages of being an asshole — someone who pursues his or her own career with ruthless dedication while stepping on and over others. More than that, unkindness is viewed as a signifier of intelligence and kindness as a signal of intellectual weakness. Academia rewards those who represent the clever and cruel version of intelligence. So nasty behavior gets reinforced. Jerks admire other jerks, and departments and institutions can become havens for assholes. 

You see how much milder my language is in comparison with the words in that paragraph? ;)

Assholes abound in academia.  Which is why if students find out that I am a good listener, I end up being their counselor.  

Apparently the absence of kindness is a part of the larger culture in which (if you want, channel Trump here) only "losers" show kindness:

According to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor, kindness “has become a forbidden pleasure.” In their 2009 book, On Kindness, they explore how kindness has emerged as trivial, corny, and/or silly rather than a crucial component in our social interactions. Simply put, kindness has a bad rap. They write: “Most people, as they grow up, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers.” We think people who act kind are weak or are only acting that way to further their own interests. Kindness actually makes us suspicious of other people’s intentions. 

Could there be a particular reason for empathy and kindness to be looked down upon in academia?

Part of the problem is that kindness gets associated with emotion while ideas and intellect go together. That dualism, they write, is “a philosophically thin account of what it means to be human.”

 Many academic philosophers--who are the ones we think of as contemplating what it means to be human--are also some of the most bitter, sarcastic, condescending assholes that I have met.  Recall this post on assholes in which I cited a book by a philosopher; I bet the author ran into way more unpleasant experiences with assholes than he ever wanted to write about.

We are now so much used to people behaving badly, and we so much expect the other to be nothing but an asshole, that we think that one acting with kindness has some devious agenda.  Hey, this is what progress is!

The question is more important than the answer

As much as I was effortlessly earning the high grades in math and science--high marks, as it was referred to in the old country--I knew even during my high school days that my career would not be in anything related to science and technology. I knew there was something missing, but I did not know what it was.

Decades have passed since those angst-filled days and months of what I wanted to do.  I am now one of the lucky few on this planet who does what truly interests me and I get paid for it!  Yet, I doubt that I could have clearly articulated in a couple of sentences like the following from Alan Lightman:

At any moment in time, every scientist is working on, or attempting to work on, a well-posed problem, a question with a definite answer. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.
But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. … For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer.

 It is that wonderful ambiguity of life, of humanity, of this world, that has always fascinated me.  Even in this fascination, I am not at all keen about the answer. Instead, I just want to be breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

So, yes, the questions themselves are immensely more exciting than to figure out what the answers are because, after all, the answers are what we end up trusting to be the answers.  We love somebody more than we do any other person because ...?  We love a certain music more than other types of music because ...?  Or the god we prefer. Or the place we prefer. There is simply no single answer, right?  You come up with your own answers, fully aware that you chose one answer out of a gazillion.  How fascinating!

More from Lightman:

We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing.

My greatest concern and worry, from my pedagogical perspective, is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.   The humanities, as we refer to them in the academic world, are increasingly marginalized, in favor of intellectual inquiries that drive towards definitive answers.  And then the academics themselves are making the situation even worse by offering courses that have very little, if any, for students to contemplate on, writes the ever blunt Heather Mac Donald:

Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. ...
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. 

I recall one student who angrily asked me, back when I was the director of the Honors Program, why he had to read some dead people's philosophical works from centuries ago, and why we compel students to take such courses.  Contemporary higher education legitimizes such grievances from students, who are the customers who bring in the money, and then offers courses where students can supposedly understand the ambiguity that life is by watching contemporary movies!

Heather Mac Donald puts it well:

We have bestowed on the faculty the best job in the world: freed from the pressures of economic competition, professors are actually paid to spend their days wandering among the most sublime creations of mankind. All we ask of them in return is that they sell their wares to ignorant undergraduates. Every fall, insistent voices should rise from the faculty lounges and academic departments saying: here is greatness, and this is your best opportunity to absorb it. Here is Aeschylus, whose hypnotic choruses bear witness to dark forces more unsettling than you can yet fathom. Here is Mark Twain, Hapsburg Vienna, and the Saint Matthew Passion. Here is the drama of Western civilization, out of whose constantly battling ideas there emerged unprecedented individual freedom and unimagined scientific progress.
Instead, the professoriate is tongue-tied when it comes to promoting the wonders of its patrimony. These privileged cowards can’t even summon the guts to prescribe the course work that every student must complete in order to be considered educated. Need it be said? Students don’t know anything. That’s why they’re in college, and they certainly don’t know enough to select courses that will give them the rudiments of culture. The transcripts that result from the professoriate’s abdication of its intellectual responsibility are not a pretty sight, featuring as many movie and video courses as a student can stuff into each semester. 

Her clearly articulated sentences, and the reference to Mark Twain, remind me about this that I read earlier today:

As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Maybe I should end this post, which is already way too long, with another set of wonderfully chosen right words, which together further drive home the point about the ambiguity of life. Here is a poem by Oregon's own William Stafford, whose birth centenary was the front page story of our local paper:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

A winter evening in my part of the world

Sometimes, it is just Dumb Luck!

As much as we might believe that it is up to ourselves to figure out what we want to do in life, and how we would like to be remembered, we can't forget that one piece in this: dumb luck.

Take, for instance, my return to academia.  There I was an unhappy transportation planner, when all I wanted to do was to be engaged in a world of ideas. Academia.  Years went on. One became two and quickly it became my fifth year there and I got one of those dull and boring form-letter style certificate of appreciation.  I worried that I would die young from not enjoying what I did.

One day, an intern, Robert, who was working on his undergraduate degree at the local university after a stint as an army officer, asked me whether I would be interested to guest-lecture at one of the classes he was in.  Based on our conversations, he apparently decided to suggest that to his professor, but wanted to check with me first.

As a colleague used to say, I simply wait for opportunities to exercise my lower jaw and I bet I said "yes of course, yes!!!"

A week later I guest-lectured.

A month later, I was an adjunct professor teaching a course in the evening.

Two terms of adjunct teaching later, I had a tempting offer to work there as a non-tenure-track full-time lecturer and direct an interdisciplinary major.

Two years after that, I had the job offer from Oregon.  It has been eleven years at Oregon now!

Dumb luck, don't you agree?

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

What does it mean to be human?

The introductory class that I am teaching this term made me wonder and question, yet again, what exactly higher education is about.  

I have noticed over the past couple of years that students get a lot more focused when we discuss the economic rationale behind why anything that can be outsourced will be outsourced, and why activities that can be automated will be automated.  It is understandable--students immediately see the link between the concepts and their own lives and futures.

From the back row, a student’s hand went up.  "If robots do our work, then what happens to finding our purpose in life through work?  What about human interactions?"  Her voice seemed laden with emotions.

When it comes to such questions on what it means to be human, students know what my answer will be.  With a smile, I remind them that those questions are beyond the scope of the course in economic geography, and that I hope they would  take courses in the humanities and the social sciences to understand such important issues.

Technological advancements, which are difficult to keep up with anymore, will raise challenging questions on what it means to be human.  Even now, most public policy questions that we are grappling with are all variations of that very question.  The examples are endless and include abortion, healthcare, social security, unemployment benefits, and war. Technological advancements will only further muddy the issues.

Our responses to each and every one of the public policy issues depend on our own constructs of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to a society and to a country.  Above all, what it means to be one of the more than seven billion humans on this wonderful planet.

One would imagine that education, especially at a level beyond high school, would prepare adults for such inquiries.  Unfortunately, that is rarely the case, for at least two important reasons.

The first is the simplistic formulation that higher education is about economic betterment.  Hence, for instance, all the rah-rah for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and professional-sounding majors.  This is flawed for a number of reasons, especially when we think about the fact that these jobs are subject to those same outsourcing and automation dynamics. I should note in this context that my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering.

The second reason that students do not get to systematically think about these questions is because colleges and universities have practically abandoned those in their curricular offerings.  On their part, students typically treat the humanities and social science requirements of a liberal education to be nothing more than items on a checklist to be completed on their way to getting the diploma.  In order to attract the uninterested students, academia has gone after making courses “attractive” to them. My favorite, of the ones I have come across in the news, is a course on Lady Gaga.  It will require quite some effort on a student's part to use that course as a vehicle to understand what it means to be human!

The result is that I doubt whether students will really have enough structured opportunities to think through the kind of important questions that the student raised.  If this is how we "educate" students and prepare them for the rest of their lives that begin with Commencement, then what have we really accomplished?

In academia, it is "I publish, therefore I am" and not Cogito ergo sum?

In case you hadn't noticed, I was off my daily blogging ritual--I was away from home and work at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.

One of the sessions that I attended was about achieving learning outcomes by having students make use of the different technologies that are at our fingertips these days--videos, Twitter, ... This is something that I am always interested in, but unable to incorporate for the same reasons that I articulated during the Q/A which was something like this:

I think terms like "digital natives" to describe the youth who seem to be at ease using the gadgets is incorrect.  They are merely consumers.  And, by using terms like "digital natives" we assume that students can easily transition from being consumers of information to becoming producers of knowledge.  But, that is not the case.  In fact, it has become much harder for students to become producers of knowledge and education is quite a challenge to make them producers.

The presenter agreed with me and explained why, therefore, he thinks training will be required.  But, that is not what this blog-post is about.

After the session ended, one of the other presenters at the session walked across to me and expressed her pleasure in me having used those phrases of producers and consumers of knowledge.  "Do you have any ongoing research on this, and have you published anything?"

"I don't have any formal research work into this issue" I replied.

Later at lunch, while conversing with another geographer, when she referred to Tanzania, I told her that I was there about three years ago.  "I was in something like the south central part of the country" I said and described the location of Pommern and Iringa as best as I could without a map.

"I went there to better understand this whole idea of volunteer tourism because my feeling is that while it does the volunteer a great deal of good, it doesn't do much to the community in terms of building institutions that can generate self-sustained growth and development" I explained.

"That is exactly what one of my students wants to study" she said with excitement.  "Have you published your findings?"

This time, I was not polite in my response; so, what's new!

"I think most of the academic publishing is crap" I replied.  "I did write a few newspaper columns related to it."

In academia, it is all about publications.  Even if nobody ever reads them.  As I remarked in my essay from twelve years ago in The Chronicle Review, against this extreme fascination for everybody to talk even when nobody is listening, my dissertation adviser once commented that perhaps an average of six people read his articles, and that includes the peer editors!

It is a crazy world in which we publish articles for the sake of publishing articles.  In that world, I simply do not exist.  Sriram who?  Because I don't publish.

Any day, I prefer cogito ergo sum.

A few of my fellow-volunteer tourists at work in Tanzania, 2009

Why write? I would rather not do anything else!

Over the years, I have come to understand how much I have lucked out in being in the profession in which I am, because there is nothing else that I would like to do, even if I were paid a gazillion dollars.  Being here means that I do not have to literally, nor metaphorically, drive around with a bumper sticker along the variations of "I'd rather be ..."

It also means that I find it difficult anymore, to say the least, whenever students approach me with questions on what they might want to do.  I would like to honestly tell them, "it is your life and you need to figure that out, and I have no idea what truly gets you going." 

I suspect that most people I interact with in academia do not truly want to be here.  When colleagues complain about their work, or how they are looking forward to the end of the term, or how they "survived" another week of class, I imagine that they, too, like most people on the planet, have trapped themselves in a "I'd rather be ..." world.

I, unlike those colleagues who are always dreaming of a great escape, look forward to going to classes. To help students understand and interpret the world. To listen to students getting excited about being constructive. So much so that as the academic year draws to a close, I get a depressing sense of "it is all coming to an end." 

In leading such a life, I blog and write opinion pieces for newspapers. I do it more for myself, and rarely for anybody else.  I do these because, well, I would rather not do anything else.  The feedback I get from friends and strangers is a fantastic bonus and I shall surely miss them if they stopped coming.  But, a lack of feedback will not stop me from writing either.

Perhaps it is an addiction?

Writing has always been a pleasure for me—a way to channel a disorderly world into an orderly form. And yet, as with any palliative, writing has an addictive aspect. I often tell my writing students that this comes with the territory. If you want to make writing a career, it must be a compulsion. It must be something that you cannot not do. 

Nope, it is not an addiction as much as it is simply a reflection of who I am.  Like being right-handed.

So, I write.

There are a lot more like me, even those who aren't losers like me, who write because we don't know anything better to do.

lots of us don’t publish… it doesn’t mean we’re wasting our time.

That was the late writer, David Foster Wallace, in a response to a request on feedback on a manuscript, advising that not getting a work published is no cause for despair.

Like most people who end up measuring themselves with the money they own, sometimes writers end up measuring themselves by their publications.  In doing so, they forget that the writing is primarily for themselves and not for others.

Writing for myself is a wonderfully enriching selfish act.

The "New Jews" of Academia

Towards the end of the doctoral study, I applied for the World Bank's Young Professional Program.  (That was a a couple of decades ago; am not sure if the Bank has it even now.)  After four rounds of filtering of the applications from all over the world, it was down to eighty candidates for interviews at Washington, DC.  From this eighty, a half would be offered entry into a career with the Bank.

I was excited to be in this group of eighty. More than anything, it was an affirmation, an external validation of sorts.  My dissertation adviser, Harry Richardson, who was a veteran consultant to the Bank, was equally happy for me.  For one, he had cautioned me early in the process that I would not even get to the final round. Not because he doubted my abilities--at least openly with me--but because there was one negative in me: I was from India.

"The Bank already has too many people from India" Harry said.  He added that quite a few applicants too would be with Indian roots, which meant that I had to be exceptionally good to become one of the final forty hires.  "It will be easier if you were from, say, even neighboring Nepal."

Well, I am no Nepali.  And it turned out that exceptionally good I was not!

To have an accidental birth characteristic held against me was not entirely new to me, however.  India had made that clear to me even before I got to high school.  My sister's dreams of joining medical school were shattered, despite her academic achievements, because of quotas that limited the intake of Brahmin students in the state's colleges.  I suppose it was one of the many early lessons on how the world isn't fair.

Being an Indian applicant at the World Bank was perhaps like being a global Brahmin, and there were quotas restricting their numbers.

Expand that to one more level and now it is "Asian."

The notion of overachieving Asians apparently triggers similar restrictive quotas.  The only difference is in the nomenclature: instead of "Brahmins" it is "Jews":

The parallels between the Jewish and Asian experiences are striking. As with the Jews who applied to the nation’s top colleges with fake names, Asian-American students applying to many colleges are encouraged to stress “non-Asian” attributes like student government, not playing the violin. Those that are half-Asian, half-white are encouraged by college counselors to list themselves as white, while the Princeton Review Student Advantage Guide warns Asian-American not to check that race box at all or send a photo. “After 10 years of [college counseling] and 4 years in Dartmouth admissions, I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think there is discrimination,” admits former admissions officer Michele Hernandez.

Why this strange discrimination?  Because, you simply cannot have too many Asian students at the prestigious colleges, can you at ?

In every state where racial preferences in college admissions have been eliminated—California, Texas, Florida—Asian-American enrollment has increased. Caltech, which refuses to consider race, is one-third Asian, while the University of California-Berkeley, barred by law from considering race, is more than 40 percent Asian. There’s little doubt (and much worry) that if the informal quotas were dropped at the nation’s top private universities and colleges, Asian-American enrollment would swell there, too.

Back in India, the argument was that the Brahmins had to, in a way, pay for the centuries of caste system that kept pushing the lowest castes and the untouchables lower and lower into the utter darkness.  There is simply no denying that the caste system was atrocious (and it is depressing that it continues to be practiced even now.)  But, through reverse discrimination, do two wrongs make a right?

At least, there was that caste-abuse explanation in India.  Here, it is not even that Asian-Americans abused their power and privilege in order to gain at the expense of others.  Nor did the Jews back then.

Oh well.  Whoever said the world is far, eh!

Personally, I am thankful that I didn't get into the World Bank--I am sure I would have had a tough time marching to my own drumbeat that is almost always at rhythms very, very different from the Bank's.  Maybe it was a good thing I was from India, and not Nepal!