– Chenni Valavan
Dear Department,
Hi. It’s me. From the last Integrated MA batch. Still here (all 10 fingers, 10 brain cells). Still confused. Still waiting for someone to acknowledge our situation, to not brush it aside. And yes, I am talking out of experience. Kindly hear me out as I write to you all; students, faculty, department administration – I am talking from a place of pure anxiety, and therefore, my letter might look like a rant. However, many of us can see the writing on the wall – we have problems that will snowball in our future.
Let’s start with the course offerings—because clearly, someone must. The current selection of electives is so limited, I was (and still am) paying out of my pocket to Coursera to learn about stuff I like. Not leisurely, but as a solid need. Public Policy? Law? International Relations? Conflict Studies? Epidemiology? We’d love to study them. We’d also love to see the Indian society talk approvingly of an arts degree (at least half-heartedly). Both seem equally mythical at this current point in time.
Minors? Oh, you mean that thing other departments get? All the cool stuff? We get a couple of minors, of course. But, even if the department has the minor you like, how sure are you that all the 3-4 required courses are available and none of them come under your core course basket? Furthermore, there are no specialized minors. No thematic focus areas. There’s just a vague hope that we’ll somehow become professionals in that field by sheer will (if we have any left after our time here, that is).
Now, let’s talk about the academic Maginot line of the decade: merging our core courses with the two-year MA cohort. Nothing quite says pedagogical planning like throwing undergrads into common core courses with postgrads who’ve done full undergraduate degrees in sociology, economics, math, and suffering. Sounds like the admin has some Churchill energy in them, launching us into the maw of Gallipoli. We’re over here Googling “what is a Lambda?” in economics courses while they’re out there solving for pareto optimality or regression. I’m sorry, but we cannot pull a defense against the steep grade distribution caused by MA folks like the Osowiec Fortress counter-offensive. Can’t blame the MA people either, since they are also forced to do this to us. They have laid their basic yet tiring foundation in their UG years and now find themselves re-laying the same foundation again in their PG alongside their intellectual juniors. They are justified in feeling the same frustration as us, maybe higher. It’s not exaggeration to make a claim that the IMA and MA are stuck locking horns with each other. IMA and MA are like drivers: the former trained to drive a car but forced to drive a truck and the latter, skilled at handling a truck but stuck behind the wheel of a car.
And the course that was supposed to help the math-starved IMA peeps – “Mathematics for Economics”? Ah yes. That was lovingly cancelled, probably during someone’s coffee break. Lovingly, I might add again, as we cannot take breaks for our coffee because of it. When we mentioned the issue of lack of technical courses to the external reviewers, they asked us if we “had the background” to study such advanced topics. Dear Ma’am, Sir, that’s like asking if someone lost in the desert has the hydration prerequisite to drink water. Sure, he cannot gulp a gallon, but at least a generous cup will do.
Then there’s the vibe—by which I mean the complete lack of one (or just the tokenistic one that exists). There are no large, dedicated department spaces for students to just…exist. There are very few places to meet seniors, share gossip about electives, or cry about stuff. We just drift from class to mess to mural area/MML/non-AC RSL, hoping that other department people haven’t invaded the space. And should I mention that there’s no department library? Fun fact: I recently encountered a couple of HS15 folks in the department, strolling down their memory lane. They asked me what happened to the library. Their immediate, loud “Chiiii” when I informed them of the status quo perfectly reflects the current DSB sentiments with regards to this issue.
Technical skills? Who needs them, right? GIS, OSINT, Excel, R—irrelevant, apparently, for students of Development Studies (now, I might add a disclaimer here that the department has conducted a single session on Stata and Professor Sabuj is also teaching the same in his class – an inclusive choice necessitating a thank you from my side). Because the real development was the friends we made along the way. Except, surprise! We didn’t make friends! Which brings me to my most favourite topic— my batch.
If this batch were a ship, we are a bunch of lifeboats drifting in separate seas, only coming together for ethnic day/end-of-semester group pictures. There are cohorts based on languages, regions, class, and we don’t want to delve into the other lines of separation. Social cohesion is so weak, my professors know more about me than most of my batchmates. My faculty advisor doesn’t judge me for my poor English diction, but one specific group in my batch sure does :). It’s a little sad because nobody is quite sure how the group went from ‘naming our WhatsApp GC as Little India’ to this. The amount of personal and professional development that could’ve resulted from at least a wee bit of inter-batch cooperation is unprecedented. For a department whose tendency is for its students to proudly exclaim to their techie friends that it’s the most inclusive department, the irony writes itself – the first thing you learn here is where you do or do not belong.
People hoard intellectual resources and opportunities, and “collaboration” is code for “I already did it, but I won’t tell you how until you’re not a competition” – like the Flying Geese model.
What we’re left with is a system where people with insider info—parents in high places, cousins at JNU or GMU, friends abroad—keep flying higher, while the rest of us get stuck doom-scrolling LinkedIn and wondering if we missed an important email (yes, we did, 10 minutes in the future).
I’d be lying if I told you that it has no effect on me. It has, terribly. I have a few health conditions due to stress and my bitterness with the status quo is seeping into my personal relationships. I’m stuck in my room, chasing fireflies in the hope that they’ll lead me to the fire.
So here I am, watching the IMA slowly be replaced while sitting in its ruins. It feels like we’re lab rats, but there’s no lab, nor people looking over us. There’s no happiness in attending, nor graduating.
To be clear: I am not angry. The DSB is not rallying around with pitchforks. That requires anger, energy and cohesion. We don’t have even one of the three. What we are is disillusioned and deeply aware of how good this program could have been – how great we could have been, and how great our worlds might have been.
Warm regards (or what’s left of the warmth),
Chenni Valavan
HS22 – The Final Vanguard of IMA
“Built different. Mostly because we had no choice.”
Article 19 