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a full rich day
Today did not begin as what Hawkeye Pierce calls a full rich day - I got out of bed at lunchtime, Shim having lured me out with Peruvian coffee, then I picked up my bike from the shop, I tried a Lush cupcake-flavoured face mask, I went over my business law mock (verdict: if you did some work, you could get a distinction, why don't you do some work), and then settled down to reading about company liquidation.
But things change. I have had two startling pieces of news in the last two hours.
-Firstly. I have received an email from the University of Chicago Law School. They want me to know that they are very impressed with my credentials but have run out of space, thus far, in the LLM programme, and so they are putting me in a standby group (people drop out, people don't get funding, or most amusingly of all, they decide that the overall group lacks geographical and ethnic diversity). I should hear from them again by April about whether or not they want to admit me.
My thoughts on this are mixed. First of all I am not filled with hope about being admitted - I've been waitlisted before, by the UCl Medical School, and they waitlisted me in January 2005 and finally rejected me in May, and on the whole these things don't work out. But on the other hand, the email included the statistics. The law school have already rejected seventy percent of their applicants, just about, and I have spent the last two years doubting myself. Wondering if I am really smart, if maybe I was fine at school but am not cut out for higher education, if maybe I am only pursuing professional training because I am not good enough for academia. And whether or not I am finally admitted, an incredibly good US law school thinks that for its academic Masters programme, I am better than seventy percent of the people who applied. I think I feel good about that.
-Secondly. My mother has returned from India - from Delhi, though recently from Kolkata, Silchar and Bangladesh. She had gone to Bangladesh with my Dadu (who is not my grandfather, actually - he is my mother's father's youngest brother, my biological grandfather having died in the seventies), having acquired visas and permissions with great difficulty, for good reason. My mother's family are Bengalis, Hindus, and ancestrally, they come from what is now Bangladesh. Dadu, then thirteen or fourteen, and the rest of the family, fled over the border in 1947 soon after Partition.
Dadu has wanted to go back for many years. Not for good, he says, but he wanted to see the place again, "before I die". My mother has wanted to make this happen for nearly as long. So, she stayed on long after I and most of the rest of the family had left, and flew to Silchar to see her sister and my cousins, and then on Monday they set out from there to Karimganj, where they planned to cross the border at the Kushiyara River. My mother said, at this point she was ready for anything, but mostly for the place to be like Nilam Bazaar, the village in Assam where the family settled, and where until recently we had a house – impressive, and surrounded by mango trees and coconut palms, but run down, at the end of dirt tracks, and impossibly remote. (I broke my ankle there, once – it took a week before it was looked at. It's a far away place.)
The boat, she said, had the Indian flag on the one side, and the Bangladeshi flag on the other, and once they had got through the lengthy process of immigration – I have never crossed a border by surface! - they went to Sylhet, which, my mother said, she thought was a village. It was in 1947, but now it is a small city, and they rented a car – a Toyota, my mother said, in quiet wonderment – and drove down paved, easy roads that looked like English ones, she said, complete with the same sorts of speed limit signs, looking for another village.
They couldn't find it. Dadu couldn't recognise anything; they stopped and asked someone, and he didn't know what they meant or what they were looking for. My mother had an idea – consult people of Dadu's age. So they stopped at a doctor's surgery with old people in the waiting room – Muslims, my mother said, with dhari and topi - and asked them. The people there told them that they had missed the village, driven past it – but they knew which village. They knew my grandfather's name, and his father's name.
So they went back. And the village when they came to it, was bigger, and Dadu didn't remember it, but they found a house that he thought was the one, and they knocked on the door. The family who lived there invited them in, and gave them tea and food, and said that they were the third people to live in that house since Partition. The first people to live there had taken over the empty space after Dadu and his mother and siblings had fled, and they had sold the house to another family, who had sold it to the current owners. They were very kind, my mother said – another Muslim family, who couldn't do enough for them, showed them around and fed them and made them feel welcome. Dadu said when he saw the house, he knew it was the right place, and said, I was born in this house – but he hadn't been there, he said, for more than sixty years.
And he said to the people who lived there, that my grandmother, my Didibhai, has never been to this place, but she is the bahu of this house – its daughter. And they went outside and cut four coconuts from the palms, and gave them to her, as the gift for the bahu for the house, for her to take away.
They went back to Sylhet and hoped to go home, but apparently you cannot cross the border outside of office hours, and it was past five o'clock and they had to find a guesthouse. Which was perfectly nice, my mother said – she had been picturing the sort of huts you would have left behind, in 1947! - but they hadn't been planning to stay, so none of them had anything to sleep in, or really anything beyond what they were standing up in. And she explained this to the driver, who had a bright idea. He drove them to the local mosque, who lent them four lungi to sleep in, and bought a single tube of toothpaste between them all. It was an adventure, my mother said, and they returned them to the mosque before they left!
And in the morning they went back, and crossed the river to India.
I wish I could have gone. Even though I couldn't, I am so happy that they found the place – that my family comes from somewhere, that in the end Dadu could go home.
But things change. I have had two startling pieces of news in the last two hours.
-Firstly. I have received an email from the University of Chicago Law School. They want me to know that they are very impressed with my credentials but have run out of space, thus far, in the LLM programme, and so they are putting me in a standby group (people drop out, people don't get funding, or most amusingly of all, they decide that the overall group lacks geographical and ethnic diversity). I should hear from them again by April about whether or not they want to admit me.
My thoughts on this are mixed. First of all I am not filled with hope about being admitted - I've been waitlisted before, by the UCl Medical School, and they waitlisted me in January 2005 and finally rejected me in May, and on the whole these things don't work out. But on the other hand, the email included the statistics. The law school have already rejected seventy percent of their applicants, just about, and I have spent the last two years doubting myself. Wondering if I am really smart, if maybe I was fine at school but am not cut out for higher education, if maybe I am only pursuing professional training because I am not good enough for academia. And whether or not I am finally admitted, an incredibly good US law school thinks that for its academic Masters programme, I am better than seventy percent of the people who applied. I think I feel good about that.
-Secondly. My mother has returned from India - from Delhi, though recently from Kolkata, Silchar and Bangladesh. She had gone to Bangladesh with my Dadu (who is not my grandfather, actually - he is my mother's father's youngest brother, my biological grandfather having died in the seventies), having acquired visas and permissions with great difficulty, for good reason. My mother's family are Bengalis, Hindus, and ancestrally, they come from what is now Bangladesh. Dadu, then thirteen or fourteen, and the rest of the family, fled over the border in 1947 soon after Partition.
Dadu has wanted to go back for many years. Not for good, he says, but he wanted to see the place again, "before I die". My mother has wanted to make this happen for nearly as long. So, she stayed on long after I and most of the rest of the family had left, and flew to Silchar to see her sister and my cousins, and then on Monday they set out from there to Karimganj, where they planned to cross the border at the Kushiyara River. My mother said, at this point she was ready for anything, but mostly for the place to be like Nilam Bazaar, the village in Assam where the family settled, and where until recently we had a house – impressive, and surrounded by mango trees and coconut palms, but run down, at the end of dirt tracks, and impossibly remote. (I broke my ankle there, once – it took a week before it was looked at. It's a far away place.)
The boat, she said, had the Indian flag on the one side, and the Bangladeshi flag on the other, and once they had got through the lengthy process of immigration – I have never crossed a border by surface! - they went to Sylhet, which, my mother said, she thought was a village. It was in 1947, but now it is a small city, and they rented a car – a Toyota, my mother said, in quiet wonderment – and drove down paved, easy roads that looked like English ones, she said, complete with the same sorts of speed limit signs, looking for another village.
They couldn't find it. Dadu couldn't recognise anything; they stopped and asked someone, and he didn't know what they meant or what they were looking for. My mother had an idea – consult people of Dadu's age. So they stopped at a doctor's surgery with old people in the waiting room – Muslims, my mother said, with dhari and topi - and asked them. The people there told them that they had missed the village, driven past it – but they knew which village. They knew my grandfather's name, and his father's name.
So they went back. And the village when they came to it, was bigger, and Dadu didn't remember it, but they found a house that he thought was the one, and they knocked on the door. The family who lived there invited them in, and gave them tea and food, and said that they were the third people to live in that house since Partition. The first people to live there had taken over the empty space after Dadu and his mother and siblings had fled, and they had sold the house to another family, who had sold it to the current owners. They were very kind, my mother said – another Muslim family, who couldn't do enough for them, showed them around and fed them and made them feel welcome. Dadu said when he saw the house, he knew it was the right place, and said, I was born in this house – but he hadn't been there, he said, for more than sixty years.
And he said to the people who lived there, that my grandmother, my Didibhai, has never been to this place, but she is the bahu of this house – its daughter. And they went outside and cut four coconuts from the palms, and gave them to her, as the gift for the bahu for the house, for her to take away.
They went back to Sylhet and hoped to go home, but apparently you cannot cross the border outside of office hours, and it was past five o'clock and they had to find a guesthouse. Which was perfectly nice, my mother said – she had been picturing the sort of huts you would have left behind, in 1947! - but they hadn't been planning to stay, so none of them had anything to sleep in, or really anything beyond what they were standing up in. And she explained this to the driver, who had a bright idea. He drove them to the local mosque, who lent them four lungi to sleep in, and bought a single tube of toothpaste between them all. It was an adventure, my mother said, and they returned them to the mosque before they left!
And in the morning they went back, and crossed the river to India.
I wish I could have gone. Even though I couldn't, I am so happy that they found the place – that my family comes from somewhere, that in the end Dadu could go home.
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or most amusingly of all, they decide that the overall group lacks geographical and ethnic diversity
Wait. So does that mean they can unadmit previously-admitted people purely on non-academic bases? I can grok doing that kind of selection before admitting people, but after? Isn't that cruel and unusual? (Or am I misunderstanding?)
Congrats on beating out 70% of the applicants for a really great school! That is something to be proud of, absolutely.
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That's the process I'm familiar with, although I could be wrong about Masters-level.
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Well, DUH. They would have to be incredibly dense not to see how superior you are. :) That's awesome, and certainly something to feel good about.
Also, what a lovely story. I will admit, I got a little teary reading it. (My father has always wanted to go see the bit of Northern Ireland that is The Land of His Father(s) [our family name is supposed engraved on a courthouse square in Belfast], and I've always wanted to be able to be the one to take him there. So that struck a chord-- although I doubt a trip to Belfast would be nearly as exciting as the adventures your family had in Bangladesh!)
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Also, congratulations on being better than 70% of the people who applied! Who I'm sure were all fabulous, but as I have always believed, you are so incredibly awesome, my dear. *hugs* Well done.
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Sad because it's changed, or sad because it's changed and your Dadu wasn't there to witness it?
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(you weren't to know, don't worry; I didn't really make my feelings clear in my post.)
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(We're doing a history class on, well, Islam in Southeast Asia, I blush to admit, and it was so interesting reading real-life contemporariness about it. Thank you for sharing your family with us.)
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You are being very badly advised if you have been given the impression that LLMs (with the exception of a few very specialized ones, e.g., tax) are taken at all seriously in the United States, or that they represent any meaningful course of study.
You know the M.St.s at Oxford? The programs where they admit every random foreign student who wants to study at "an English university" and can afford to pay most or all of the tuition? For the most part, they're like that. They attract students who are desperate to have a common-law or Anglophone credential, or U.S. citizens trying to polish up a shaky resume. I graduated from a top-five U.S. law school and the only person I know of who went for an LLM did it in tax, and that was in conjunction with a work program.
It's not a meaningful professional credential for someone with a law degree from an English university who has a traineeship at an English firm waiting, and it's pretty humorous to think of any experience at a U.S. law school as being intellectually rigorous. Maybe you have a specific personal reason for wanting to be in Chicago, but otherwise I don't see what value it would offer you.
Like I said, I don't know you, it's really not any of my business, but I hate to see anyone being misled. Look here (http://abovethelaw.com/2008/07/the_value_of_an_llm_degree_rev.php?show=comments#comments) for instance. (I hate to refer anyone to that site because it's full of jerks, but it can give you an idea of what the LL.M. is thought of in the U.S.)
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Also, I'm not otherwise occupied during the time period; my alternative for the relevant academic year is, um, writing fanfic and eating cake.
Thanks for commenting, by the way. I appreciate it very much.
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