After a heart wrenching few weeks on making a personal choice between the two premier educational institutes in London, I decided to go for the King's College KCL over the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS. This is of course no aspersion on the proficiency of SOAS as an academic institute of repute, not only within the United Kingdom but also worldwide. SOAS was my entrypoint to the world of academics in Britain and the decision to choose KCL has been largely guided by what the Bloombusry institution taught me in two years. As a hetrodox academic institute, SOAS taught me to challenge the mainstream and try things which situate thinking in a different perspective. The choice of KCL was only to witness the alternative to what I imbibed from the SOAS.
SOAS has literally been a melting pot of alternative thinking and the intellectuals there aren't shy of practising what they preach. One would thus see academics delivering lectures not in pin-stripped suites, as is the usual practice in most western institutions, but wearing Pink Floyd T-shirts and faded Jeans. The campus would witness a sprectrum of thoughts ranging from the Old Socialist school, vehmently opposing any reduction in the role of government, to making a case for the meanial migrant workers, who often face deportation threats, and finally queing up to have themselves fed by the 'karma food' provided free by the International Society for Krishna Conciousness (ISKCON).
It is not only the image of enacting the alternative that stood SOAS apart, the academics, undoubtedly some of the best in the world, also provided the intellectual succour behind the emobodiment of such a hetrodox thinking.
Being a student of the Department of Development Studies, I had the pleasure of interacting with some of the wonderful minds, ranging from acclaimed academics like
Subir Sinha to Gilbert Achcar. Subir Sinha influenced much of my recent thinking, especially his improvisation on discursive analysis provides a rare insight into the roles of civil society and social movements within the domain of global politics, and Gilbert Achcar is an epitome of knowledge.
Although I studied Keynesian economics at the undergraduate level in India, but it reached a fruition beyond the IS-LM Curve Analysis only after Alfredo Saad Filho explained the political economy of its rise and demise. Jens Lerche with his breadth of knowledge on agrarian change and class relations in South Asia would often meticulously attend some of my trivial queries on land following the developments in Singur and Nandigram.
Paolo Novak was my first admissions tutor at the SOAS. Coming from a South Asian background we are not generally used to seeing teachers as friends but as days progressed Paolo with his warmth and informality turned our relationship into more of friendship and similar was the case with Dae-oup Chang, who joined the SOAS in the same year as I did.
My experience at the SOAS has been more of a journey, as Henry Bernstein would use the metaphor to describe 'development', into the world of knowledge guided only by the pleasure of learning, made possible by the academics and also by a team of dedicated staff in the faculty led by Jack Footitt. I leave SOAS, with a heavy heart, only to put to test if I have rightly picked up the essence of what this hetrodox institution stands for.
All comments are personal and have no bearing on my present or past places of work. Comments on the post are welcome at the blogsite.
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