Wayward

First thing first. Where I am. What I am doing today. The waywardness that has surrounded my life the past couple of days had me lose myself. Even as I traveled around Bombay  attending meets and training sessions and the like, I guess some reassessment of my self and my work is called for. Very often I find myself distanced from the areas I wanted to work in i.e. rural India. The fact that I am placed here in Bombay seems to me such a waste of time. "Things are fine here. Send me to the war-front!", say my innards. Ok but this is not the time for such commentary. There is work to be done and now. And no matter where I am situated - my work/academic research can still be done. And I can always travel 'there'. (hidden mockery in my own words.)

I love my job. I really really do. I love seeing things through the rights perspective. It is not an effort, spending hours and hours over reading and making sense of dozens of articles a day, taking notes and chalking out the contours of my own thesis. In short, I like studying and my fellowship here is giving me a lot of time to do that. But what has been bothering me? The fact that though what I am trying to say is very new in this organization,, within this set up, on the whole it is not very novel - much has already been written about it - do I really wanna give birth to a near-clone? From health perspective while I will have to explain things from the very scratch, over there i.e among people who have a human rights background I think I would only be articulating what has already been discussed, debated, agreed upon. Would it be better to instead take the discourse further or at least add something to it? I don't want to be bringing in an idea that (i fear) might be already stale. Is there something called a stale research? But then, doesn't research itself mean re-search? Phew, I don't know. The basic study is necessary for me anyway. So I should be concentrating on it.

I don't have answers but I hope I will in sometime. I also want to get my LSE assessed essays published - but somehow in the heart of my heart I tend to underestimate my work.  Within my mind it goes something like this - If I have been able to do it, then anyone can and so it is not good enough and if I face difficulties doing something - it must be wrong somewhere and so definitely not good enough. Do I leave myself with any choice here?