Land of Lime

If you thought writing and defending a dissertation was hard, there are more difficult rituals associated with this process. First, to get your dissertation committee to read your dissertation. Approval is easy, since you could argue, reason with your committee but getting it read isn’t. You have no agency in this matter. But in the dissertation office, the process gets reversed and creates the second major hurdle. It’s easy to get the folks there to look at your draft but their approval is very, very hard to achieve. I have come to realize that they are better at finding faults and keeping accounts than even Chitragupta, the legendary accountant of Yama, the god of death. They even find faults in drafts that they have already approved and in copies which they have accepted. You are asked to bring fresh printouts mercilessly and with a stern face.

The right paper. Margins. Footnotes which spill over. Set schemes for table of contents and list of tables. Pagination. Consistency in everything, formating and fonts, numbering schemes. They are very, very good at finding inconsistencies and mistakes. You can’t reason with them. It’s their way or NO WAY.

When I was revising and formating my dissertation, a friend told me that one needs all the help to submit / deposit a dissertation. She wasn’t way off the mark. If researching in the archives and then especially writing (on the obscure topics) is a lonely process, formating and preparing the manuscript for submission requires as many pairs of ‘volunteer’ eyes as one can bully into action. There are no professional editors to rely on, as is the case when one publishes. One gets sick of the sentences and paragraphs one has stared at forever and even to do a quick spell check or formating consistency. So the trick is to blackmail enough friends to help us with proofreading.

Over the years, I have ‘volunteered’ many times to have developed a historical perspective on this process. True, it isn’t as bad as in the days of manual typewriter and yes, recent versions of MS Word have made it easy to do formating compared to even late 1990s and up to about 2003. If you use LATEX, then all is nice and dandy. Not so, in times past or with folks who are still using Word 98. In the late 1990s, I was ‘interfacing’ for a friend who had to leave for India; a particularly nasty dissertation office Chitragupta made me resubmit the same page three times. Each time he found a new error. But by that time, between the two of us, me and my friend had already made over 25 visits to the dissertation office and met all his demands. He still wasn’t satisfied.

I can recount horror stories of dissertation submission all night long. Days spent editing and proofreading drafts, one’s own and of other people. Finding errors and then frantically making phone calls or sending emails to the authors, since they have the right font and diacritics to make corrections. Waiting for them to send a PDF version back, since Word won’t display properly on my machine. Printing all night long, on an Inkjet printer.

And then I have my own horror stories of roaming in the streets of Mysore, trying to find computers with USB ports in the cybercafes of Mysore or WIFI hotspots, so that I could send chapters back to Chicago for submission.

I just deposited my friend Ajay Rao’s dissertation, which made me remember fondly experiences of the past. Last summer, Ajay printed out my dissertation and deposited. This time around, it took us less than six hours on four different days to print out a draft, get it reviewed by Colleen (who is extraordinarily helpful and kind, an angel, if there ever was one) at the dissertation office, make a list of corrections needed, print the final draft, get the paperwork done at the Dean’s office and deposit it in the dissertation office. Not bad, given how much time we would have spent in the past. Of course, I am not taking into account the time Ajay had to spend to format and proofread his draft; that’s his karma!

Good job, mon. Congratulations. Let us hope our ritual has ended and the Diss office won’t email us again, ever.

Ajay makes an important argument about the theologization of a literary epic, Ramayana. Look forward to reading it closely and then in true Chicago fashion, raise hell.

For others, clock is ticking. They who know who they are shall plunge into action, like battle scarred veteran epic heroes and then demand that we ‘volunteer’ to be fresh pairs of eyes. I await that fate eagerly.