An Encounter With God

This is going to be a story. A particular event from my life. The immediate trigger for this is another post I made on my Tumblr page. You can find it here. As you will see the post was intended to correct the wrong information being publicized in an American publication about something that happened at a temple in the Indian state of Kerala, the place my family is from. After I posted this, I started thinking about what my position is with respect to religion and the concept of God. My way of thinking about these issues has gone through a lot of change in the recent years but it has not yet solidified. While I am fairly certain about rejection of any organized religion, especially those inclined to being dogmatic, I am not so sure about the existence or absence of a superior power. Since I feel much better writing about something as a process of contemplation rather than thinking in air, I decided to write my thoughts down here. There is also another reason. When the incident that I am going to narrate below happened, it included a rather painful experience that I normally do not like to remember but keeps coming back to me during the bouts of depression that I periodically still go through. One reason, I think, this keeps coming back is because I have never discussed this with anybody in my life. I am hoping that putting it down here might relieve me of the pain. 

I studied in a boarding school till the tenth grade and did not have much freedom or exposure to the world outside. Even during my undergraduate university years, when I lived in my parents' house, I did not have much opportunity to explore and know the world around me because of my father being an authoritarian and excessively protective. The incident I want to talk to you about happened during the last year of my under-graduation. In May of that year we went to Kerala for a relative's wedding. The entrance examination for admissions to master's program at Andhra University (located in Visakhapatnam, the city where we lived) was scheduled on the Sunday following the wedding. There was an unfortunate accident to one of my mother's brothers just ahead of the wedding. So, my mother and rest of the family decided to stay back and I had to go back to our place alone so I don't miss the exam. Anyone who has ever tried to travel around in India during summer vacations in May will attest to how difficult it is to get a train ticket confirmed. For that journey from Shoranur to Visakhapatnam by Bokaro Express, I could only manage to get a wait-listed ticket. One of my uncles assured that he knew someone who could 'arrange' for me to get a confirmed birth on the train. After we reached the train station, this arranging person turned out to be a railway porter who in turn introduced me to a TTE (sort of a ticket supervisor in Indian Railways) on that train. After some money changed hands, the uncle, assured of my reserved berth, said goodbye and left. A couple of stops after the train had left Shoranur, the TTE came around to where I was sitting and asked to check my ticket. Having been assured earlier, I assumed that he had come to allot me a berth to sit. After looking at my ticket he appeared surprised that I had a wait-listed ticket. "This is a waiting list ticket. Don't you know you can't enter the reservation compartment with a waiting list ticket? Get off at the next station and go to the general compartment". I protested and reminded him of the bribe that my uncle paid him. He, of course, denied getting any money from me. "Not me, but my uncle paid you. It is that bald man who came along with porter Hamsa at Shoranur". Probably because there were other people sitting there, this talk of money only seemed to anger him further. "Get out right now. Go stand near the door till next stop". I protested some more. "Will you go or should I call the police". The mention of police scared me. 

I proceeded to the compartment door without any further talk. I stood there for a while and after may be a couple of hours, the TTE happened to pass by that door again. "Why are you still here? Didn't I tell you to get off and go to general compartment?" I didn't know what to say. After a little silence, "OK, look you seem to be from a good family. I have a free berth in the AC compartment. If you have money to pay the extra fare, I can give it to you ". I was happy. There is hope after all. "How much do I have to give you", I asked. I don't remember the exact amount he asked for. How much ever it was, I do remember that I did not have that much money and I told him. How much can you pay, he asked me. I only had about 500-600 rupees. That is not enough, he said. Get out at the next station if you don't have the money or I will hand you over to the police, he further warned me. "I have an exam on Sunday. That's why I was forced to travel without reservation. Please help me", I pleaded. He came close to me and said "OK, if you don't have money, there are other ways to pay". Before I could even understand what he had said, my pants was unzipped and he was touching my privates. I did not know what was happening. At that point in my life, I had never even thought that men could be molested, let alone by other men. I was shocked and scared at once. I tried to free myself but couldn't. What happened in the next few minutes is not very clear in my mind. I don't even know how much time passed. But at the point when my memory of that day returns, I was still standing at the train door but the TTE is not near me anymore. He was talking to another young man, probably a little older than me, about getting his own ticket confirmed. After the TTE left, the man smiled at me and walked away into the other compartment. To this day, I am not sure if he had seen me in trouble and come to help me or if I am just imagining things. 

I did not see him again till that night. I found a vacant seat and sat there till the train reached Chennai. I had to move out after the people who had reserved that seat boarded in Chennai. I was once again back at the door and decided to somehow spend the night sitting there. After being there for a while, I saw him once again. He said he had met a Malayali family who were travelling with kids. They had got separate berths reserved for the two kids who were now going to sleep with their parents. So there were spare berths and they offered one to him. There was some luggage on the other but if I did not have a problem, I could sleep on it. I was more than happy to take anything if I can get out of the cold doorway. So, I slept that night on half a berth. It was not comfortable but warm and safe. By next morning, many people had gotten off the train and there were many spare seats for illegal occupants like the two of us to sit on. I got to know him a little more that day. He was Christian priest who had just finished his seminary training and was going to a remote village in Orissa to take up his first assignment. He asked about me, my family, what I was doing and what I wanted to do. I had brought along a big bottle of water for the journey. When the train reached Visakhapatnam and I was about to get off, he asked if I could leave that bottle of water for him. I was only too happy to be able to do something for him. We parted with the promise of meeting again at some point in our lives. 

Its been a long time since then. I got through the exam, completed masters, got a PhD and now am a postdoc. Have lived in Chennai, New York and Vancouver. But I often look back to that day and think how things could have been. That's how one of my encounters with what I think might be God happened.    

The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony 2015

P.M. Bhargava and the scientific temper police

When I started this blog, I had decided to strictly restrict the discussions to science, scientists and academic affairs and to completely keep politics out. But extraordinary times require rules for normal times be suspended. And what we are witnessing in India now is indeed an extraordinary time. The left-liberals who have for all these years since independence in 1947 had enjoyed a monopoly over government policy to decide how India should think and where she should go, are increasingly being challenged and sidelined. Having failed to influence the electorate during the 2014 general elections despite their best efforts and numerous open letters, they have now resorted to spreading canards about a democratically elected government. Latest in these shenanigans is a statement issued by a group of scientists. I was alerted to this statement by a news in Nature India. Third paragraph in this statement begins thus:

"The Indian Constitution in Article 51 A (h) demands, as a part of the fundamental duties of the citizens, that we '...develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform' "

Reading this reminded me of an op-ed that the leader of this group, P.M.Bhargava, had written few months ago. You can find it here. There he narrates why, how and, most importantly, when he got this article inserted into the constitution of India.

"The conclusion that our very own scientists — who would be expected to be leaders in the development of scientific temper — did not possess scientific temper themselves and were just as superstitious as any other group was supported by another incident in 1964. Following a statement by Satish Dhawan (who later became Secretary, Department of Space), Abdur Rahman (a distinguished historian of science) and I, set up an organisation called The Society for Scientific Temper, in January 1964, the founding members of which included distinguished scientists like Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner. For membership to the society, the following statement had to be signed: “I believe that knowledge can be acquired only through human endeavour and not through revelation, and that all problems can and must be faced in terms of man’s moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural powers.”

We were disillusioned when we approached scientist after scientist and all of them refused to sign the statement. Clearly they were devoid of scientific temper. Following this disillusionment, I persuaded Professor Nurul Hasan, then Education Minister, to have the following clause included in Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of Indian “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.” 

Hopefully, I don't have to draw your attention to the fact that 42nd Amendment to the Constitution of India was enacted during the Emergency that India Gandhi had imposed. It was a time when democratic rights were suspended in India. It was the only time in history when something close to authoritarian dictatorship was actually imposed in India (forced sterilization of people, carried out by Ms. Gandhi's son Sanjay, is often cited as an example). The 42nd Amendment was therefore not enacted through a democratic process. It is also an amendment that has constitutionally imposed a political ideology, Socialism, on all citizens of India irrespective of whether they agree with it or even understand it (as an aside, I remember reading somewhere that the Swarajya Party of C. Rajagopalachari could not be revived in post-emergency India because they did not subscribe to socialism and hence were not in agreement with the constitution. So much for democracy and freedom of political association in India). 

So, here we have a group of people who see no problem in imposing their world-view, their way of thinking, their ideology on rest of the citizenry. They feel no compunction in actively collaborating with authoritarian dictators in the process. They see no problem in passing judgments on the scientific temper of a person just because they did not sign up to their "statement" and subscribe to their "society". The very concept of freedom and individual liberty seems alien to this group. Ramanujan ascribed all his math genius to visions from his family goddess. Newton spent a lot of time searching through Bible for secret messages from God. Now, imagine if the careers of these scientific geniuses were to be left at the mercy of Bhargava and his fellow scientific temper police. Well, you don't actually have to imagine. That is what has happened to Indian science for all these years since Independence. All life has been sucked out of it by this scientific temper police. 

Now, if only this "deeply concerned with the climate of intolerance" gang who have no qualms about collaborating with dictators to impose their ideology on rest of the nation, had looked up the word "IRONY" in a dictionary before churning out their statement. One only hopes they will finally be called out for what they really are, a bunch of hypocrites throwing a tantrum because they no longer have control over other's lives. 

Conference Dairy - 2

While attending these conferences one picks up a lot of funny snippets during the talks. Some samples.

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If you are a biologist who uses NMR to study proteins and are visiting a different country to work in a collaborator's lab,  never tell the border security that you intend to enter the country to do some work with "nuclear" magnetic resonance imaging. That little word could land you in a lot of trouble at the airport. 

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You come across a lot of interesting people at conferences. There is a scientist who originally wanted to become a pig farmer before straying into lipid biology. Then there is someone who swam to escape East Germany. But the one case I found most interesting is the scientist who did her PhD in planetary sciences looking at Jupiter before she shifted to studying the role of fatty acids in cancer biology. The largest molecule she studied as a grad student had 5 atoms. Now she studies systems made up of thousands of atoms. 

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At this conference I learnt of a molecule called Coprostenol. It's derived from cholesterol and is used to detect faecal contamination in water, food etc. Wiki page here. The meaning of its name is interesting. It's derived from Greek.

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During breakfast one day, I was sitting across from a senior professor. He claimed to be someone who reviews research papers a lot. According to him,  one can get a sense of which way the center of the research world is moving from the number of papers one receives for review from each country. Keeping that in mind, he said, he's been lately receiving a lot of papers from Chinese researchers but rarely ever from India. This discussion was in the context of whether the government is putting enough money into research and the ease of finding an academic job.

Conference dairy - 1

I am currently attending a conference that is known to be very intense with respect to both the schedule and science. The experience has been very rich both for the science I am getting to learn and the social aspects of meeting people from a diverse backgrounds. I have enjoyed being here so much that I think it is worth sharing. I have been told that I cannot use the name of the conference any where as well as not talk about science. So bear with the arbitrariness in both. 

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I have attended international level conferences before. A few times I was just a participant. Many times I have presented posters. But this is the first conference where I got an opportunity to make an oral presentation. And since the conference is being attended by some really important people in the field, I was kind of really nervous about my presentation. I wanted everything to be right and in place before hand so I don't have any nasty surprises during the presentation that would compound my tension. Since my talk was scheduled to be the last one in the session, I was told to connect the computer to projector and set it up so no time is wasted before my presentation starts. Sitting through the talks preceding mine, I was so nervous that I could barely sit steady. When it was time, my face was splashed on the screen, the session leader introduced me and invited me to the dais. I went there, stood in front of everyone and saw that the laptop screen was empty. First I thought it was the screen that timed out. No. I then thought it must have gone to sleep. No. Is it in hibernation? Turns out the computer for some reason that I still can't figure out had shut down. I was standing there with all eyes on me waiting for the computer to restart and the session leader was growing impatient. I would have thought the embarrassment will give me a heart attack. At least that is what I wished would happen. But surprisingly, I was alright. Even the earlier nervousness had disappeared. My heartbeat had returned to normal and I really felt relaxed. The science part after that went off smoothly. And I think the talk was overall well received. All that ends well etc. 

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In the session following my talk, there was another presentation by a researcher from Japan who is working on a similar problem. He had some really interesting data and some very important observations. Unlike mine, his talk went off without any technical glitches and overall he made a very good presentation of his work. But he was in great discomfort as soon as the discussion (Q & A session) began following his talk. It was clear that he knew the science to explain the questions that were asked. But he had a great difficulty in articulating them probably because of a lack of fluency in english. It is the reality of times we live in that english is the language of science today. And it becomes very difficult to communicate the science we do, however excellent it might be, unless we have at least a manageable proficiency in english language. For me, this experience has forever settled the debate on what should be the language of instruction in schools, especially science teaching. 

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I have met a female graduate student at the conference who has come from India. She works in one of the premier science research institutes. She has apparently got some kind of funding from Indian government to support her travel to the conference. As it is the rule imposed on all Indian researchers who get government funding to travel abroad, she too flew to US by Air India. And as any human being (or animal) that has travelled by Air India will tell you, she too had a harrowing experience with the carrier. Apparently, she had to fly (by Air India) to New Delhi to catch a connecting flight to New York. Midway through the flight, the plane was re-routed to Lucknow. The passengers were informed that the change of route was due to bad weather in Delhi. But when some of the passengers grew suspicious and demanded an accurate explanation, they were told that the flight had to be re-routed since there was not enough fuel to reach Delhi (on a regular, pre-planned route). That's how irresponsible the operations in Air India are. Consequently, the flight reached the original destination after a couple of hours delay. Meanwhile, the passengers (like this grad student) who had to catch a connecting flight spent a few nervous hours worrying about the prospect of having to deal with Air India's front-desk employees to find alternate flights if they missed the connection. I have often heard from friends before about this bizarre Indian government rule of requiring to travel exclusively by Air India, if they want to avail the government funds to travel to conferences, workshops etc. abroad. This rule apparently has to be followed even if ticket prices are lower with some other airline. I think this is just a waste of very limited budget allocated to research in India. In fact, I think it is an unpardonable waste of tax-payer money to keep Air India alive. But it is an even bigger sin to force the research community to waste their meagre funds on this white-elephant. 
Update:
Apparently, this grad student's travel for the conference is supported by DBT (the person wasn't very clear on what program of DBT gave this funding, but a little Google search tells me it might be the CTEP). As a scientist-bureaucrat who must have put up with this proxy-funding of Air India nonsense many times through his career, the incumbent DBT secretary Dr. VijayRaghavan should initiate steps to put an end to this practice. If required, it must be brought to the attention of the S&T minister and Prime Minister. 

Pictorial warning on cigarette packs

Note: A version of this blog was posted on my Tumblr page.

Recently, there has been a fresh controversy brewing in India regarding the size of pictorial warnings on cigarette packets. The mainstream Indian media outlets, going by their default nature, wouldn’t have bothered to inform their readers/viewers about the issue since it is not as important as some kid hitting a cricket ball towards a church. But this time, they were stirred to action since the parliamentary committee which recommended that the current size of the pictorial warnings on the cigarette (and other tobacco products’) packing need not be increased, happened to have an MP who is also a tobacco businessman. Of course, this gross conflict of interest would have gone over the heads of our media had the MP not been from the ruling party of India which the media honchos love to hate. That the said parliamentary committee gave absence of Indian research linking tobacco use to cancer as the excuse for its recommendation should have been reason enough to arouse media interest but that is not as attractive as something that would further the propaganda war against the current ruling dispensation.

The issue I want to talk about is not the media or the uneducated recommendation of the committee or the conflict of interest of an MP. I want to talk about our hypocrisy in this entire ‘pictorial warnings on the cigarette packs’ issue. To start off, let me clarify that I do not intend to question the scientific fact that cigarette smoking or tobacco use is injurious to health, including causing cancer. I also agree that people need to be informed and warned of this. But whose responsibility is it to do this? I want to ask if it is ethical to force the cigarette manufacturers to put up advertisements that would negatively effect their business. That too with their money and on the face of the product that they are trying to sell. Is it ethical for the government and the society in general to pick on just one kind of product? What about fast food business whose products have been shown to cause obesity which is now reaching epidemic proportions in various parts of the world? What about sugary drinks? Alcohol? Most universities in India are substandard. Shouldn’t they warn their gullible students that all they will end up getting for their time and money is a piece of paper called degree and not quality education? Our judiciary’s main quality is to deliver delayed justice. Shouldn’t they warn all the litigants that they will have to wait forever to know what happened to their case? News outlets’ main job is to inform the public. But in India today, all that the media does is propaganda peddling, disrupting communal harmony, spin lies, twist facts, edit truths and foster outrage. Shouldn’t the viewers of every news channel and readers of ever news paper be informed that whatever they see, hear or read should be taken with a truckload of salt and masala? Going to our government hospitals means getting many more diseases than what you already have. Shouldn’t those getting admitted they be warned of their awaited fate? These are just some instances where the government does not force warnings in the consumers’ interest. So, why only tobacco industry? May be because it is a fashionable thing to do in the west. May be because it is an easy target. I don’t know. What I do know is that these kind of warning should be mandatory everywhere to protect the consumer and not just where it is convenient for the government to force without facing a backlash. Also I do not think it is ethical of the government to force someone trying to sell something to warn against buying it. It is however government’s duty to warn people of the dangers. So why doesn’t the government use the tax money it collects from the sale of tobacco products to buy advertising space to issue these warning, including on the face of cigarette packs and in movie theatres?

What do you think? Do you agree with me? If you disagree I would like to know why. 

On Indian Universities

Note: A version of this blog was posted on my Tumblr.

Today, I had an interesting discussion with a fellow Indian post-doc here at UBC. Since both of us are at a stage where we are about to start looking for academic jobs, the discussion moved towards the university system in India. Both of us were in agreement that the way universities are currently administered actually does grave injustice to the young Indians that they are supposed to serve. I argued that as things stand today, there is just no quality control mechanism that can force these universities to reform or aspire for excellence. There are so many Indians aspiring for a university degree in the hope that it will help improve their social and financial status, that even the worst among the private universities, with barely any physical or intellectual infrastructure, manage to get many times more applicants for each available seat in every course. The situation in the public universities that charge almost nothing for a fee, the demand is unimaginable. Given this, the government is obligated not only to let these institutions survive despite their low standards but also to actively support their existence to manage the ever increasing demand and avoid riots on the streets. However, the government does have the power, both financial and administrative, to push the universities towards better quality. Problem is that they just don’t seem to think of it as a priority issue. And in a democracy nothing becomes a priority unless the voting public asks to make it one. If past experience is anything to go by, politicians in India do nothing to address an issue unless they are forced to by public pressure. And when they do want to make things happen, they do; the success of pulse polio campaign is a proof to that. In my opinion, one possible way to force this to happen is by imposing a penalty on the public for tolerating sub-standards in the institutions where they get degrees from. Let’s say the recruiting agencies do not consider the degrees from all the universities as equal. They could, for example, apply a normalizing factor that would put the degree issued by a good quality university at a higher level and pushes the one issued by a poor quality institution to a lower level. Such a normalizing factor could be developed by an accreditation agency like the NAAC. In fact, the entire function of UGC can be limited to assessing the different universities in the country to determine this normalizing factor for each university at regular intervals, instead of going around micromanaging universities. The union government can make it mandatory for all its departments, to begin with, to apply this normalization while assessing the applicants before any appointment. Government can also suggest the private sector employers to do the same. If people realize that the degree issued by a particular university is of no use to them in getting a job, they’ll hopefully pressure their local government to initiate the much needed reforms process. And eventually, probably in a couple of decades or so, our institutions might be in the same vicinity as the best in the world.

What do you think of this suggestion? Do you think it can work? Do you have any ideas that you think can help improve our universities’ standards? Do share. I would love to hear from you.

NASA | 5 Year Time-lapse of the Sun