The second act

India was never in my "top 10" list of places I might want to visit. It always seemed too crowded, too dusty, and too hot. When given the choice, I usually went some place cooler like like the UK, or less crowded, like the Canadian Arctic.

It started a year ago in my graduate seminar in visual communications. I worked with a Nepali student, Deepak Neupane, and told him I had always wanted to visit the Himalayas. He said I should go, and he meant it. So we visited Carl Lindquist, our director of international programs at Arkansas State and he liked the idea. Carl is an India scholar, and he had lived and married there. So we planned and India-Nepal trip. Eight months and a dozen permutations later, the Nepal trip faded. The two-country trip proved too expensive and lengthy. Our university chancellor made the final decision.

India remained. My wife, Sara E. McNeil had always wanted to go. She's the type of person who views  the Upanishads as recreational reading.

And I just wanted to go.

Somewhere.

I suppose you can say I am at a "career plateau." In the scheme of things, it's not a bad problem to have. After all, if your problems are existential, are they really problems? After several years of doing the requisite professor things -- publishing articles in journals and going to conferences and teaching classes and being involved in the profession yadda yadda yadda, I "topped out," with a promoted to full professor last year.

And left me ... I wasn't sure where. I could have continued to do more of the same things that got me to that final promotion, but what's the point? I looked into moving into administration, and I got some bites and even an on-campus visit for an associate deanship last year, but ultimately they filled the job internally at a far lower cost. 

My professional journalism career is at a dead end, too. I worked part time for a regional metro newspaper, but the economy killed that gig.  I was regional director and national vice president for a major professional organization, but after they chose someone else for president, they really didn't know what to do with me.  I sometimes fire off a column or a letter or rant in a local newspaper or professional blog, but I haven't found anything to sustain forward momentum.


Isaac Newton said that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion and that bodies that don't move tend to stay that way, too. I am not enjoying my my existential inertia. But I know I have no right to complain; I am in an enviable position. I can go through the motions, and they'd probably be pretty-good motions, until retirement and .....


... and  some professors do that, and it happens in other careers, too. Colleagues and friends tell me to gear down a bit, keep my nose clean, and sort of go into an early semi-retirement. With the way Social Security and my 401(k) look, that semi-retirement looks like a 20-year stretch. 


I am not ready for that.


So, here I am at Boston's Logan Airport, waiting for a flight to Paris, and then New Delhi. My daughter,Kate, 11, is beside me, playing a computer game and her mom is reading beside her. The students accompanying us, Shenetta Payne of Pine Bluff, Ark., and Kalee Haywood of Piggot Ark., are respectively reading and napping. And frequent flier Carl Lindquist is keeping track of our travel plans, double-checking itineraries.


We cross the Atlantic in an hour.


We're touring the Golden Triangle: New Delhi, Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and Jaipour. We're visiting Mumbai and Bollywood. I hope to bring back a student tour next year and find a home for them to produce documentaries on the subcontinent.  I have meeting at  the Times of India, NDTV (India's CNN) and the renowned Whistling Woods Film School. 


I hope it works out, and as long as I have hope, I can move forward.