Etcetera

Responding to critics

As academics, we are always providing critique of others’ work, reading and responding to others’ critique of our own work. Responding to criticism is a work-in-progress for me, certainly. Here are two very different approaches of responding to your critics, both of which I go back to repeatedly for inspiration.

The first example is a timeless classic – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. It should be required reading for living on this planet. Here it is (thanks to the African Studies Center at UPenn): https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

The second example is from none other than the inimitable P.G. Wodehouse, so beloved by so many of own countrymen and women. This is Wodehouse’s characteristic response when berated by his critics for lack of originality (of all things), from the preface to his classic Summer Lightning:

A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

A word about the title: It is related of Thackeray that, hitting upon Vanity Fair after retiring to rest one night, he leaped out of bed and ran seven times round the room, shouting at the top of his voice. Oddly enough, I behaved in exactly the same way when I thought of Summer Lightning. I recognized it immediately as the ideal title for a novel. My exuberance has been a little diminished since by the discovery that I am not the only one who thinks highly of it. Already I have been informed that two novels with the same name have been published in England, and my agent in America cables to say that three have recently been placed on the market in the United States. As my story has appeared in serial form under its present label, it is too late to alter it now. I can only express the modest hope that this story will be considered worthy of inclusion in the list of the Hundred Best Books Called Summer Lightning.

Do you have other favorites? I would love to hear from you!

Some random facts about me

I grew up in a small town in the state of Kerala in India, completely unaware of the fact that I was growing up in what would become a tourist’s paradise. Kerala is better known today as “God’s Own Country” and featured on every major travel magazine’s bucket list of must-see places. It is a tiny emerald strip along the southwestern tip of the Indian subcontinent, and has roughly a million waterfalls, coconut groves, and backwater routes. I would love to give you travel suggestions for Kerala; please contact me!

I am also lucky enough to call Botswana my second home (for those of you who are fans, yes, the very same Gaborone now made famous by the novels of Alexander McCall Smith). I had some life-altering experiences there, including being thrown off the back of an irate ostrich I was trying to ride, and close encounters with a pack of hungry hyenas. I also experienced the divine aroma that wafts from food cooked over a campfire, sleeping under skies filled with a million stars in the Kalahari bush, and daydreaming under 4,000-year old baobab trees in the middle of a great salt pan than was once a great ocean. Same note about travel suggestions applies.

At Columbia University, I continued my daydreaming career under the gracious old trees that circle the lovely neoclassical buildings of McKim, Meade and White. I also regularly daydream in parks, and particularly love the stunted, funny-looking crabapple trees in Riverside Park, even though the crab-apple grove is sadly, almost always closed.

I am happiest (in no particular order) when spending time with my kids and my (large and boisterous) family, working on my research, looking at the world through my camera lens, hiking, reading a book, or birdwatching (hat tip to the friend who once called this last one the nerdiest activity in the world - you know who you are!). I am a compulsive consumer of all written material. I read books, magazines, poetry, brochures, instruction manuals, concert programs (cover-to-cover, including the list of donors at the end), and the recommended recipes on the back of food cartons. I have often wondered if this is a medical condition. If you know of a cure, please email me, and thank you in advance. One day, I want to summarize the essence of each paper I have written in a haiku.