It’s almost that time of the year. And promises to be another year of me staying put. I so do not want that to be the case… but I have too many things cooking at the moment and cannot afford to get out of the kitchen :( ... a variety of permutations and combinations could also lead to very different tracks so again have to wait and watch and then decide… let’s see… things are going to be interesting one way or another.

I had always looked forward to one milestone (among many others) and it feels a little odd that it just passed and I haven’t really felt anything. I submitted my first co-authored paper to a journal! I guess I will feel something only when I know its fate. There are so many stories out there of papers getting rejected, taking aeons to publish, never seeing the light of the day, moving from journal to journal for a home, and so on that I suppose I want it to be low-key till I actually have something concrete underfoot.

I have been reflecting a lot of late on the question of identity. People speak of things being core to identity but I suppose identity can be pretty multi-dimensional and dynamic. There are situations when my Indianness feels very core to my identity, situations where my strong integrity does, sometimes my intellectual and reflective orientation,… it’s not this or that but everything… if you take any of these things out, I wouldn’t be me. The other day someone said something very negative about India and I felt my identity diminished, as if I needed to speak up in defence not for the country so much as for who I am. Then in another encounter someone made me feel like I hadn’t really accomplished enough or fast enough. It made me feel diminished. As if the potential invested in me that people expected me to fulfil was languishing because I wasn’t really getting on with it. All of these events coming one after another in the same space of time brought this deep reflection on identity. Of course, in principle I do subscribe to the idea that our identity cannot be determined or challenged by other people. It must be internally wired and internally driven. And yet, practically speaking, isn’t our identity thrown into the world also an attempt at projection… of who we are and therefore how we want to be perceived? If I am a person of integrity, wouldn’t it matter to me that I am also seen as such, not by every person, but in a general way? I suppose there is an interplay there in terms of who I am, how I act (in line with who I am or not), and how I want to be perceived… and a disconnect in any two could be a source of tension. If I act in a way that is not really who I think I am it causes me to reflect too. Perhaps also depends on how much value one places on consistency of character, self-reflection etc…