Aseem’s work experience includes community organizing, natural resource management, and monitoring & evaluation.
Aseem’s first career began with AKRSP-India in 2001, followed by Eklavya-Bhopal, and Catalyst Management Services-Bangalore, before ending with a brief period of complete unemployment in 2008. His second career began with a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he finished in 2016. His primary areas of expertise is political sociology with a focus on collective identity, social movements, race/caste, labor, ideology, and capitalism.
His research on the politics of vegetarianism; majoritarian politics and indigenous social movements; comparative Human Rights; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been published in peer-reviewed journals. He has also written for popular web publications such as theconversation.com, scroll.in, countercurrents.org, etc.
Q. How has been your journey from IIFM so far?
A. IIFM has had a transformative effect on me, both intellectually and emotionally. One of my OT’s Samaj Pragati Sahayog: Rural Empowerment in Central India and my work with Eklavya (which later became Samavesh) have left deep imprints on my understanding about the value of people-centric work, as well as its limitations. While I have had a somewhat different career since I shifted gears after 7 years of work, I still fondly remember my experiences and observations tied to IIFM and its people.
Q. What were some of the key milestones/learning in this journey that you would like to share with us?
A. I should warn readers that they will likely not learn much from whatever appears below.
I have taken the liberty to simply share my experiences. While I learned a lot through my experiences I have failed to frame them as learnings. There might not be much to learn from my experiences. I hope that those who ignore this warning will at least get a bit entertained from this write-up. I did like remembering and writing all of this.
I thoroughly enjoyed my days at IIFM and the training that I got there. They added a layer of human capital over the cultural capital that I came to IIFM with. I grew up in Lucknow with multiple privileges and unearned advantages steeped in class, caste, and patriarchy. I was socialized in a progressive household and was surrounded by people, active in academic and activist networks. This exposed me to books, documentaries, discussions, and verbal communication skills in both formal and informal settings from a very early age. Such cultural capital is highly valued in most status-based hierarchical societies including India, and IIFM was no exception. Schools in particular are especially prone to rewarding cultural capital and reproduce unearned social advantages. While I was generally a mediocre student, I did better than what my efforts were worth at IIFM.
My first OT (now called Summer Internship) was with my roommate at CAPART in New Delhi. This was a major hub of rural development at that time and being there we saw or met some of the most influential players in the field. We spent the OT traveling to many places in India where government-funded watershed projects were being implemented.
Cultural capital couples with social capital to reproduce social advantages and create opportunities. It worked for me there too. The connections we made there helped me get my second OT (now called Project Work) at Samaj Pragati Sahyog in Dewa’s, which was then an upcoming organization working in a very harsh, arid, and hot region of MP.
But some people are immune to the seductions of cultural capital. With them, you can’t get your way. Professor Mehta was one such person. His courses and grading style cut me to size. By the end of IIFM, my rank was just a few places away from the bottom. However, my anxieties vanished once I saw the dynamics of the placement process.
Many recruiters during that time, if not all, assessed potential employees with rubrics that favoured cultural capital, not the actual competence or merit of the person they interviewed. My prospects remained bright.
I appeared for two job interviews, partly bluffed my way through, was selected for both, and chose AKRSP-India which was made to be a big deal then for anyone wanting to work in the field of watershed management. I was excited and promptly joined their field office in Junagadh. All of 24 years, I became the team leader at a cluster office on the coast. My team had two members with more than twenty years of experience each. I earned twice their income, often travelled by Jeep, was supposed to lead the team, guide subject matter experts, and also ensure corporate-style discipline at the organizational level. It didn’t go well. I resigned after 4 months. I must add in my defence that the Dal was always sweet, I had no friends there, salt ingress in drinking water made me lose a lot of hair, and the house I rented was almost haunted. Anyway, that was the end of my first job.
I promptly retreated to the safety net of my Social Capital. One of my close friends worked at Eklavya in Bhopal along with two more batchmates from IIFM. I was quickly set up for my next job within a few days of leaving AKRSP-I. This was a different kind of place. All of us IIFM folk were put in the right place. Our salaries were higher than a lot of other more experienced colleagues here but none of us were put on the ‘team leader’ pedestal. I spent about 4 years here, did things that I never thought I could, and learnt a bunch of stuff that I can never forget.
These included designing a non-masonry micro dam with P Naveen Kumar (which didn’t last long), working with indigenous farmers trying out new crops and new farming techniques (Isabgol/Psyllium being one of them), helping organize SHGs, planning Panchayati Raj trainings, and helping with a pre-school program in villages where discrimination against Gond, Korku, and Dalit children was pervasive.
Other perks in this job included occasionally hunting for crabs with village folk on full moon nights, taking bus rides through kilometers of pot holes interrupted by pieces of a state highway, walking the last 6 kilometers to field villages, taking a bath in full public. view, and using toilets without roofs, or doors, or walls. It was fun. And those 4 years are the ones that I cherish the most. They changed me and made me very strong.
By then funding patterns for development programs in India was fast changing, becoming more ‘professional’ and reorienting towards more orderly organizations. Our paydays transformed into hopeful, partial payments, and deferred promises. Since I lived with two of my best friends, all these financial problems seemed trivial. We ate a cheap Idli/Sambhar breakfast on the street, a subsidized lunch at work, and had a beer for dinner (at least sometimes). Then one of us three bolted, and the two of us had to start looking for other opportunities, with actual salaries. We were all finally coming of age, marriages were looming, and the specter of family life hung like a sword and entering a job in the consulting world. This was sometime in 2005.
My next job was with CMS-Bangalore, and the client was the DFID funded PACS program. The recruitment process ‘appeared’ very professional, objective, and competent. It was actually not. Same old Cultural Capital stuff, hiding behind state of the art assessment techniques. I made it again and became the State Coordinator (Monitoring) for UP and returned to Lucknow. In this job, I took a lot of flights, got my first laptop, and felt very important working 16 hours a day writing emails and filling up MS Excel sheets. I don’t recall any other details of what I did other than that I soon knew this was not what I wanted to do. The money was pretty good, and like a lot of other people, I continued doing what I did for a couple of years until the money stopped feeling valuable enough to tolerate my mechanical, repetitive, and alienating work. I will spare you the tail end of my first career other than the fact that I spent a few months preparing for GRE while trying to earn some basic money through casual consulting to keep everything rolling.
Two big pieces of self-realization that I did get by this time were:
a) That project consulting and management consulting in the field of development were not things that I respected, or valued, and hence could not do, &
b) Working with a small NGO or CBO with the most vulnerable communities required a conviction, and dedication that I failed to find within myself. I was fundamentally, too urban, too comfort-loving, and unable to dig myself outside of my class position. My heart lay in that work though. In short, I realized I was a petty bourgeoisie. Higher Ed would be my calling.
Q. What is the most satisfying part in your career?
A. The highlight of my current work, that gives me the most satisfaction, is the interactions that I have with my students, a majority of whom come from under-served backgrounds—working class, first-generation, and ethnic minorities. Sociology dazzles them and draws them in for a lifetime of thinking about the world from a critical lens. I love the fact that I can help in this process.
I also get a lot of time to read, to write, conduct research, present at conferences, and publish. But overall, I love the fact that I can do what I enjoy, day in and day out.
Q. Has your learning at IIFM helped in shaping how you approach your professional roles?
A. Not in a formal way, but I am sure my experiences, and some of my reflections about them help in unconscious ways.
Q. Who (or what) are the biggest influences or drivers in your careers? What would be your advice to freshers and IIFM graduates who are looking to choose similar sectors/roles?
A. Reading. Thinking. Writing/Discussing. That is what continues to help me the most. Fortunately, my job involves these as my main work, and I get incentives for them. My spouse Abhilasha (Asst. Professor of Economics, California State University, Fresno) is also an academic and is deep into theoretical work. That helps too. My kids who only half understand Hindi often think we are arguing when we thrash out stuff that we have been reading or thinking about. In hindsight, I was able to read very little towards the end of my first career, and that was probably also a reason why I quit that career and lifestyle.
I would not advise anything but want to share what has helped me in addition to what I have already shared—I am learning the value of going slow, relaxing, and resisting the need for constant growth. Rather, I am thinking about other ways of being, questioning the value of efficiency, and trying to be more reflective in all that I do. I have taken up gardening, to maintain perspective and remind myself of the natural speed of life and its processes.
Q. How did you decide to go for higher studies post IIFM? And how was the experience?
A. The immediate trigger to get back to education was my last job, where I earned the most, worked the most, and would have risen well, but eventually found everything to be pretty meaningless. I was seeing in detail, the innards of the development sector, not at the grassroots anymore (which I deeply respect) but at the middle and upper level. This included observing people in formal and informal situations within the management, consulting, and advising circles. I am trying hard here to not take names, but I am definitely talking about management consulting groups, international auditing firms, and large NGOs that had by then transformed into management-oriented broker organizations specializing in ‘facilitating’ development.
I was never a very good student, and the eligibility requirements for a PhD in the US involved GRE and TOEFL. GRE gave me a hard time, but I eventually scored well for the social sciences that I was aiming at. The admission process was a rollercoaster as I learned things on the go. I didn’t understand very well the differences between Anthropology and Sociology, and didn’t think ‘smartly’ about what schools to apply to, but eventually got a good number of offers. My PhD experience was excellent- both the coursework and preparation and the field research that I did. I loved getting back to school, reading frenetically, and enjoying the cultural shocks of both grad school, and living in a radically different culture. I have become a big fan of living away from your culture, even if temporarily. It can help liberate one from the often narrow, petty, and constraining habits that we remain blind to unless we go away. Of course, I don’t find other cultures, including the one I now live in, ideal, but living between cultures has helped me think through a lot of stuff that I would not have thought about otherwise.
I am happy to talk about this with folk who ever want to go for a PhD, send me an email
on [email protected] if you need to.
I do make a specific suggestion: if you are planning to get a PhD, also consider options outside your training at IIFM. Don’t just constrain yourself to Environment, Forestry, or Development, think about Political Science, History, Anthropology, Sociology, and whatnot. Your IIFM training and professional experience will be valuable no matter which way you head.
Q. What are your favorite memories during your IIFM days?
A. Too many. Loitering in Nehru Nagar, 10 No. Market, and the Top N Town Plaza. I also clearly remember snaking through the alleys behind Top N Town where a friend of ours (who cannot be named) used to get lost very often. He had a strange memory issue.
Whenever he went there, he would forget coming back, and some of us had to go find
him and literally drag him back to campus.
Of course, the Fri/Sat night parties outside Silver Fir (I think a rose garden now sits near that small plaza) were the weekly high for me. They sometimes (d)evolved into a few broken bottles, a couple of tipsy folk being carried into their rooms, and on some occasions some of us had to be given a shower and a change of clothing lest the janitorial staff reported the mess to the higher-ups in the morning!
Q. In hindsight, what was the biggest contribution or take away from IIFM that you think played a critical role in shaping you as an individual or professional?
The best buddies / seniors /faculty at IIFM? Some memorable tidbits that you like to share?
A. IIFM opened my mind to a number of new things that I likely would have missed learning about if I had gone to a more mainstream institution.
At IIFM I came face to face with many new things. One of them was the cultural and linguistic diversity that South Asia can boast. One fine night in June of 1999 I was in Pushpak Express headed to Bhopal, and the next morning I was shaking hands with folks from not just UP but Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Nepal, Jharkhand, Bengal, Punjab, Karnataka, Orissa, Kerela, and Bangladesh.
The second thing that shook me was the mundane, ordinary intermingling between men and women. I was schooled at a Catholic Boys’ school and didn’t have many women friends during my undergrad at the University of Lucknow. It was however, not just the intermingling, but the equal and easy way in which everyone hung out together, that I had never experienced. These experiences included arguments and minor conflicts with girls in the batch, most of whom were way smarter than me and did very well both in academics and in their professions. These experiences trained my 23-year-old self in ways that no other formal training could have.
Another major phenomenon that really opened my eyes to new ways of thinking, doing, and being was Prof. Majumdar, endearingly called Zoom then. He modelled how a professor can relate to students. He deliberately hung out with us during tea breaks, and would smoke half a cigarette, before cutting off the lighted end and saving the other half for next time. It didn’t strike me as a very special thing then, but over time I think it has affected how I relate with my students now in creating an almost equal relationship.
My entire schooling and undergrad education in Lucknow followed the traditional system where teachers were either benevolent elders or authoritarian tyrants but never equals.
Our relationships were always hierarchical, way too respectful to nurture any notion of democratic values or critical debates, and IIFM also largely followed the same model, other than a handful of professors who broke that mold. I would pinpoint Dr D. N. Pandey, Dr. R. K. Singh, Dr. Amitabh Pandey, and Dr. P. K. Biswas as the progressive ones, who cultivated very friendly relationships with students, and communicating with them on equal terms.
Regarding friendships, in the beginning I spent a lot of time with my room mates Ankur Singhal and Avinav Kumar, as well as other close friends- P Naveen Kumar, Nimisha Mittal, Mukesh Chandra Sharan, and Aishwarya Sharma. Within a semester, it became clear that my company was not conducive for academic progress. Aishwarya Sharma and Ankur Singhal promptly abandoned me and soon improved their grades. Ankur is now a successful entrepreneur, and Aishwarya went to IIM before joining the Punjab government. Our love has remained intact though. The other four and myself continued hanging out. It was great fun. All five of us are now partially unemployed (professors at state universities have a 9 month wage period), barring Mukesh whom we failed to corrupt, any more than he already was. Sameer Kumar, another friend with whom I became very close after IIFM, never paid attention to me then. And Kabita Ghimire,
another very good friend, was always busy with other smarter and nicer people. Having said this, we were a very small batch and barring a couple of people I had great interactions with most of my batchmates.
The plaza near the hostel telephone functioned as the Bodhi Tree, where a nightly Panchayat would assemble after dinner. Participants included insomniacs, homesick folks, long distance lovers, loafers, and occasional 4.33 GPA students in need of refreshing entertainment. I belonged to many of those categories except the last one.
Amit Vatsyayan, and Sarika Sinha regularly dished out micro-doses of wisdom and life affirming advice. These sessions were very therapeutic and comforting. It was here that we managed to convince Avinav Kumar against leaving for a very lucrative MBA offer that he got in the first few weeks of IIFM.
Q. As an alumni, what’s your advice to freshers or those are joining IIFM to get best out of the 2 years there?
A. My primary advice is to read across the board, especially outside of what coursework requires you to. Courses and syllabi are almost always functions of norms and values prevalent in any institution, and larger society. They are geared to reproduce existing power hierarchies and social structures. Reading outside the requirements helps counterbalance these tendencies. This is likely a challenging thing to do given all the time constraints students at IIFM face.
I myself regret not using the library as much as I could have when I was then. In my defence, there were good reasons for that. There was too much fun going on, for a person like me who was living in a residential college for the first time. Computers were also a distraction at that time, it was rare to have broadband connections then, and we all had it as well as unrestricted use of the computer lab. But above all, a lot of my potential reading time was spent looking for a dear friend who was often lost in the alleys of New Market.
Q. What was your typical day at the work? And how does it look like while you are on a break?
A. I work at a large state university that focuses on teaching, requires a healthy amount of research, and demands a lot of service (committees and meetings). I am usually in office 2-3 days a week when I teach and do my service work. The rest of the time is used for research. On a typical day at work, I teach 2 or 3 classes and hold office hours for meeting with students.
A university job such as mine provides a lot of time in comparison to other jobs. I get a three month-long summer break, and about 3 weeks during the winter. The breaks however are often spent in research and writing, and sometimes for preparations for teaching new courses in the future. Conferences are also often organized during the summers.
I live in Central California which is home to two very large national Parks (Yosemite, and Kings Canyon) and has great weather across the year (including a very hot summer that reminds me of Lucknow). All of these factors create a lot of opportunities for outdoor recreation.
Q. And how about weekends, hobbies, family and anything else you want to add?
A. This is the first year since I came to the US (2008) when I am finally practicing minimal work during weekends. It is, however, hard to tune out of research that I am voluntarily plugged into. I am trying to spend a lot more time with my spouse, and 9-year-old twins, and our two young cats. All of us are trying to bike more, walk and run more, and undertake fun home projects more often. We plan to replace the water-intensive grass in our front yard with xeriscaping, which is likely going to ruffle some feathers in my otherwise settler-colonial neighbourhood.
Q. Favorite Books, movies, authors?
A. I am addicted to cinema and TV, and read across the board with no permanent favorites. Some books that moved me and that I would recommend are: The Life and Times of Michael K; Aadmi Bail Aur Sapnay; Akkarmaashi, Nachyo Bahut Gopal; Chotti Munda aur Uska Teer; and Joothan.
Q. IIFM is driven by alumni’s passion and commitments towards its goal. How would you like to contribute to IIFM or IIFM alumni, students? Your engagement with IIFM Placement or OT/SI?
A. Having changed my career, I am pretty useless for helping with OTs(now called SI and Project Work) or placements, but I am happy to speak with people interested in graduate school and research in general. I am not sure how useful I will be as I am honestly not very enthusiastic about the way IIFM has been turning towards a very neoliberal direction monopolized by market imaginaries. I am, however, happy to share what I know about getting a PhD.
Q. Any suggestions on who you want to get profiled/interviewed here?
A. I would like to see some of my batchmates profiled here whom I haven’t been able to keep track of: Amitabh Dongre, Binu Koshy, Sugandh Jaiswal, and Maitreyi Mandal.