Good at Arrivals, Terrible at Staying

 

The email arrived on a Tuesday, the way these emails always seem to. Polite. Grateful for my "contributions." Wishing me well "in my future endeavors." I read it standing in my mother's kitchen in Chennai, kettle just off the boil, my father's blood-pressure log open on the counter where I'd been about to fill in the morning reading. Six months at IIM Udaipur, in a village called Salumbar where I'd spent my days inside primary health centres asking frontline workers why the medicines never arrived on time—and now I was the one asking why the position never arrived at all.

This is not a resignation letter. It is not, I hope, a complaint either. It is an accounting—the kind I was trained to do, and the kind I am now forced to do about my own life.

The Pattern, Named Plainly

Look at the last five years on paper and a shape emerges that no single institution intended but that all of them, together, produced. Sixteen months at a business school in Sonipat. Fifteen months at a university in Mangalore. Three months guest-teaching in Hyderabad. Six months as a research lead in Udaipur. Each ending not in failure—TBEM scores improved, kaizens delivered, papers published, a distinguished award even—but in expiry. Contracts, by their nature, expire. That is not a character flaw. It is the terms of the document.

I used to think the fault, if there was one, must be mine. Objectivist philosophy insists that a man's worth is measured by what he produces, and by that measure, I should have something else to answer for: more than a PhD from IIM Indore, a master's from Penn State, twenty years spread across TATA Communications, Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, four teaching appointments, and a growing shelf of publications and preprints..... what else?

Production was never the shortfall. What I have learned, slowly and at some cost, is that institutions do not hire production. They hire budget lines. And budget lines, in Indian higher education and project-funded research, are drawn for a fiscal year, a grant cycle, a pilot phase—rarely for a person. That is the first honest thing I can say about why these roles keep not converting: it was never really a referendum on me. It was a referendum on how the institution accounts for its own uncertainty, and I happened to be standing where that uncertainty landed.

What Fifty-Four Changes

I will not pretend the calculus is the same as it was at thirty-four, when a six-month gap felt like an adventure and a short contract felt like a foothold. My parents are in their eighties now. My father's mobility has narrowed to the distance between his chair and the balcony; my mother manages the household with a stubbornness I recognize because I inherited it. Their care does not pause for my job search. Their medicines, their appointments, their frailty—these run on a clock that has no sabbatical.

A permanent position, for a man in my position, is not about ambition anymore. It is about stability. Navigating this middle  to pneultimate chapter of life as a solo carer—without the shared buffer of a partner or a dual income—means the weight of their uncertainty rests entirely on my shoulders. It is about being able to tell a doctor "yes, I can be here every Thursday" without first checking whether my contract survives to Thursday. It is about a pension line that exists, an insurance policy that doesn't lapse between assignments, and an address I can give without a mental asterisk for how many months it remains true.

The Gita's counsel on nishkama karma—action without attachment to the fruit—has carried me through the intellectual disappointments of this decade. It does not, however, pay for a cardio/physio consultation. There is a limit to what detachment can be asked to do when the people depending on your stability did not choose this uncertainty; they simply grew old inside it.

Reasonable Expectations, in a World Built on Cycles

I am not asking the universe for guarantees it was never built to give. Markets contract. Institutions reorganize. Research funding follows political and financial weather, not merit alone. I have made my peace with the fact that ups and downs are not an aberration in a career—they are the career, and anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a life they have not yet fully lived.

What I am asking for is narrower, and entirely fair: that twenty years of demonstrated delivery, across industry and academia both, be allowed to count toward something that does not reset every twelve to eighteen months. That an institution weighing a permanent hire look at a body of work—Six Sigma deployments, TOC frameworks applied from airports to metro rail to rural health centres, a publication trail that has not gone quiet even once during the "gaps"—and see continuity, even where the paperwork shows breaks.

The breaks were never in the work. They were in the way the work was contracted.

The Impersonal and the Personal

There is a word for what these seven years have taught me about institutions, and it is not cruelty—it is impersonalism. No dean ever wished me ill. No HR officer, closing my file, felt anything at all. That is precisely the point. I was administered, not known. A line item renewed or not renewed according to a budget cycle that has no memory of the man who taught it, published under it, and improved its TBEM score. The institution relates to the impersonal function—"researcher," "faculty," "guest lecturer"—and the function, once vacated, leaves no trace of who filled it.

I recognize this structure because I have read about it in a very different register. The Gita spends real attention distinguishing two paths to the same truth: the way of the impersonal absolute, nirguna Brahman, formless and unrelating, which Krishna admits is the harder path for an embodied being to hold onto—and the way of the personal, saguna, a God who can be addressed, who answers, who remembers you specifically. Krishna's counsel to Arjuna is not that the impersonal path is false. It is that most of us, bound to bodies and to time, need something that knows our name.

I have spent two decades being handled by the impersonal—by processes, cycles, and budget lines that renew or lapse without sentiment. What has kept me upright through it is not a matching impersonalism of my own, a stoic shrug that says institutions were never going to care and so that everything is not lost. What has kept me upright is the older insistence, inherited from faith and now tested daily in a kitchen with my parents' medicine log open on the counter, that somewhere the personal still holds. A father recognizes his son whether or not an institution renews his contract; devotion is owed and received outside of any HR calendar. To the people who matter, I am never an impersonal function waiting to be reassigned.

This is not resignation dressed as spirituality. It is closer to a division of labour: I have stopped asking institutions to be personal, because that was never their nature. I ask that only of the people, and the faith, that were built to hold it.

A Candid Assessment for the Final Chapter

Every administrator looks at a fragmented CV with a degree of hesitation, wondering if the transitions signify a restlessness of the mind or a deficit in adaptability. Let me answer that hesitation directly, without theatre:

• My Strength: I am a builder of frameworks and an optimizer of broken systems. Whether it is an international airport, a metro rail project, or a rural primary health center, I know how to make operations work. My record proves that my intellect does not rust between assignments.

• My Limitation: I am no longer built for transient setups, nomadic academic stints, or short-term piloting. A career built entirely on contracts teaches you to be excellent at arrivals and terrible at staying. The constant uprooting exhausts the spirit, and my domestic realities no longer allow me to be agile at the cost of stability.

I am not looking for another stepping stone. I am 54 years old, and I am looking for the place where I will anchor my career until retirement.

The Line I Keep Returning To

I have arrived, competently, at seven institutions and companies over two decades. I would like, once more, simply to stay—long enough to watch a research programme mature instead of handing it off half-grown, long enough to be the steady name in a department instead of the visiting one, long enough that my father, on one of his better afternoons, can ask "so where are you working now" and get the same answer twice.

I am not done producing. I have never been more ready. What I am asking the next institution that reads this resume is simple: hire me for the depth of my expertise, accept the boundary conditions of my current life, and let this position be the one that does not expire.