Monday 30 April 2012

Things To Do To Stay Interested in Your Thesis

Yes, this is a movie blog. Yes, this is a topic that is off the record,er... celluloid. However, this lately blossomed thesis of mine has been giving me sleepless days and worry-some nights( yes, it is the days that usually see me watching the original celluloid God intended for humans) and has, in fact, managed to consume and depress me so totally that I have even given up my one true love, film. Every moment I work on my thesis, I keep worrying about all the films I could have watched, possibly made, instead of making hopeless, impostor attempts at an academic career. Next week, on Sunday the 6th of May, I have two occasions coinciding quite mercifully on the same day. It is my 24th birthday and I have my first proper film school exam diverting me from the horrible reality of it. There must be very few non-nerdy, non-masochistic people who like having exams, buts lets just say that a film school entrance exam(diploma in film direction at FTII Pune) is far, far better than aging. I don't want to be one of those horribly boring cynics who are actually called depressing people because cynics are sexier. But look, I shall be 24, I have more than 5 gray hairs, I have the beginnings of a double chin and I do think my energy level is decreasing. I wouldn't be surprised if I turn senile before 40.

Therefore, I decided to write a sort of how-to article without naming it a how-to one because a) God, oh God, I don't want to be a how-to writer under my real name even if it gets me more attention b)no one reads this blog anyway so why would I want attention here and c)how many people in the world are stupid enough to write bloody theses if they are not interested in them?(ans: 1, myself).

So, here goes...

1) Pick a topic that pleases you and not the world around you. Writing theses is a bit like a marriage. Don't pick a partner according to the wishes of others. Pick one you wouldn't mind getting naked with. No matter how much the world discourages or mocks you(by world I mean only supervisors, pesky profs and fellow bright young things), I can assure you that a thesis can be written on the most obscure, nasty, perverted things you can think of. So, if you want to write a thesis on relatively innocent things like unicorns, go right ahead. Write what pleases you, not what pleases others.

2) Get a part-time job. You are not into academics because of the money. Yeah. Right. You are pursuing research because all you care about is knowledge and discovering things. Uh-huh. Sure. The real reason you are willing to spend your money or someone else's just for researching is so that you can have real money. The real reason you are unemployed till the age of thirty is because you want to travel on someone else's money, live in someone else's lodgings and use your money to buy an expensive car when you are 45. Which is all very good, but a job, or at least a part time one, is not just about the money. As a researcher, you need something to do that is adult, responsible, socially contributing, social by itself because believe me, researching is none of those. Being a penniless post-graduate at the bottom of the pay scale can be a marvelous place to be in. It is an experience much like falling in love for the first time. Don't miss out on the trials and tribulations of your first jobs. They might teach you much more that your thesis ever will.

3) Read books or go through archives not as if you are cramming before a test, but as if you are working at a gold mine. Oh, for heaven's sake, all that exam-taking and attending classes and having syllabuses are over and gone for good. The eternal student doesn't need to go through all that boring, quite unnecessary, nerve-wracking, nauseating, IBS- inducing shit again. We're not gonna take it. We are research Workers, not uniform-wearing students being scared of canes. I will read a book leisurely. If I find something irrelevant, I will skip it. If I find something interesting, I will make a note of it. But, I will not try to push a book down my throat. If I think its rubbish, I will throw it across the room. Researching should, if not anything else, bring back the pleasures of reading again to people who have become rather used to taking shortcuts and learning everything about nothing over their university years.

4) Write reflections on what information you are acquiring without thinking its a draft of the thesis. Of course, it IS a draft of the thesis, but you don't need to know that. The more you reflect on what you read(instead of just going on searching and searching) and the more you write it down will give you more conviction, solidify your impressions and your thesis will follow a growth arc much as your expedition towards reaching it has been.

5) Your research work is not the end of the world. Not getting a job is, of course, a business worth seriously worrying about but, please, research won't necessarily save you, or the world, from hunger. It ups your chances at things, it is a life experience and it helps annoy people because you can go around being pompous, but it does little more than that. Most inventions, discoveries, hypotheses have been made by non-academic people. Institutionalized voyages into thought and happenings have rarely ever broken ground, even though they can help fatten bank accounts. Therefore, it is not half as formidable as it seems. They say that an artist's life is much more romanticized than his work, but I think it applies more to the academic. Both have responsibilities towards making something original, but the artist does not have to bear the burden of coming up with something useful. No wonder it is art that is much more useful than academics. Most academic work is, in fact, as useful as gray, smelly socks. It is no wonder that we in the academic world call the text primary and the scholarship secondary.

6) A thesis is an argument, a singular idea of looking at things, not a 50,000 word or more book. If all writers thought in terms of word count instead of matter, we humans would have been much less admirable than we believe ourselves to be. Do not write your thesis just to cram it with stuff you have read, producing yet another scholarly book that claims to "succinctly" deal with everything else that is available. Scholars get boring not so much because of a show-offy vocabulary or gravity-defying convoluted sentences but because they rarely state anything by themselves that is not out of that self-contained box of being academic. Be bold. Be ferocious. In other words, be original. Be guttural. Just think for yourself, and please, please, have some mercy and write it down. It's gonna bear your name. Make it about you, you, you. What you think. What you feel about things. We all have a capacity to form a judgment by ourselves about anything we perceive. If we didn't have institutions like religion, politics or the keepers of knowledge shoving their do' s and don't s down our throats, we would all be a little less stressed. That is what is so attractive about artists. They have the innocence and cheek to choose what they want to believe and tell others. Stop trying to please everyone.


So, there you go. A little too ambitious for a blog that no one reads. But who knows? In this vast cyberverse someone just might come along wanting some inspiration to distract themselves from writing their thesis. Let me end by saying that, I don't do any of these things, but in an alternate universe, if I actually did do these things, I would be the next Da Vinci, Galileo or Lennon who all thankfully did not wait around for a thesis to get their ideas for the world going. 













































































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