Painful romance with Sociology

An old Piece from 2007. 

Sociology...

The past 6 months have messed up my brain. literally. the only time I can think clearly is when I'm not really thinking. and the rest of the time I'm reading laborious writings in which some other very thinking people are thinking. And I used to think I was a thinking person. Now I no more know what I think.

Welcome to my life-world (a sociological term) of a masters in sociology.

I have wanted to write my first blog entry for so long, but my brain has been too cluttered. So without putting all that down, I really cannot move forward. To throw it all out is my intention, but that may not be the end I reach. For as sociology teaches us (oh for christ's sake!) life hardly works by a means and ends logic, and a lot of sociology is the study of the unintended consequence [Hence perhaps ur Chattis ka aankda with the model -loving economics dept!!!].

The original beauty of sociology is undeniable. You see so much of your own thinking, existence, mundane and special activity in such novel ways. Also gratifying in many ways is to see theorists talking of things you have observed from time to time.

But then the texts! Its amazing, i mean it is so easy to turn into a bookworm (and not in the delicious enid blyton way) without realising it. And ironically even though you are studying society, you (at least I) tend to feel more and more removed from it. And if that impersonal observer in me (whose existence is also an active area of debate in S_) had not caught me in time, i would have begun to believe myself as some know it all. And its not a know it all, as in one with with all the answers, but which has all the questions to counter every answer of the other, and hence leave him confused as hell, and myself with this very unsatisfying sense of achievement. 

Some of the texts are the quintessential social science material. At times i can almost feel I am reading about 10,000 words randomly selected from the dictionary. But coz someone told me, that 'he's' a great thinker, i gotta make some sense of him. But what do i do with something that appears like juggled words to me? Simple. I attribute a sense to them. And my classmate may attribute a thoroughly different one. Wow! its like reading poetry! I donno. I mean either im being foolish not to see the point. Or all my professors are in a maya-jaal, and are pulling me into it too.[ God! i din't know the feeling ran this deep!].

This rant though, applies only to some theorists. I won't name them. Tauba tauba. There are several others that are deeply exciting and transformational. One can sit for ours and devour them. And one is never the same after reading them. 

S_ makes me cease to ascribe sacredness to anything. Religion, says Freud (we read some of his more sociological texts and in higher studies the discipline boudaries are any way bit blurred) is the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind; says Marx, is the opium of the masses. All my lovingly held beliefs are kicked away. India is an imagined community. The 'Nation' is an abstraction. My patriotism is gone for a six. The armed forces are the state's biggest forms of coercion. There goes my charm for the men in uniform. Heterosexual families involve a hegemony of conventional ideas of sexuality. phut! goes my dream of the happy family. Then most of my insti is pro-reservation. again confusion in the head. Many are largely against the revival of hinduism, and see it as a reaction to fact that other religions are becoming popular in India. phew! what of my admiration for a spiritual movt. in 'my' religion, ... Oh ya! then the argument that Gandhi effected a nation formation where the demands of oppressed classes in India were only pacified and actually the old Brahminical model was maintained. The goes the father of my nation. How religious texts serve to maintain the hegemony of a religion, and the upper castes and men in that religion. And so my admiration for the Upanishads or Gita is also just coming from my privilege?

And ironically most arguments make sense. But they give me no answers. And given the avalanche of stuff I ingest everyday, i think i can only come to make sense of it in retrospect. After an year of finishing this course.
And the entire discipline runs the other way at the very mention of the supernatural -of any (rational or irrational) sort. One prof. - who owing to the fact that he turned a naxalite in the days of his youth, left it later, now he calls himself a 'convinced hindu'. To me he seemed like someone who my own hinduism partial mind could relate to. But then he said I agree with hinduism in totality. jaat-paat, karma, caste...all the lot. Lo behold! My boat has rocked again!

But thankfully I can say that I haven't turned bitter. [as I said i caught myself in time]. I still seem to find solace in reading stuff on Reiki, the Gita, taoism, jedi knights... Perhaps i do it for a sense of security. Yes. But God I need it right now. For it would never do to turn into an atheist. And by that i mean someone who does not at all believe in any sort of divinity, even of the small things in life. Like what if the next time i see a baby laughing, I think of the oedipal complex!! dude!!

But yeah, thanks to sociology I will never become a totalitarian. And even dissillusionment with the subject wont be so bad. For is not doubt essential at the starting journey of any quest, so happily even when i am in doubt i can please myself by believing that i am being spiritual!!

Wrote this far back in 2007 I think... Was really my first blog entry, but I felt sheepish and removed it. It isn't bad actually... for a new sociology student struggling to make sense of it... though of course I have learnt better after these years. For instance I understand why reservation was a important intervention, I do question nationalism and fundamentalism... and yet also I have realised that all this does not mean hating or shunning one's tradition....