Art Bike

I rode an art bike to the last day of the conference this morning.

Attending this conference has been the strangest intersection of crossing paths with people I haven't seen in years--if decades. Over the past two days I've been in the same room with:

• A professor from the University of Washington with whom I took two undergrad courses
  last seen 24 years ago

• A former classmate at the UW who was doing graduate study in the same program in which I was doing my undergraduate degree
  last seen 23 years ago

• A former student of the same Urdu language program who happened to drop in one day to the program center in Lahore where I was studying who has now become a professor at the University of Oregon
  last seen 22 years ago

• A UMass professor with whom I shared a taxi from the Berkeley Urdu Language Program Center across the city of Lahore
  last seen last seen nearly 5 years ago

  Conference Keynote Address

• The brilliant and kind librarian at the University of Chicago who took time to give me thesis direction
  last seen 1 year ago

• A rideshare passenger I happened to drive from Ottawa back to Montréal
  first met 1 month ago

• A fellow graduate student in the same department who came into the program with me at the same time
  last seen 3 weeks ago

• One of the University of Toronto graduate students I met through a conference I just attended there
  first met 2 weeks ago

• An Urdu scholar who teaches at the same university in Buffalo where Professor N. teaches whom I
  first met 10 days ago

Zahra and David: Current McGill Grad School Classmates

I'm not sure which is stranger. Is it this confluence of people who have flittingly criss-crossed my path around the globe over decades? Or, is it the fact that I remember meeting so many of these people so long ago without the benefit of being on any of today's standard social networks?

In a sense, it's not that bizarre of a gathering. As an undergraduate one of my bachelor's degrees was in International Studies - South Asia. Now that I'm back in the same field as a belated graduate student it only makes sense that some of the same people would still be in the game.

One point I do find odd is that--though almost everybody in the room has far more experience academically in terms of research, published papers, tenure, etc. than I have--I tend to have a far longer amount of experience living and traveling in both South Asia and Central Asia. I do recognize that I lack the book depth of all the scholars at this conference. I'm hoping that continuing my studies might change that.

Former Teacher and Former Student: Fatemeh and David

I've met plenty of new faces here with whom I suspect I'll cross paths again in some future year (or decade.) Drinks with a couple eking out their Ph.D.s at the University of Chicago. Lunch with a professor who has just retired from Humboldt State University to teach part-time at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I went for a couple rounds of drinks with fellow conference attendees at the Tornado Room which was a perfectly preserved cocktail lounge from, what looked like 1950s-era design, replete with cramped U-shaped booths that were built when people must not have been as tall or as fat as they generally are today.

I'm easily able to talk to people who share interest in topics ranging from Turkic languages to cities of the Mughal Empire where I've spent time. I just can't decide if this is going to turn into a Ph.D. track for me. Some days--like these over the conference--I feel fully committed. Other days I feel like it's best to call it quits after I've written my M.A. thesis.

The best note to go out on was attending the final panel session this morning, one on different scripts used in South Asia. Before coming here my academic advisor, Professor P., had encouraged me to speak up and ask questions at the various conference panels. I'm happy that he'd made that suggestion. As soon as I'd posed the question on my mind to one of the discussants on the final panel that same librarian from the University of Chicago who helped me out last year--who also happened to be in attendence--blurted out that I'd taken his exact same question. That led to more discussion and a detailed back and forth about the limitations of adopting a new script in 19th century India given the state of printing with lithography and typography. I felt engaged and in my element.

Former Classmates: Nate and David at Dotty Dumpling's Dowry

I've taken the time to re-live some of summer of last year by riding B-cycle to places I went every day over those months. I rolled along the trail hugging Lake Mendota back to Dejope Hall, the dining hall where most of our meals were taken together, all over conversation in Persian. I got together with one of the instructors, Fatemeh, who led a calligraphy "mini-course" that was one of the options available as required elective.

This evening I met up with my opposite from that session of Persian language study: the youngest student in the program, Nate. (I'm not positive, but am pretty sure I was the oldest.) Nate is still an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. We met up at a local burger joint, Dotty Dumpling's Dowry, which is evidently some sort of Madison institution.

We had a good time catching up over burgers and deep-fried cheese curds. He told me how he's hoping to take his senior abroad in Istanbul next year which will mark his first time leaving the U.S.. I gave him what advice I could having passed through Istanbul a couple times. I told Nate I was envious not so much that he was going to such a dynamic, vibrant city as that he'd be going abroad for his first time. Everything he'd experience would have so much more impact.

Next stop: Chicago