Trying for nirvaan

  Finally, I feel I am a step closer to nirvaan, moksh, mukti what ever you may call it, for detachment from worldly things is the first step. When I retired, on 30 th June this year, I brought my books home and also seven boxes of papers, files and God knows what all. This after I had been cleaning and throwing stuff from my room for more than a month earlier and thanks to many of my students, especially Rizwan Ahmad, I could do this. These cartons kept lying in my garage for four months. May be as a historian documentation is in our blood and difficult to part with it. Finally, I threw all of the boxes  out but I could not part with my class teaching notes which I had meticulously kept from 1984.I have separate boxes for history and separate for Gender studies. Finally, I invited a colleague and gifted him all my class teaching notes. However, I will not call it complete nirvan because I am still attached to some moha- maaya and not totally rid of it. I still held on to my class notes in the form of a notebook which I had kept since 1976-1977. My friends used to borrow my class notes from me in my MA days for I would make such elaborate notes in class when our teachers gave their lectures. In one page, I found the time table too, Radhey Shayam, Rekha Joshi, Chandra Pant and C. B. Tripathi's classess being mentioned. I started my academic life as a student when xerox was also not available. We borrowed a book, made notes and returned to the library. Then we got xerox, though still not affordable. From Manual typing we saw electronic typing emerge. After this we saw  one computer for the whole school of social sciences and we had to book our spot to figidt  with it and learn about it with trial and error. Then we had desk tops at home and today we have lap tops, ipads,smart phones. I still cannot forget the feeling that i had and it is so fresh in my mind when I was sitting in a library in Australia and any book that I wanted was available. I told myself, life is so easy out here for the struggle of our students back then in the 80's and 90's was getting the material especially for research. Today, downloading is so easy and so much material is available in the digital font.  I can never forget the first time , I had done a PPT presentation.   I was invited by the World Health organisation to present a paper  in Kobe, Japan and I had to take a lot of help from my husbands office staff, In ICRISAT in the early 80's to place a picture, and learn the ropes of making a ppt for the first time. So much has changed in technology in the last forty years. It was with a note of sadness that I parted with my class teaching notes thinking, I will not be teaching a class now. Any way the satisfaction is that I have taught four decades of students and kept adding to my notes over the years. May be some one will benefit from these for when books were not available I had used libraries abroad in France, U. K. Australia and US to add to my notes.