Why a Ph.D?

Since Saad D asked....

To be honest, I wish I had a more profound answer with movie-like charm but Ph.Ding was a happy accident for me. You know one of those stories where you know you always wanted to do something and then battled all odds and reached all your goals and then some. There might be sparks of it in my account (more on that below) but it wasn't like I knew I wanted to get a Ph.D. when I was 5 years old. Okay I did enjoy pretending to be a teacher while I got my homework done - my family members gladly obliged and played students. In fact, I actually taught my mother's mamu ( mother's mother's - my grandmother's -brother...irrelevant aside: what I find immensely fascinating is how in the Urdu language we have a specific name for each blood relationship that within 4-7 or however many letters spells out your relationship with someone with more precision than the generic "aunt" or "uncle" affords) how to read and write in Urdu since he didn't know how. His English was impeccable but since he grew up in British India he never actually h-a-d to learn Urdu. But I digress.

What I wanted to write was that teaching was something I was drawn to and I knew I always wanted to teach but I never claimed it as what I wanted to become. Because there was something more I was looking for. When I lived in Pakistan, advertising seemed to speak to that "something" I was in search of for the longest time until I moved to the US. Two years of liberal arts courses pushed me out of the all-too-popular MBA into media studies. Grad school came and I taught at a number of colleges. It reminded me of my love for teaching. But more so, grad school, specifically working on my MA thesis, helped me see how much I enjoy finding better arguments.

Some might use the "making jigsaw puzzles" metaphor to describe the experience. But I think that's inaccurate. Why? Because someone else defines the picture. You, as the puzzle solver, simply fill it in. Puzzle maker is probably closer but I just don't like the connotation that puzzle might carry here - I don't get excited by the thought of puzzling other people or having them follow the exact contours of the picture I see. I'd much rather they engage in a conversation with me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm not the biggest fan of one part of the process of writing in that it forces me to spend huge amounts of time all by myself. But I do like being able to use words to unravel that which bewilders me. And that's back to my decision to go for a Ph.D.

I love the idea of delving into something that bothers me, hurts me, bewilders me, puzzles me. I like questioning it, diving into it, breathing it, existing in it. Till I can fill those spaces that I think are missing in others' accounts of it. Doing that doesn't make my account definitive - it only fills the gaps that I feel (notice I wrote feel and not think because I truly believe that what we write about is stuff that makes its way into our lives as our guts notice it before we can begin to rationalize it) are problematic or that I think are plain and simple important enough to merit greater attention than they have now. Basically, unmuting the silences that aren't spoken but they are definitely out of our reach given our present ways of thinking about stuff. It's a lot like artistry. You figure out what to represent and how to represent it and you hope it resonates with people - not in the sense that they agree with it but that they grapple with it. To me, this is the better argument...and it's an interest in better arguments about specific things about the social world that lead me to Ph.Ding.

I'm reminded of something Nietzsche wrote in "Genealogy of Morals": "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowledge”; and the more affects that we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we know ourselves to deploy for the same thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing—and our “objectivity”—be."

Which brings me back to my last post. Thanks Saad for making me put my finger on it publicly...but it still comes back to what I said earlier...it's pretty darn entertaining. It's being part of the process that Nietzsche talks about in the excerpt I included above that I thrive on.

What am I going to do with it? That question is not irrelevant [although if somebody wants to ask me about that, well e-mail me or call me and I'll share because it's I feel it's too personal to blog about...at least until I make the decision and things fall into place] but the more important one for me is: "what have you done with it?" My answer: I've become a more educated being in that I've gotten a wonderful opportunity to spend time to read, think, percolate, and write.