On Sabbaticals!

 

ON SABBATICALS

A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri – November 2021

 

I recently concluded a 3-month break from work, my third of this century!

The first was in October to December 2001, when I absconded to the UK (and, for short stints, to Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Norway) on a British government scholarship to study leadership at the LSE. It was a great time to travel – nobody else was doing so in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and most airlines had a ‘get bums on seats at any cost’ policy that enabled great deals for the remotely intrepid. I took my family on a cruise (Newcastle to Amsterdam and back on ‘The Prince of Scandinavia’), I walked through the glens outside Edinburgh, I even took a journey across the Arctic Circle to Troms, all on my scholarship money. In fact, I remember only one weekend spent in London, the highlight of which was a visit to Loftus Road to watch a third division game between Queens Park Rangers and Oldham – football tickets were way more expensive than travel in those days, with GBP 30 getting you from London to Lisbon and back on British Airways but not a seat at an EPL game in London, not even those in the outer stratospheres of stadiums from where the players looked like ants.

The second was in November and December 2006 and January 2007, when I moved to Gujarat for a Visiting Fellow post at IRMA. The highlight of this was the kindling of a love affair with knowledge – it led onwards to several academic papers in different fields (power, participation, autonomy, aid effectiveness, democratic decentralization, et al) and an attempt at full-time doctoral education (I flunked out after three wonderful years alternating between the library and the football ground).

The third, August to October 2021, had no such structure or noble intent – I simply needed a break (pretending to work without having anything to really do takes its toll), I wanted to write a book (whose storyline has been churning inside my head for years), and I wanted to take my annual trek, an activity that, for me, makes life in a city livable (and I hadn’t done one since 2019, so this too was bursting inside me).

I also wanted time to think through my impending retirement.

So, a quick report!

I did two treks! The first was to Patalwan Lake in the Gurez Valley in Kashmir, 5 days from roadhead to roadhead, reaching an altitude of 4,000 meters! This was a beautiful, easy-paced trek through empty alpine meadows (and, I should mention, some less pleasant time spent clambering over rocks), culminating at a stunning and large high-altitude lake. Gurez has been described as the most beautiful part of Kashmir, but also not a good place to visit because of its proximity to the LOC and its convenience as a place for unwelcome foreign guests to cross over into India. My wife and elder child were among the 25-person group that did the trek, and we also enjoyed the excellent food (three hot meals a day, and wazwaan-style cooking when our camp cook was in the mood), the interactions with an army patrol that was in our vicinity through the trek, and the friendships we developed with our trek-mates and our trek leaders (both really cool recently-retired military personnel).

We returned to Srinagar and then decided on the spur of the moment to take an additional week to explore Ladakh (the wife and child had never been). For me, the highlight of this week was the Srinagar-Leh highway (I had travelled on this road many times in the late 1990s – some things had changed, and some had not) and the time spent in the Nubra Valley (my first time in the areas north of the Indus and along the beautiful Shyok and Nubra rivers). The lows were seeing the damage that a successful film can do (in this case, ‘3 Idiots’ to Pangong Tso lake) and the resemblance between Khardung La Pass and Lajpat Nagar market.

The second trek was to the Everest Base Camp in Nepal – it was long (12 days from Kathmandu to Kathmandu), high (reaching 5,600 meters at Mt. Kalapathar for those such as me who chose to make an extra effort for a wonderful view of Mt. Everest), and with long ups and downs, scary bridges, and some stretches of rocky terrain. But, beautiful scenery, few people (and, therefore, Indians welcome – thank you, pandemic), and mostly decent places to stay in with good food, electricity, and a selection of books to borrow. And, last but not least, this trek has serious show-off value upon return, especially in difficult forums such as one’s weekend football team. In case you are wondering, if an obese 58-year-old can do it, so can you (evidence is appended in the form of a photograph taken on 4^th October 2021)!

The second photograph was taken on top of the Taklang La pass on the Leh-Manali road (altitude 5,327 meters) in August 1995, and is included as evidence that wisdom does not, as is commonly believed, increase with age. Same dumbass, 26 years, some inches and many kilograms apart! Pathetic!!

I also managed to complete a first draft of my next novel, “A Walk Through the Wild Side”, which explores issues of ethnicity, identity and insurgency in the North East of India around the late 1990s – and expect sales to creep into double figures this time. Watch this space!!

What I did not do was think through retirement; what will I do, where will I go, should I slow down or continue to work somewhere, etc., at a time when my wife is working (the ‘kept man’ option is particularly attractive), my children are out of the house (though not yet off the payroll), and I like to think that I have almost enough money (nobody has quite enough). The default option, of disappearing into my wife’s cottage outside Dehradun and waking up every morning with nothing to do, no one to meet, and nowhere to go, is an attractive one (but is it too early for that?). Should I write for a living (as opposed to writing because I have something to say), and how would a true Bong manage the business end that is necessary for a modicum of success? Does somebody who is not ‘communications friendly’ (i.e., doesn’t speak much, is not on social media, likes being in the background, and is averse to networking) have something to offer in today’s, and tomorrow’s, post-truth world?

Matters have been somewhat expedited by my return to work, my welcome being akin to that of a refugee on the Polish-Belarussian border (not a great surprise – the corporate sector has a different attitude to 3-months-out compared with the media and development sectors that I had been part of earlier), and I have committed to GTFO by early 2022. Don’t feel too bad for me – I had done everything that I had joined up to do more than two years ago, and will not miss a job that I can do in my sleep, an ‘all-fart-no-shit’ department, and a retromingent hierarchy.

So, suggestions on retirement options are welcome!

Returning to sabbaticals – my experience with them has been excellent, and I strongly recommend these as a means of taking oneself away, recharging one’s batteries, and rethinking the fundamentals of one’s existence. They work well if there is a structure or else a set of pre-set goals for the time away, and a schedule for meeting these that keeps one genuinely busy. They don’t if they are mistaken for holidays (or, alternatively, if work keeps encroaching upon the time away), if they enable sleep in the daytime (or other activities that are not normally done during office hours), or if one ends up hanging around the house and getting in the way of its daily schedule. Getting one’s family on board is a good idea. And, like with children, spacing them out is advisable. Finally, a sabbatical should serve as a means to an end, one whose value in bringing about change in the quality and direction of one’s life is discernible only in hindsight, and not as an end in itself.

During my recent sabbatical, and as an antidote to that feeling of sloth that develops whenever things can be postponed to another day, I had the appended words greeting me at the dawn of every new day. And that’s another thing that hasn’t changed with time (along with my great wisdom, as described in the photographs above, and my love for football), they reminded me back in my college days to focus on the road ahead, and they continue to do so today.

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep; but I have promises to keep; and miles to go before I sleep; and miles to go before I sleep.’ Robert Frost