I woke up wondering what I would do to get through the day. At breakfast, I was asked a question that I am often asked here. “Are you studying?” and even more often than that, “Are you doing your MPHIL/PHD?” when I mention that I am researching Shah Latif. No. There is no academic, “I want some kind of degree out of this” portion of this research.To some extent, I really dislike academia. Teaching can be fantastic, and learning and studying things can also be great. That is a part of what I do anyway. Everyone asks me if my research on Shah Latif is in service of some PHD or MPHIL and they get very confused when I tell them that it has nothing to do with any of that. That concept seems foreign here. If you don’t plan on getting a degree, then why bother? For what could be more satisfying than researching a topic and writing in the most difficult to understand language possible to impress your fellow academics? Let us marvel at the quaint, archaic cultures dying in our midst and get some academic credibility while documenting its decline. That about ends my interest in that.I very much respect careful studies, that investigate and seek to bring about more knowledge on different subjects, but that bit of packaging it out of reach of the very people you are often discussing turns me off to the whole thing. I see a lot of posturing and inflated egos. Many of the people who have been helping me understand Latif’s poetry on a deeper level are not those who read it to obtain a degree. They are people from various backgrounds who took it upon themselves to study something for the passion of doing so. There’s nothing wrong with doing research to obtain a degree, but I think it need not just be for that.Other than thinking about that, I needed to find some greater purpose to being here. Since a degree wasn’t going to fit the bill on that, I went out and picked up a few kgs of mangoes.