In the third semester of the first year, as an experiment for the first time, the administration separated the PhD’s from the MBA’s. We had our own classes, except a few we had to take with them. The PhD courses were different from the MBA ones. Every professor had their own style of teaching. One professor was particular about the readings and expected every student to come prepared. If there was even one student who was not prepared, the professor would just leave the class. Another professor would not even teach anything to us. The students presented the reading. He would sit on the last bench and complain to me about the volleyball game he was missing because of the timing of his class. He had no inputs to give, no interest in teaching.

I realized that most of the resources of this business school were being used for the MBA’s. The whole air of the campus, so to say, belonged to them. All the clubs belonged to them. All the events were tailor made to their aspirations. The MBA program was Mumbai and the PhD program, a rusty little town in Bihar. The Institute had not created a worthwhile culture for the PhD students.

To bring some change, I decided to start a forum with the help of some of the other PhD students. We met together every week with a topic in mind so that we could discuss it amongst ourselves. The other students showed interest in it. My idea was that there should be a place where some of us can discuss our research ideas or the books we were studying. It could help in collaborating. And meeting as a group gave us a sense of being and identity which was missing in the PhD system.

The Institute though was very forthcoming about idea. We got a class every Saturday to conduct our meetings. We were also allowed to have tea and snacks as we discussed. The faculty was not invited for the discussions. It was a topic of ongoing debate on whether we should invite them. Sometimes the discussions heated up. I considered it a good sign. It gave me a sense of pride to start this forum and bring some change.

Assessments and classes, along with the lifestyle had taken a toll on my sleep. It was difficult to sleep before 1-2 a.m. A life in undergraduate college disturbs your sleep cycles. Living in a boy’s hostel, sleeping and waking up on time becomes a thing of the past. Sometimes people don’t even sleep in the night and attend classes in the morning. I had tried to solve this problem when I was in Mumbai, sleeping and waking up on time. But here again, the devil showed its face. I would sometimes sleep in the afternoon. But I had lost my discipline.

For the PhD’s, the courses were in full swing in the second year. It is the year where you choose the kind of courses you wish to study to prepare for your research. There was not much to choose though, at this business school. It was a poor man’s meal. Very few PhD level specialized courses were on offer. In my area there were three PhD level courses available in the whole year. In one of them we were clubbed with the same elective for the MBA program. In today’s world where Economics has expanded on so many frontiers, this was not enough. Most of the faculty wanted to teach the MBA’s and float courses for them, to enrich the luxurious rich man’s meal. They were incentivized to do so. I took the courses which were on offer for us.

In the second slot, I took a specialized PhD course of a faculty, let’s call him the Professor. He was later to become my PhD guide and play an important role in the events that happened to me on campus. He impressed me to no end when I started taking his course. He was old but energetic. He spoke fast and seemed knowledgeable. The one thing I liked when he spoke was that he made a lot of associations between different concepts with ease, something I found fascinating. I thought I was able to follow him. While some of the students would sleep in class, I would try and understand what he was saying. There was a contrast in the way he had structured and took the course with other professors. I read his CV on the internet. He had lots of research papers and involvement in committees worldwide. I became a sort of a fan.

To compensate for my academic workload, I started waking up early in the morning and going to the library to study. It was serene and quiet then. One could hear the chirping of the birds. The library was empty in those times. Going to the library for me felt like sitting beside a quiet and scenic pond looking at the birds passing by to drink water. The library reading room was a brick walled big space filled with book stacks and big tables. Sometimes, while reading, I would meet The-light. She would sit opposite me making me unable to work. We discussed about our lives and I would forget I had come there to study.

One effect of studying under the Professor was that I started speaking like him. I don’t know what happened to me. I generally spoke less. The Professor changed that for me. He spoke fast so I started imitating him and speaking fast. I picked up his tone and since then until I got psychotic, I would speak in that tone. I started imitating him.

The Professor would talk about how there was a caste system prevalent here. That the whole MBA cohort would behave like the new upper castes. Once he also gave an example of the sub caste I belong to. He said it discriminates against women. He said he once went to the family of one of his friends of my sub caste and found that women did not even eat with the men. They were not allowed to work. He was sort of making fun of my clan and looking at me for a reaction. I did not betray a reaction but his words resonated with me. The Professor was one of the few faculties I had seen who took the PhD course with certain energy.

It would take me hours and hours to write a mail to The Professor. Every time I had to write a mail to him, I would compose the email and then sit with what I had written changing one word here, a line there. I could not muster the courage to send the email to him. I remember one day sitting in the library and composing a three-line email to him. It took me three hours before I could finally hit the send button. I would also be anxious if I had to call some other professors in their office hours. God knows what all this fear was about.

A very strange incident occurred in one of the courses. The faculty gave us an assignment. The assignment involved writing a code to solve a problem. Most of the PhD students were not adept at writing codes. I wrote the answer and was pestered by some to share it with them. They said they would understand the solution and then write their own. One of these colleagues of mine directly copied the answer including the names of all the variables in the code and submitted it. Some of the others also copied some part of the code. The faculty caught us when he looked at the assignments. We were all called for answers. I immediately accepted that I had shared my assignment with some of the others. The faculty gave us a lecture on plagiarism and then let us go. As a punishment, he reduced a certain part of our grade. I decided never to share my work with anyone again.

Slot 2 of the second year ended when we submitted our term papers. I had worked hard on my term paper and got a grade A in the Professors course. I had asked him for feedback but for some reason the professors here never gave any feedback to the PhD students on their term papers. We were supposed to infer the quality of our paper through the grade rather than any verbal or written communication.  One day after his course had ended and the grades had come out, I met the Professor outside the Institute gate. He told me to submit my term paper for publication somewhere. I didn’t understand why he was telling this to me outside the gate and not through an email or a meeting, especially after I had asked for feedback. I never went ahead with the paper.

After I had passed the comprehensive exam, it was time to choose a research guide. I had two options. One was to work with The Professor. His work was in the energy and carbon markets. I had worked as a consultant for Climate Change before in Mumbai in a consulting firm so had some experience of the area. So, working under him would gel well with my CV. Another option was to work with the Game theory professor who also worked in behavioral economics. Working on this topic was my wish.

I talked to the professor of Game theory and he was enthusiastic to take me in. I called my father and asked him what to do. He told me to go with The Professor who was more experienced and could guide me better. I was in two minds as if there was a fork on the road. One day I was sleeping and dreamt of a senior of mine who had worked under The Professor. She told me to join him. I believed in the power of dreams and the messages imbibed in them. When I woke up, I wrote a long mail to him that I wanted to talk to him about doing research. He replied back immediately and we fixed a meeting.

Everything happened very fast after that. The Professor was sure that I would work under him. There was no discussion on what we would work on. He talked of electing faculty in my thesis committee. I could not say no to him even though I had gone to him to get an opinion and discuss, not to finalize working under him. We had to sign a form with the names of committee members. I suggested few names but it was The Professor’s choice. So, he picked up two more faculties in my committee. I gave my consent and the form was signed and submitted to the chairperson.

I did not like the way it was done. I felt I was not at all heard in such an important decision of my life, the formation of my thesis committee. In the first meeting we had after the committee formation, he was very happy. He told me that I should always pick my ears straight and not around my head. He also told me about a faculty at the Institute who was asked to leave because the students complained about him. The faculty, as per the professor, did not catch his ear straight. The professor had explained to the faculty that if he was teaching about chickens in the farm, then he should count the chickens one by one: One, two, three and so on. He was laughing at this example. I was not clear then what he was trying to say to me.

He told me I could write three or four papers during my PhD. He asked me to give him a one pager about what I wanted to work on in around four days. I worked on the one pager but to be honest, had not thought about what I wanted to work on. I also wanted to write it fast. I had never written a one pager before. I wrote what came into my mind picking from my term paper and sent it to him. He called me to his office and told me angrily that if I cannot write a one pager properly, how will I write a two-hundred-page thesis!

I started working as a Teaching Assistant in one of the courses of The Professor. This meant dealing with a lot of student mails. The Professor also gave me some work regarding finding the Gross Value Added of few sectors of the economy. I was able to do it. They needed it for some of their project work. I told an MBA friend who had come to select students on campus placement about me being a teaching assistant. He laughed out loud as if it was a servant’s job. I didn’t know what to say to him. 

The Professor arranged for me to go to Japan to attend a workshop on a Japanese Climate Change model. At that time, I was not in a mental state to visit a foreign country. Anxiety and negative thoughts had filled me. Yet, I did not refuse or discuss this with The Professor and went to Japan. The room where I stayed was clean and well furnished. Felt like a very good hotel. During the workshops, I made frequent mistakes. Once I forgot my laptop in my room. I also used pirated software which stopped working at the workshop. They had to give me another laptop.

The senior who had come in my dream was there to help me. She was doing a Post Doc there. She had given me a bicycle on which I toured the town. The thing that struck me the most about the Japanese town was its cleanliness. The roads and pathways were clean as a wiped off slate. You could always find people with a broom, cleaning pathways outside their homes.

Once I lost my way and was looking for an address. A man on a bicycle, whom I had asked, walked with me the whole two kilometers to take me to my destination, talking to me the whole time. This impressed me. I don’t think anyone would do this in my own country (I stand corrected, these things do happen in India, please see comments). I also went to Tokyo one day. I noticed on the train that every single soul was engrossed in their mobile phone as if their life depended on it. I had a good time with an Indian I met in one of the Indian restaurants in the town. We drank together as I heard the story of his coming to Japan and meeting a Japanese wife. At the end of the workshop, I had to give a presentation and I felt it went well.

An undergraduate friend visited me on campus when I returned. He had some professional work with his team in India which was in an adjoining city. He worked in a start-up of his own based on applications of virtual reality in architecture. I told him about the anxiety I had in vague terms. He suggested I see a Counsellor. But I did not head to his suggestion. It was firmly rooted in my mind that I should not see a psychiatrist or Counsellor and it seems no one could get me out of this belief.

I started preparing for my research proposal. I would spend my days in the library reading books and journals. One day I was researching on the solar auctions in India. I found that there were some anomalies in the data of the bids for the government run solar auctions. One firm had a low winning bid while the other firms had won high bids. This got me excited. I immediately went to my game theory professor to discuss this with him. I was aware of a phenomenon of winners curse where in the bidders in an auction bid a higher value than the value of the object of the bid. For example, in oil auctions, the bidders could win after a bid only to find that the value of oil in the rig they won is less than the bid. The faculty also suggested that this could be an instance of collusion in auctions. He encouraged me to work on it.

I issued the relevant books from the library to start studying on the auctions. I constructed an econometric model to understand the bids and study them. The research led me to some interesting facts about the auctions. Many of the firms who had bid had the same bunch of people heading them. This smelled of collusion. I prepared two proposals for The Professor. One was on collusion, other on the high-speed rail systems and their emissions in India. Both of them were interesting for me.

I had been excited with this research of mine even though it did not have a literature review. But I could have worked on it. All this time, I had forgotten about The-light. Unfortunately, The Professor turned down both the proposals. He gave me a reason on email that I should formulate the research questions in a careful manner. I tried to argue with him and we decided to have a meeting to talk about this. I went to the professor of game theory and he told me that he was willing to be a part of my committee if I worked on this topic.

On the day of the meeting, in the morning, a man came into my mind. He was the founder of this Institute, a very well- respected man in the country. The Institute has named the library after him. He told me to fight for my proposal about collusion. He wanted me to do some good work on collusion and fight the corrupt forces in the country. He stressed that academic Institutes should be at the vanguard for fighting corruption. He stayed with me for an hour and talked about all this. But when I went to the meeting, I could not speak a word in front of The Professor. He kept speaking the whole time and I kept nodding my head. The Professor had hardly let me speak since I joined under him. He wanted me to work on the topic of his choice. When I told him I wanted to work on my problem, he got angry. Finally, he prevailed and I came back dejected. In the evening, I went to the professor of game theory and he told me in indirect terms that he could not help me out in this work.

It was all very shattering for me. I realized that there was no encouragement for independent thinking and risk taking for research. That The Professor wanted to dictate terms and impose his opinion on the students. The whole system of research at the Institute promotes this kind of an attitude. This was not the reason I had come to spend my time in research. Research was supposed to be challenging and a passionate endeavor that takes you to unknown territories and questions. Here the territories and questions were dictated by your guide.  One’s personal opinion and motivations did not matter in this scheme of things. I had honestly not come for this. I came home and cried.

In desperation I wrote an email to The-light that it had been a very bad day for me. I wanted to share it with somebody. She did not reply to it. I did not wish to waste the efforts I had put in studying collusion. I felt it was my responsibility to get the information out. So, I decided to work on it on my own.

The Professor gave me the title of my thesis. He asked me to work on the freight sector of India using a US based Integrated Assessment Model. I had no interest in the topic but I prepared my proposal. One of his former students had worked on the model and he would help me with it. I read some of the thesis of his former students which I had borrowed from the library. No discussion took place on the research questions as opposed to what he had written to me on an earlier email. The questions were pretty standard.

I looked at the Professor’s resume once more and started reading his papers. One thing which became clear to me was that most of his works were derivative. In science derivative work is something which is not novel but derived directly from other works. The Professor had worked on models developed in US and Japan and some of his works were just the use of the model on Indian data. His other works were pretty derivative too and he had no qualms in just importing ideas and theories. I felt that this is not the kind of work I wanted to do in my career. I wanted to do novel work. This realization that my thesis is a total derivative work saddened me.

Two days before the proposal, I felt like running away from the Institute. The pressure got to me. I wrote a mail to The-light telling her about my issues. Even though she was not replying to me, I kept writing to her. The urge in me to get in touch with her was deep as I could see her all the time. It was stalking her of which I am pretty ashamed now. But because she was inside me, I felt so close to her. It never occurred to me that her presence had nothing to do with the real person.

It became difficult for me. I called one of my close friends in Mumbai and told him about my feelings. He gave me a suggestion which I now follow as a golden rule and which has saved my life in a professional sense. He told me that whatever happens, I should go and stand in the presentation room. Only my presence is needed. If I stand there, other things would follow. I listened to him and dropped my idea of running away.

Before my actual proposal, there was a mock proposal held for my committee members. The Professor had asked me to send him the proposal. I sent it to him the night before. In the mock proposal, the committee members floated a number of suggestions. I noted them down on a piece of paper as the members gave them. While I was delivering the mock proposal, I felt The-light with me. I felt as if it was she who was speaking rather than me. I was emulating her ways of speaking. The mock went well and I came back and included their suggestions to the best of my understanding.

My proposal was a mundane affair. There were few scholars present. I presented my literature review, methodology, and research questions. My committee members gave their suggestions. They were helpful at all the instances and the proposal passed without any issues. I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do, like an obedient pet. For them, who had steered the thesis of so many students before, it was a routine affair.

I spent few days on the campus after my proposal trying to learn the model. I visited my senior once in Delhi and he gave a few suggestions to help me out. I was able to figure the operational details of the model out in a week.