November 2011 - And then...

On Inspiration

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has the brilliantly named INnovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired REsearch programme, INSPIRE. We have, as a University, benefited from it, notably in the CIS where a number of our integrated MSc students are recipients of fellowships. As the INSPIRE-DST website puts it, the basic objective of INSPIRE would be to communicate to the youth population of the country the excitements of creative pursuit of science and attract talent to the study of science at an early stage and build the required critical human resource pool for strengthening and expanding the Science & Technology system and R&D base.

The three components of the program are

SEATS: Scheme for Early Attraction of Talent
SHE: Scholarship for Higher Education
AORC: Assured Opportunity for Research Careers

and the numbers they hope to reach is impressive. One million- 10,00,000 – in SEATS, 10,000 each year in SHE, and an unspecified number of doctoral fellowships in the AORC. There has been nothing like it in the country, and one can only hope that this will make a difference.

The falling numbers in enrollment in the sciences has been a matter of concern, particularly to the Academies of Science in the country for a while. (There are 3 Academies of Science, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, and the National Academy of Sciences, in addition to an Academy of Engineering, one of Agriculture, and one of Medicine). The Academies have undertaken a number of measures- particularly their Summer Research Fellowships, where undergraduate students and College teachers can spend a summer in a laboratory of their choice. Nevertheless, in terms of reach, INSPIRE both aspires differently and does it differently- the numbers are larger, and the choice is greater.

One initiative that the Indian Academy of Sciences undertook was to ask another question, why are there so few women who take up a career in science. Around 2005 they set up the Women in Science panel to look into this question, as well as into other related questions. The panel did a number of things- one being a survey that asked how many women did a Ph D but then chose not to pursue a career, and why they made that choice. Another was to establish a mentorship programme- having a number of successful women scientists talk to undergraduate women science students. A third was to bring out a set of books in which women scientists of some accomplishment spoke of their lives, what helped them, and what did not.

As a member of the panel, I was involved in editing the book, Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India that came out in 2008. And last week, a follow up to that book, The Girl’s Guide to a Life in Science (edited by Rohini Godbole, Mandakini Dubey and myself) was released at the annual meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences in Ahmedabad. The blurb of the book, that has been published by the Academy and Zubaan Books (New Delhi) says

Inspiring, informative, ingenious…meet twenty-five of India’s most celebrated female scientists. From astrophysics to zoology, learn what it takes to make a career in science. What led them to choose their particular field? Who encouraged them? What were their struggles? What are their sources of inspiration? What are the key questions at the cutting edge of modern research? Why choose a life in science at all? From astrophysics to zoology, learn what it takes to make a career in science.

The idea in putting together these essays by and about working women scientists in India was to try to provide inspiration by having role models who were local, and who were in a sense “within reach” rather than to always try to derive inspiration from those who were at lofty Nobelian heights. And to provide reassurance to both the young women and their parents that a career in science was do-able, fulfilling, and enriching in as many ways as any other career can be.

Numbers. In the end, that is going to be our only salvation and that would be the best result of our “demographic dividend”. We need to inspire as many young people as possible to take up science as a way of life- whether they make it a career or not- if we are to seed innovation, to become self sufficient in intellectual capital. And all measures that we can take towards this path are, I guess, useful.

Golden Threshold

The wind of change forever blows
Across the tumult of our way,
To-morrow’s unborn griefs depose
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields to dream, strife follows strife,
And Death unweaves the webs of Life.

The fragment of the poem quoted above is, as you might have guessed, from Golden Threshold, the book of Sarojini Naidu’s poems that was first published in 1905 (and which still seems to be in print, from Dodo Press).

Sarojini Naidu has, through her legacy played a large role in the creation of our University, most famously by the donation of Golden Threshold, the iconic building in the centre of Hyderabad where the University took seed. I recall coming to the University in the early 1980’s and setting off for the Gachibowli campus from there. At the time, the building itself seemed nice but unremarkable, and since I was there so briefly it made no particular impression on me. Since coming back, its been quite another story…

In the last few years with all changes that our University has been going through, the GT campus has undergone many changes. The premises occupied earlier by the SN School now houses our Centre for Distance Education, the Gopal Clinic hosts the Ranga Reddy District’s Jana Siksha Sansthan, and the original GT building is unoccupied. But it is in sad disrepair, the years of poor maintenance, whimsical remodeling, inappropriate conservation measures having taken their toll. The building has its beauty and charm, but it takes little to see that there is much more under the layers of lime. The view from the top shows the tarring of the roof- and in the past few years, the city has grown, buildings coming up cheek by jowl, painted which ever way, unplanned and chaotic- the image at the top of this post is the view from the roof of our building housing the CDE.

About a month ago, Anuradha Reddy of the Hyderabad chapter of INTACH, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage and her colleagues came to GT to talk with us about what they could do, and we initiated a conversation on what conservation measures we could take to preserve the building. More, what we could do to restore the building to its earlier condition and to make it take its place among the other marvelous buildings in the city. Restorations of the Falaknuma palace, Chowmahalla, Purani Haveli and other heritage sites have brought back a lot of pride to Hyderabadis!

Well, INTACH is helping us assess what needs to be done. A conservation architect is coming over to advise, and together we hope to make the main building a worthy addition to the landscape of our city. After all, we do still have a tree planted by Mahatma Gandhi at GT…

What more can we do there? How do you see the GT campus playing a role in the life of the city? Ideas and suggestions would be very welcome-

One last thing. The Wikipedia entry for our University is really incomplete… It would be good if it can be updated and corrected- and I guess that’s up to us to do it. Any volunteers out there?

Cameroon Diary

NODYCOS-2011 is the International School on Non-linear Dynamics in Complex Systems, being held at the University of Yaoundé. Having agreed to come here earlier this year to lecture on the applications of Nonlinear Dynamics to Biology, I found myself on a flight from Brussels to Nsimalen last Friday.

All the things that could go wrong did, of course. I had not had my yellow fever vaccination (so I got it at the airport, much use that). The transportation that had been sent to get me gave up after a long wait- my “visa on arrival” entailed much delay and negotiation and stretched my non-existent French to the fullest, so when I emerged with the visa, there were only predatory taxi-wallahs who homed in on me to take me to downtown Yaoundé for what seemed like an astronomical amount. I capitulated… Je suis fatigué can be used only so often.

The drive had its moments. One thing about living in India, most other places seem like somewhere familiar. On the outskirts, Yaoundé seemed very much like one of the smaller Indian towns, Indore, Tiruchi, or Bhubaneswar some years ago maybe? On the other hand, Yaoundé is hilly, so images of Aizawl flitted by occasionally. And it is also quite French colonial, so Pondicherry came to mind too… Posters proclaiming the gratitude of the President, Paul Biya, for being elected- making this his 29th year at the helm of affairs- festoon the place, so by the time I reached my hotel, I was fully indoctrinated by Paul the taxi driver and tres tres fatigué to boot.

Navigating through this part of the world for the first two days was mostly social since it was le weekend– with a trip to the seaside town of Kribi (with a side trip to a so-called village of the people of the forest), seeing a lowland gorilla close up in a reserve, a canoe (pirogue) ride through a partly submerged forest… And a run in with the militia for not carrying my passport at all times (and that seemed very much like something out of a despatch from Ryszard Kapuscinski).

__________

So much for the pretty beach picture, the work part now. The poster says: NODYCOS 2011, the first school of its kind to be organized in Cameroon (by the ICTP Trieste, Italy) aims at bringing together students and leading experts with diverse backgrounds in applied physics, theoretical physics and computational physics, to share insights on the state-of-the-art of efficient forefront analytical and computational approaches to models governing nonlinear physical processes.

The ICTP in Trieste has played a major role in nurturing physics and mathematics in the developing world, thanks in great measure due to the vision of its founder, Abdus Salam. Its outreach activities are impressive, and this School is another example of what the ICTP has done well in the past (nearly) 50 years. NODYCOS expands to NOnlinear DYnamics in COmplex Systems, a common way in which acronyms seem to be constructed here, phonetics being as important as brevity. Other delightful examples are SOACAM (the SOciete Alimentaire de CAMeroon) and FINUTRASU (the Fako INter-Urban TRAnsporters Union).

Arriving at the University this morning, it was good to see a large group of enthusiastic students. Not all were there to study chaos, it turned out that a few had come- Eid notwithstanding- for their distance education classes. The real surprise for me was that these were students of Amity University in Noida- all taking the e-learning modules in finance, tourism management and other subjects. From what I was able to gather, there were 60 students in Cameroon, and about 500 in all of Africa, and the government had sponsored them for this 3 year course. Other private Indian Universities- Manipal among them- have also heavily invested in the distance learning mode, and much of their outreach is in Africa where the need is large, and an Indian solution is both inexpensive and highly regarded. There is a lesson here somewhere for us…

There was more to learn- in particular about opportunities for African researchers to come to India. Amazingly enough, FICCI and the Department of Science & Technology have initiated the C V Raman International Fellowships to promote scientific cooperation with Africa. There are opportunities for African researchers to collaborate with groups in Universities and other Indian institutions in various areas of Science & Technology.  Each of the participating African nations have been given 8 fellowships, and these are at the post doctoral, junior and senior levels totaling about 24 man-months. That I had not heard about it until a Nigerian student at the School told me is not clear evidence that the fellowship has not been widely advertised, but still… Given the widespread enthusiasm for the Indian educational system that I see here, the real need and the vast potential, I think this is an excellent opportunity for us to do something meaningful!

__________

I did go around the central part of downtown Yaoundé, chancing upon the few Indian stores that mostly sell mixed goods- a catchall phrase for just about anything from LG TVs to baby clothes. The community is small, but will be getting together to celebrate Gurupurab on Thursday… The Consul General of India in Cameroon, Mr J Ravikumar, has been doing a great deal to further relations between the countries- in particular the effort in e-learning and telemedicine is largely thanks to his initiative. It should be added, of course, that the Indian Government has put in a large amount of money into this- apart from the CV Raman Fellowships, there is the Indo-Africa Virtual University (IAVU) that was announced earlier this year.

Meanwhile, a colleague shared a link to the New York Review of Books’ article by Anthony Grafton, a thought provoking piece titled Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? I found some time to go over it today, and in case any of you have wondered if there is indeed cause for concern, this article gives a special insight into the US university system and its challenges at this time. The essay is a good read and thought provoking to boot. One aspect that I thought that we should keep in mind as we think of growth and change is Grafton’s comment that (in the books he was reviewing) “two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors […]. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.”

__________

The past few days have been busy with lectures mainly, with something like 80 students, the bulk of who are from Cameroon, but there is representation from other states in the region. 11.11.11 is the last day of lectures- in fact the last day of NODYCOS- and at lunch today I discovered a startling fact. No Ph D student at the University of Yaoundé receives any sort of fellowship. There is simply no equivalent of the UGC’s scholarships for all registered Ph D students, let alone anything like the JRF or SRF’s that enable most students in our country to pursue their doctorates. And, of course, this is a serious impediment to higher learning in an already poor country. In spite of that, there are 100 students in the Ph D program in the Physics department alone, though with this level of governmental support, one can only imagine what other hurdles they have to cross. The thought did, I must say, cross my mind: What would our enrollment be if no scholarships were offered? Both in terms of quality and quantity…

Coming away at the end of a week of varied experience, one can only be struck by the similarities of our two situations. A colonial past, a diverse linguistic composition, considerable and visible poverty and inequality. Differences too, and probably these determine the two very different trajectories we have taken. But still, there is a great opportunity here, and I believe it is to our advantage to participate- in some way in this globalized and connected world- by providing opportunities to the Africa that is anxious for and enthusiastic about higher education. Postdoctoral training, in particular, is something that we should be able to offer and with very little effort on our part, this would be very attractive to most of the students here.

Nature@UoH

A few days ago, I was taking a short walk on campus when I came across Professor Sudhakar Marathe busy taking close-up photographs of a flower. It was pretty enough but quite ordinary, and indeed quite unlike some of the extraordinary forms of life that he had photographed (and shared) a few months ago. In July he copied me in on a letter that goes: I am attaching pictures of just a few of the 28 different forms of life I photographed today (25 July, not including the various mushrooms that I photographed also) on the University of Hyderabad campus […] the enormous and easily determined overt biodiversity in the campus (Obviously, microlife simply cannot be recorded in this way.)

The place is simply teeming with life: virtually all the pictures I am sending were taken within 15 feet of the Humanities building […] the Administration parking lot and […] the end of the Humanities concourse.

In an earlier mail, he wrote that he “happened to have this camera that very cleverly takes incredibly good pictures of “all things great and small”. It needs much more than a clever small camera to record these images, and what I’ve shown on this page are just a few of an incredible collection of photographs that he has, by his reckoning some 15000 or more. He ran the Nature Club at the University for over 15 years and published a Nature Newsletter for eight years- with some superb illustrations by Prof. Vipin Srivastava.

The campus biodiversity is, of course, huge. Not just in flora, but also fauna, both large and small. Professor Marathe’s inventory of more than 800 species will find a way of being made available to all of us, and this post is just a teaser of what there is. And also an invitation to all of you who care about the present biota of the campus, to send in your photographs or drawings…

The header of the blog now shows one of Professor Marathe’s recent pictures, that of “a small spider just about half an inch long wearing a red crown-jewel, which is actually a parasitic bug (about 1/32 of an inch long); the spider is trying to hide from my gaze (or the camera’s gaze at any rate), yet curiously looking round the stalk of a vine on which I found it to see what kind of spider-gobbling creature I might be. If you look carefully, you will even see the two thin and pale antennae of the tiny parasitic bug!” And elsewhere, the School of Humanities building imaged in a water drop on an oleander flower.

Like Blake, he is able to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower…

And through his eyes and camera, we also see many other wonders. Enjoy!