Goodbye Sachin………

Adding my 2 cents’ worth to an already over-exposed and over-discussed topic. Sachin Tendulkar in all likelihood has played is last innings in Cricket today. And have to admit whenever the Indian Cricket team takes the field next time, it will certainly feel a little different. I hate to admit it but for a very long time he was a part of my life since cricket was the only sport that I followed with any interest and Sachin was an inseparable part of the only team I supported, the national team of India. Mind you those were the days before Ganguly and Dravid and Sehwag. And much much before the IPL. He started playing for India in 1989 and it was also the year that I joined a boarding school where the first seeds of my cricket obsession were sown. To this day, the best and most memorable years of my life were those spent in that school. So my memories of Sachin are also the memories of my growing up years. I am sure this is true with most Indians of my generation. We grew up watching Sachin, adoring him for taking our favorite team to victory, singlehandedly conquering the mighty Aussies and instilling a confidence that our team too could win against any opponent. As his long and very successful career draws to a close, I feel a tinge of emotion. A string in the cord that connects to my childhood will now be broken. So thank you Sachin for being that string for this long, and goodbye. This is the last time I will curse you for getting out without scoring a century.

Minor efforts, Major effects

Towards the end of this blog post, the blogger describes how her employer, IISER-Pune, has taken steps to address a few minor, but non-trivial, issues that could worry a prospective employee, especially the ones that are not natives of the town/state. This is a particularly important, and probably a peculiar, issue relevant to India considering the multitude of languages and cultures in our country that change dramatically from state to state and sometimes even within a state. An outsider might have to deal with not only a bit of a culture shock but also subtle discrimination. This reminds me of my own experience as a PhD student that was diametrically opposite of what folks at IISER-Pune experienced. And the issues at hand were pretty much the same. 

I grew up in Visakhapatnam, a coastal town in Andhra Pradesh. When I got a PhD position in Chennai, it was my first big move away from my native town. Also included in the "move to a new place" package were the issues pertaining to a new culture, language and life in a metro. The institute where I did my PhD was a center affiliated to Anna University and established on a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model with pretty ambitious goals for research excellence. In tune with its stated objectives, the center has a very cosmopolitan composition, both in personnel and the research pursued. People of non-Chennai and/or non-Tamil background composed a good chunk of the staff and student population. One of the unintended (and certainly unwanted for someone in my situation) side story of this PPP experiment was that the PhD students did not have access to the University's hostel facilities.  And unlike the Pune folks, people entrusted with the job of running our center did not deem it an important enough issue to pay attention to. Consequently, the students were left to fend for themselves with their broken Tamil and shallow pockets. The challenge was not finding a decent place that was close enough to the campus. There were plenty of such places. The problem though was with the people who owned these places and insisted on renting them out only to "vegetarians" and "families". Luckily for me, both my roommates belonged to this "vegetarian" category. So, we were only half disqualified to be tenants on account of our failure to get married. In the almost 5 years that I spent there, we rented 4 different places. Each time we had to spend considerable time and energy in the process of finding each one of those and in trying to convince the landlords that we did not intend to burn the place down. It is important for me to clarify that I do not blame the landlords of that locality for thinking the way they do. I am sure they have valid reasons derived from their past experiences for imposing those conditions on their future tenants and every property owner has a right to decide who to rent their place out to or not to. But the point I am trying to make is that knowing how things were in the community, the administrators could have done things differently to ease the life a little for the students rather than leave them to their fate. It could have earned them a life time's goodwill for sure.

Another such example of administrative apathy was with regard to our stipends. Some of us had fellowships directly from CSIR. The way these fellowships were administered was something like this. At the beginning of the fellowship year (sometime around June, I think) we had to submit a claim form telling them how much to pay us (as if they didn't know that already) along with a progress report and a certificate from the supervisor confirming our continuation in the program and recommending the release of stipend. These forms are submitted to a particular office in the university. Once this office receives the forms from all the fellows in the university, they forward them to the CSIR in New Delhi who process them and release the funds to the university which then pays us every month. It usually took about 6 months before this entire process was completed and some money showed up in our bank accounts during which time we were without a pay. This could have been fine for someone living in university accommodation and eating in university mess. As mentioned above, we did not have half of this luxury. So, the system forced us to develop a grasshopper like personality to escape an ant like fate during the dry months. Again, things could have been done differently. Since, the CSIR was going to transfer funds to the university, our stipend could have been payed by the university in the interim. As it turns out this mile was too long for them to walk. 

In none of the above instances, were the authorities concerned breaking any rules. They can't even be accused of dereliction of duty. They were just not prepared to walk the extra few centimeters to make our lives a little bit easier. And this is not something limited only to our university. From what I know, this is what happens in most universities in India. In some places, things are even worse. I have heard from people who had to spend money from their pockets to buy chemicals and plastics or to get their samples analysed on specialized instruments. I probably had a relatively better Indian PhD experience. Mostly because I was part of the above mentioned PPP experiment. Though I was part of the university system, I was also detached from it. I was also fortunate to have done my PhD with supervisors who, above everything else, were great human beings. Working from within the system they did their best to protect me and tried to minimize the influence of  the negative experiences. Most importantly, they did not let any of this compromise the quality of my research. Not every researcher in Indian university system is that fortunate. Often one hears the leaders of Indian science lament the decline of research in Indian universities. For all their eminence and experience, one doesn't get a feeling that  they are looking at the right problems and suggesting the right solutions.  Maybe because, like most of our politicians, they too haven't gone through the systems and hence haven't experienced the problems first hand. Hopefully India will soon have leaders, both in politics and in science, who have grown through the system and have experienced the problems to provide real solutions. 
Were you a researcher associated  with a state university in India? Do you have similar experiences to share? 

Communicating research

The big cola companies Pepsi and Coca-Cola are constantly at war with each other for dominance of the un-healthy foods market. And the weapons of choice employed in this battle to capture the public mindscape are the TV and print commercials. Sometimes these ads are witty and interesting to watch, but most times they down right nasty where one company takes potshots at the other’s products (here’s an example). This was what I was reminded of while reading a recent report in Science which the journal claimed were the results of an year-long “sting” operation carried out to expose the ugly underbelly of Open Access research publishing (here is the link; but I am not sure if the full text can be accessed without a subscription to Science). In my opinion, this was not an honest “sting” Operation and Science was taking a cheap-shot at the Open Access movement that is starting to threaten the subscription access model that journals like Science have been employing to exploit (I’m tempted to say extort) the research community. If the study was objective, the fake paper should have also been submitted to the traditional subscription-access journals from the stables of Nature, Springer, Wiley and Science itself. The sample selection for the study is clearly biased and was done to fit into a pre-determined outcome. In fact, it could be a textbook case of how not to design a research study. Anyway, the point of this post is not to criticize the Science report (there is plenty of that already in the blogosphere, like this for example), but to present my views on communicating research findings.

Just like religious books had once served a  useful purpose in setting order in society before the advent of Democratic governments and constitutions, the subscription-driven, peer review backed research journals too had played a very important role in furthering the cause of research communities in a pre-internet world. The basic idea behind the origin of journals was the need to communicate latest research findings to the widest possible academic audience. So, a system developed where by the research from all over the world will be collected, published in the form of a book and distributed to everyone that wanted to read. Since printing and distributing these research records involved considerable expense, a fee was collected from those who wanted to read them. But evolution of the world wide web has made the hard copy journals irrelevant. Now almost everyone discovers and keeps to date with the latest developments in the research world on the internet. The open access journals that publish online and provide access to their content to everyone free of charge are fast overtaking the traditional publications. But even the open access journals, though an improvement, have not been able to shake off all the deficiencies. Specifically, the reliance on the age old practice of peer-review to judge the quality of research to be published still continues. My biggest problem with the anonymous peer-review practice is the conflict of interest that arises due to the fact that these reviewers are by rule competitors. The entire process is built on the foundation of abstract ideas like honesty and trust.

Also, though there is no charge to read the articles published in open access journals, they do charge the authors to publish their findings. I basically think even this is unnecessary expense of scarce research funds that could be expended on doing the research. Since the very idea of research publications is to communicate one’s work to the wider community, there are many alternate ways available today to accomplish that. And most of them come at almost no expense to either the author or the reader. For example, I plan on using this blog space to regularly publish my research findings and then publicize/communicate them to my peers using social media avenues like Twitter, ResearchGate, Mendeley etc. Since the content on blogs and other social media sites are indexed by search engines such as Google, it won't be difficult for those interested to find and access the information on the internet, just the way they do now. Of course, I will have to wait to establish myself as a principal investigator before implementing this plan and taking the liberty to challenge the established tradition of research communication. But I have a very strong feeling that something similar or a variation of this approach will be embraced by the wider research community in the very near future. And we can all spend more energy on doing, rather than writing and presenting, novel science. 

Questions Galore

Last week, a couple of my friends on Facebook shared this first hand report about an American woman’s traumatic experiences with sexual assaults during her visit to India. Anyone who reads the report cannot but sympathise with the trauma that the woman experienced, so much so that she had to be treated for PTSD. I wanted to say something about the facebook posts but all that I came up was confusion. I knew and wanted to say this is not the culture of my country. This is not an apt description of men who share my heritage. We are a country that preaches "Athidi devo bhava" (may the guest be treated as equal to god). This is probably a one off experience of a foreigner who, by her own confession, had come with a preset mind. May be she was overreacting to a curiosity of  people on seeing a white woman participate in traditional festivities assuming them to be stares filled with sexual perversion. But I also knew that was my emotional side reacting. I knew the experience and horror that the woman described was real. I knew she must have faced sexual harassment, molestation and even rape. I knew in my heart of hearts that this cannot be brushed aside as a one off. This is now a trend, one that is very widely prevalent. Fortunately, there was another report on CNN iReports that gave an alternate perspective from a woman who too was part of the same group that spent time in India.

Of course, this is not the first time that we Indians have experienced emotions such as shame and disgust at how some men amongst us treat women. In fact news such as this and worse than this have become a little too common recently and we might be approaching a stage where we might react to news of sexual assaults just the way we react to corruption in government, with apathy. Just this week there was yet another incident of gangrape on a female journalist in Mumbai. This was followed by the now too familiar  outrage, candle light marches, TV studio discussion, raucous in Parliament and self-righteous speeches by celebrities. But in my opinion, none of this is going to help with the problem that is getting to endemic proportions now. It will probably only assure us that we have not yet become an emotionless populace, despite the television and cinema. I think the problem is deep seated and well entrenched in our cultural psyche, the role and position of woman that was traditionally emphasised in our culture and how these are being re-defined in a constantly evolving society. There are probably some elements of this society that are not acclimatizing easily to this rapid rate of evolution. This is probably a phase in the evolution of our society and things will settle down in the course of time. In the short term though, there is no doubt that steps need to be taken to make India a safe place for women to not just survive, but also to live. This is a necessity for our country to progress and prosper. But what are these steps that would make our women feel safe once again? What can we do to tackle the ugliness that has presently engulfed our psyche? Honestly, I have no answers to these questions. I have neither the expertise nor the experience to come up with solutions this vexing problem. What I do have is the ability to observe the going on around me. My intention in this post is to share some of these observations. 

Many people have pointed to the inefficient and insufficient policing of our streets. There have also been suggestions to enact laws such as to make rape an offence that can be punished with death. No one can disagree with the first of these suggestions. There is no doubt that our police is severely understaffed and not very well trained, especially when it comes to matters related to women and children. Also, better enforcement of the existing laws would also help. Its been my long held belief that if there is any institution that has let India and her people down the most in these 67 years of independence, it is the police and the judiciary. Most problems Indians face today wouldn't be there if the judiciary and the police fulfill their constitutionally entrusted duties efficiently. 

Another aspect (probably a more important one) that needs to be studied is the role that our society (that is, all of us) plays in these crimes. How much does our hypocrisy have to do with this? What role does the moral policing, at the family and societal levels, play? What role do immature measures such as outlawing mannequins advertising lingerie play? What role does the treatment of women in the families of those committing these crimes play in shaping their mentality?  We are a society that cannot tolerate an unmarried man and woman living together. We shut our eyes to natural hormonal changes taking place in teenagers and young adults. In the name of morality, most men and women stay away from a serious physical relationship late into their 20s and 30s unless they are given a stamp of approval by the society in the name of marriage. How much do these attitudes contribute to the present perverse behavior of some? How much does the cultural shock of moving from a traditional/rural setting  to a more liberal/urban setting contribute? How much have our movies contributed, especially with their culture of "item songs" (such as this and this) whose main objective is to titillate men?  Will not treating sex as a sin help? Will it help to have a 911-like emergency response system? Will it help to not criminalize production and exhibition of pornography to grown ups? Will it help to legalize prostitution? Will it help if we do not objectify feelings such as love and beauty? Overall, will loosening the society's grip on individual's life help improve the present situation? 

These are just some questions bugging me and most certainly, I am not the first one to think about them. I am sure there are people that are a lot smarter, and occupy positions that matter, who can, or have to, find answers. Otherwise, our future generations may look back at this part of their history with nothing but repugnance.

Burden of knowledge

While returning from lab yesterday night, I was accosted by a Firefly. The first thought that occured to me on seeing the firefly was my son. What would he think when he sees a firefly for the first time? Would he be curious why its back is on fire? Would he want to know where and how that beautiful glow came from? I could then tell him how wonderful evolution is. I could tell him how nature has devised these wonderful factories in the fly's body that makes the light so that the fly could make little babies. I could probably also tell him about other such wonders like the petals of flowers or the plumage of a Peacock. Or I could just tell him how beautiful nature is. I could tell him to enjoy the beauty that surrounds him. I could tell him that it may not last for a very long time. That his father's and grandfather's generations have not been smart enough to preserve it in all its glory so it could be passed on to him. I would infact just teach him to worship and thank Mother Nature for making this planet our home. 

The price of pursuit.

At many points in my life, I have wondered if what I someday hope to achieve is really worth all that I am giving up in this pursuit of the elusive. I am at that point once again. Recently a lab colleague received the news that her mother was in an accident and had to rush back to her native country. I don’t know if she made it in time. That was the trigger for my latest bout of contemplation. In the past, on occasions like this, I would deliberate and argue with self, resulting in some really bad effects on my psyche. So this time around, I have decided to let it out. As a graduate student in India, I was pretty clear about what my goal was. There was probably a kind of arrogance that I knew what my priorities at that point ought to be. Work hard, be as much published as possible, keep my supervisor happy, get a PhD. So I skipped over many many important events. I would visit my parents at the most once a year though it would have taken only an overnight trains to reach their place. I did not take a day off to meet friends who were visiting from abroad after a while. It was really hard to take some time off to attend friends’ wedding or school reunions. I did not even remember to take my mind off the depressing spectra so I could call and say good-bye to a dear friend who was setting off to distant lands in pursuit of scientific truths. In the end, I managed to work hard and was even given a piece of paper in recognition of that work which proclaimed that I am a doctor (“who cannot cure people”). But I couldn’t accomplish my other two goals of graduate school. At the end of it, I asked myself, was it worth? As a post-doc, living thousands of miles farther away from my family, I have published more work and have earned the respect of supervisors. I have still not got my life’s priorities straight, though. The greatest regret of my life yet is that I was not there to welcome my son into this world. Now, as I watch him grow up over Skype, I find myself asking yet again, is it worth? 

O' My God..............

There is a prayer that Hindus are supposed to say immediately after they wake up and set foot on ground for the first time on a day. It roughly translates to: "O' mother Earth, the wife of Lord Vishnu, please excuse me for I have to touch you with my foot while carrying out my life's duties". We have long forgotten that prayer. Not only do we not ask for Mother Earth's forgiveness anymore, but also actively participate in her mutilation.

I always thought God was invented as a means to explain things that we couldn't completely comprehend. What are those shiny things in the sky? Why do we have day and night? Why do we have seasons? Where does rain come from? How are we born? Why do we die and what happens after that? How did this wondrous planet of ours come about? We were always an inquisitive and curious lot. And at a time when we did not have the tools and means to answer our curiosity, community's self-appointed wise-men and -women told us this was all the magic of a mysterious, all-powerful being, "The God".

But I am clearly wrong. God was invented as a tool to justify escapism; run away from taking responsibility for your own actions. Don't study and fail in exams; gods are angry. Invest without using your brain and lose all your money; gods are not kind. Be unproductive and lose your job, gods must be upset. Destroy the forests, dig out the mountains, build dams to imprison the rivers and when you are faced with drought, floods and calamity blame it on the merciless gods. 

I am in complete agreement with people who think the present calamity happened because the God is pissed off. Of course he would be. Wouldn't you, if you worked hard for many days to create something wonderful only for it to be tastelessly tampered with by a fool? The gods are really angry and if we do not acquire a taste to appreciate their creations, it might not be long before we are kicked out of this art exhibition. 

Worshipping wrong Gods

There was a time not long ago when Malayalam films used to narrate stories where someone or the other would be lured with the promise of a ‘Gulf visa’, taken to Madras or Bombay, robbed of their possessions and dumped. Looks like the Malayali entertainment industry has kept pace with the changing times in Kerala. These days Malayalees get duped for water. This skit is probably an over exaggeration and the situation is probably not as grave in reality. But the it is (though tacky and not very funny) a good reminder of where things are moving in the state. Mind you, we are talking of a state that is famously canvassed, and for a good reason, as ‘Gods own country’. This is the state where Monsoons enter the Indian mainland and probably receives the longest spell of rains than any other state. This is the state where people agitated to protect the Silent Valley and shut down Coca Cola. But today, in a mad rush towards urbanization and ill-planned development, we are destroying the precious gifts of nature that we were endowed with and in the process endangering the quality of our lives.
This water story is probably true of most states in India, not just Kerala. That things have come to such a pass in a place like India reveals a lot about how we have changed as people because we were a culture of nature worshippers. We have gods for every element in nature; for Sun and Moon, for rivers and oceans, for air and rain. Every animal that we can find in the wild is an object of our devotion on account of being the favoured vehicle of one or the other of our gods. Not only tigers and lions, we revere even snakes and chicken. For such a culture to not just neglect conserving what was given to us by nature but to abuse it, in my opinion reflects how misplaced our ideals and ideologies have become. We have forgotten the original ideals that our ancestors so zealously pursued that they placed these animals and elements of nature on a divine pedestal as god and goddesses. We practise the religion but have forgotten its sacred tenets. We worship the gods but have forgotten why they were considered divine in the first place. We worship the wrong gods and neglect the most important one that sustains our existence on this planet. 

ISI vs ISI

Courtesy this blog, came to know about this news article published in Deccan Herald. While the article is about the founding member of ISI, Mr. Khan Bahadur Qurban Ali Khan, the photo published along with the article is that of the founder of ISI, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. The only problem here is that P.C.Mahalanobis had no association with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence. He was the founder of Indian Statistical Institute. Says a lot about the journalism standards of that publication.

Doordarshan............Nostalgia

I recently happened to watch an episode of Dekh Bhai Dekh on youtube. And was flooded with memories of all those shows I watched on Doordarshan (DD) as a child. But as I suggest in the title of this post, good shows on DD are now confined to memories. On second thoughts, that's probably not a fair judgement. I haven't watched anything on DD (not even news) for a very long time. So, I don't really know if there are any good shows. But my guess is that most people in India don't either. (My statistics here are limited to my friends and relatives, close and distant. Since they are spread far and wide in the country and abroad, there is enough variety in there for the data to be representative.) Back then (that is before the advent of Zee TV) though, things were different. DD was the only television station in most of India and there were a few really good shows. So much so that I still remember dialogues in some of them. This post is about a few of those shows I remember from the 'DD days'.
There were the two very famous shows based on Indian epics, Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan and B.R. Chopra's Mahabharat (see I remember the maker's names). As I am typing this out, the title song of Mahabharat is on in my mind. (unrelated to the subject of this post, I wonder if DD would venture to telecast shows such as these now a days based on 'Hindu' epics in the present 'secular' environment in India). The subject of these two shows was not new to me (and probably to most Indians), having already heard most of it from my grandparents. But the exciting part of watching them was to put faces to the characters and visualize the incidents from bed-time stories. 
After the tenth board exams, I got a silver medal from my school for having stood first in History in those exams (class first of course!!!!!). But I enjoyed learning about Indian history the most while watching Bharat Ek Khoj based on Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India. For a very long time I believed the narrator of the show was actually our first Prime Minister. Roshan Seth as the narrator was that great. Then there was Chanakya narrating the story of the famous Indian economist, thinker, administrator.
I (and most of the world) saw the future Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan for the first time in the serial Fauji based on the lives of a few army cadets. I used to love the show so much that even today I remember a dialogue that one of the characters utters repeatedly ("I say chaps"). We again watched SRK's subdued acting in Circus before he was afflicted with stammering and super-stardom happened. 
Another show I remember very fondly was Param Vir Chakra which used to depict the lives of those brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives to protect the country and later were awarded the nation's highest gallantry award. What I remember the most about this show was not so much the stories themselves. I and my friends used to play role-playing games after watching the show (talking of role-playing games, during the 1992 cricket world cup, we organized a mini-world cup of our own where we were members of different teams. I was captain of South Africa Kepler Wessels!!!!!).
There were other shows like Surabhi which was probably India's first talk-show, Japal Bhatti's Flop-Show and a science-based show (whose name I can't remember, any help?) hosted by Prof. Yashpal (what's the second name?). About those and others in some other post (maybe when I am in a nostalgic mood again).  
Do you have a fond DD memory? What was your favorite TV show growing up? 

Well begun isn't always well-done

I recently came across an article in the careers section of the journal Science recently. Here is the link. This is one of those feel-good news write-ups. Especially so if you are interested in Indian science scenario, both as a member of the research community and as someone who takes pride in anything good happening in his country, even if those are few and far between. A point that is repeatedly made out by the author in the article is the need for labor law reforms to enable the research and higher education institutions to hire foreign researchers. An underlying, unstated assumption of such a line of thinking is that the homegrown talent in India is probably not good enough. Not surprising considering the fetish we Indians have for anything and everything that is imported. 
Over the past few years, there have been many schemes launched by the government in New Delhi to invigorate the research eco-system in the country. New institutes and central universities have been established, money has been showered on the  already established premier research institutes and the moon has been promised. There is no doubt that the country needs to reinvest in research to give a fresh impetus to economic growth and stay globally competitive. If anything, this reinvestment has been much delayed. It is alright to spend money but that should not be done without application of thought (as in this example). More importantly, it needs to be followed up by steps that bring about a change in the existing culture and attitude of our research community. Otherwise, the enthusiasm generated by the present investment, like with most schemes launched by our governments, will be short-lived and will not result in long-lasting gains for the country. In my opinion, the most important of these steps should be to restructure and reboot our state universities which is where most of the graduates in our country are trained. Establishing specialized research institutes is fine, but the number of Indian citizens who are directly influenced by these places is minuscule. Most people probably wouldn't even know of their existence. Money needs to be spent in such a way that it benefits the most people. After all, there is a strength in numbers!!! Another important step would be to popularize research as a main-stream career option. Make it less intimidating and more cool to be a researcher in popular imagination. It's probably time someone made an Indian version of Big Bang Theory. Does anyone know how to get in touch with Ekta Kapoor?