Day 2: The Ladies of IIT
The last few days have been interesting. I have never spent
only three days in Kolkata. It has been an intriguing thing to be here with
only my mother. Because she’s older now and gets tired more quickly (or at
least admits to being tired), we had to keep boundaries on activities. No crazy
trips, no adventurous curiosities or misguided tourist outings, all features of
our previous trips to India seemed to have. Or, maybe she’s saving them for later.
I think so because she kept lamenting that I had to go back so quickly. It is
a pity that my mom didn’t get more chances to travel with her kids to see what
she wanted to see in India. She had a growing list of places she wanted to show
me more focused on her own memories rather than big-ticket items (e.g. Taj Mahal, which I've been to twice).
The most important place my mother wants to see is her
graduate school in Kharagpur. This place, Kharagpur, is the crown jewel of my mother's memories. In the late ’60s, she spent about three years at the
most elite technical university in India. IIT is like the equivalent of going
to MIT or Caltech. You need to be super brainy to set foot there. They admit
only 2% of the students who apply or something ridiculous like that. She was
there through her own merit and studying to get her Ph.D. in Statistics (which
she was awarded in 1968). She did not have to pay for it because once you got
in, it was paid for, I believe. This fact about my mother is burned like a tattoo
in my mind. It is, let’s say, a very important part of her life. The subsequent
events of her life always seemed to pale in comparison to IIT. This includes mundane things
like getting married, being a supportive wife (which she was), having children,
and running a household. All nuisances. My mother’s true passion in life was always
to achieve the professional respect that men seem to be entitled to,
even when they are less than amazing professionally. I think I share that viewpoint, but I've been lucky enough in my life to be able to attempt and pursue this less cultural weight than my mother had, although I have to say, the American Midwest also has a long way to go in terms of gender roles. I was lucky in some ways not to be tied to either one fully. It was a little freeing.
Despite living with parents who were somewhat feminist in their thinking, I found the constant IIT reminder a little annoying for most of my
life. It was partially because of the extreme elitism while being surrounded by a culture that valued stoic humility and understatedness (American Midwest). But also, it was kind of like listening to a high school football quarterback who can’t stop talking about that game when he had to make the winning field goal. It was my
mother’s glory story. And it got old for me, personally. The part that I was
less sensitive to, as a child and adolescent, and then teenager, and even
adult, was that my mother was eternally overshadowed by my father because she
had taken on the role of the wife rather than equal professional. An unfortunate
cultural baggage issue that she simply couldn’t resolve. The actual reality is that what she'd achieved in the 1960s remains a difficult challenge for women, even today.
Day 2 (Glory days)
True to herself and IIT, she had already arranged (on Day 2
of my three-day stop in Kolkata), a reunion with her friends from IIT. These
were only women. All of them were women who earned advanced degrees in
technical subjects during the 1960s from an institute comprised mostly of men.
Not only that, they had done so in one of the most blatantly patriarchal
countries on Earth. Most of them went on to have careers as professors, heads
of departments, and one even founded an entire school. These women are actually
incredible individuals. I think there are a lot of interesting stories
and experiences I'd love to hear.
We all had lunch together, and I got to know the ladies.
This is when my excellent passive bilingualism really came in handy (the whole
trip so far, really, even my less than excellent Hindi has been helpful). I could respond in my mediocre Bengali pretty
readily to all inquiries and took in fully these wonderful comments and
personalities. I even got a few contact numbers, so maybe I will be able to
collect a few stories.
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| Mom meeting her friends after ages |
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| Lunch meeting |
After lunch, the gals hung out a while longer and
reminisced about old times. They even sang a song (I took a video, I knew this song as a kid and still kind of know it), ate sweets,
and one of them even brought a bag full of books to share. It was so incredibly
stereotypical and entirely within context. I understood all of it, and it explained everything about my parents, whom I've known out of context for my entire life. Bengalis of a very specific generation were like this. The Indian Bengali post-Independence Achievers.
