I was wondering about why I have so little to share on my blog these days. I think it’s the lack of anything going on in one’s life with the way things are. You don’t expect anything out of the ordinary to occur in video meetings, you don’t really hang around anywhere waiting to catch any drippings of gossip, you don’t go to the office and bump into colleagues to exchange long drawn out complaints… it’s like life is at a standstill. I actually can’t believe it’s almost December because time seems to have stopped for the last many months. My dear readers are aware that this is the time I would be preparing to go home and starting to get moony-eyed by the thought of home… but it looks like this year I will be spending Christmas alone. The prospect makes me sad when I dwell on it… which is why I try not to…

I was working on something for the past few weeks that made me think a bit more deeply about how my gender and ethnicity influence the outcomes I achieve in my life, or in other words, how the cards are stacked against me in this regard. It’s not that I have never thought about this but it’s always been more at a subconscious level. For instance, when I first introduce myself as a tutor to a class I am extremely conscious of how I might be judged. I wonder how the students perceive me and a large part of this perception analysis draws from my racial and gender identity. I feel like I might be perceived as not good enough on first impression or that I need to prove myself or my worth against whatever impression they have of me… all because I am an Indian woman. I imagine that some identities do not experience this sense of being judged as someone with lower worth or face this challenge of having to prove their worth. It’s as if they are taken to be good enough at face value, and because they don’t have to really do anything to earn this good impression except be who they are, it’s not so difficult to sail through. However, for those of us who are not the receivers of such instant goodwill based on our ethnicity or gender or worse still both, there is a steep uphill climb.

Even though I am supremely confident about my abilities and the quality of my work in general, I have never been able to transfer this confidence in relation to the opportunities that come my way or the outcomes I achieve. I generally have, as you my readers know very well, put this lack of confidence down to my luck. The truth is though that luck is attached to one’s circumstances in life, to who one was born to, as what, where, and so on. It is not an abstract luck but a luck that is configured into the systems and structures of the real world and that either works in one’s favour or doesn’t… In spite of being conscious of the practical dynamics of how much of what we call luck operates I think of it in the abstract, as something mystical and universally ordained… in a way it is because we did not choose our circumstances…but in another way I tend to do so because it helps me focus my efforts on what is in my own control…rather than on something that I am powerless to fight against.