August 2012 - And then...

A very special milestone

19/07/12. On this day, for the first time in the history of the Department of Economics at the University of Hyderabad (and possibly a first in the University), a visually challenged candidate, Ms. B. Madhuri Smitha, successfully defended her Ph. D. thesis in Economics. One of her two thesis supervisors, Dr Naresh K Sharma (the other is Dr B Kamaiah) writes:

Though denied of the great faculty of vision (Ms. Madhuri Smitha has total loss of vision) by nature, she is well endowed, by the same nature’s benevolence, with abundant intelligence and a will to achieve her own targets. Incidentally, this first feat (in Economics at HCU) by a visually challenged person, is achieved by a women candidate. In addition to her own great perseverance and hard work, she was supported with equally great dedication by her mother in this work and also backing of her father. She has completed her Ph. D. work while working as a faculty member at the Koti Women’s College ( a constituent college of OU).

It is always humbling to see such courage and determination, and always an inspiration. Thank you, Dr Smitha, and from the entire University community, our heartiest congratulations and best wishes!

Her graduation photograph is on Facebook.

… very Heaven!

My Independence Day speech, 2012:

Members of the University family, students, faculty, officers, staff, colleagues. Greeting on the occasion of our 66th Independence Day.

Every year this day we look to a new year of our Independence with renewed hope. Hope for a better future for our children and ourselves.

During the last few days, seeing the physical beauty of our campus- its greenery and its lakes- I have repeatedly been drawn to a fragment of a poem by Wordsworth, written at the time of the French Revolution- a time of hope and expectations. The poem captures the idealism of a time, and one that is good to recall today, particularly given the large number of young people here.

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Our freedom has brought us huge possibilities, but it has also come with a huge responsibilities. And huge challenges. One responsibility that I am especially sensitive to comes from our privileged position on a campus of such beauty, in a University where the major part of ones day is devoted to intellectual pursuit. We are blessed to be in this learning environment, blessed that we can enjoy the several freedoms we have. Blessed, one can say, to be allowed to do the things that we care so deeply about.

But with this privilege comes responsibility, in particular, the responsibility to contribute at the highest level that we can. As members of the University family, we represent a vanishingly small fraction of the population of this country that has this privilege. The privilege of being educated, of having the resources that we do, of being able to think what we can, how we can, and when we can. The investment that our country has made in us, both implicitly and explicitly is tremendous, and the hope they have that we will deliver is also ever present, and something we need to acknowledge. The country has invested in itself by investing in us, it has invested in its future by investing in us now. The important thing is that we do the very best that we can to keep the faith, and that we strive to deliver our very best- in any field of intellectual endeavour.

This is not always easy. We live, regrettably, in interesting times. Each day brings new and unexpected challenges, particularly on matters that relate to governance and policy. The past year has seen our fortunes fluctuate, especially on matters relating to funding. The economic downturn has meant that the funds that will be made available through the UGC for the 12th plan will not match the promises that were made, but nevertheless it should be possible for the University to consolidate, to improve the infrastructure and to strengthen our various academic programs. The lower funding levels, though, come with the need for sacrifice. Well, if not quite sacrifice, this comes with the need for fiscal discipline and a leanness in spending. We have to make our funds stretch to help us reach the goals of excellence that we aim for, we need to spend wisely, and to use our grants well.

While new infrastructure will slowly become available, it is also true that what we have built up over the last 40 or so years is now in sore need of maintenance. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that the facilities that have been developed be kept functional. Likewise this campus of ours- blessed are we that live here, but more blessed are those who can preserve it! I have, over the past year, been particularly sensitive to matters relating to the environment, to water, and to the campus fauna and flora. With the Hyderabad Metro Rail, we have undertaken a massive tree plantation drive, and with the GHMC, an ambitious plan to improve the water bodies on campus, to increase their number as well as their carrying capacity. This will, I hope, serve us well in the future. Similarly, our recent drives to clear the campus, manage the waste and build a sustainable program for its ongoing maintenance are in this same direction. It needs all of sections of the University to participate, and I look forward to your contributions in this endeavor.

This campus is ours. Ours to enjoy, ours to nurture, ours to nourish. We need to know it well- this is the only way in which we can know well what it needs. Walking through it- as we did earlier this year, and will do again this afternoon- is one way. Caring about it and caring for it, is another. Beyond the slogan, “Mana Campus, Mana Hridayam” we need to develop a sense of ownership of this campus.

Our university- while being central- is also an integral part of our local environment. I have often stressed that we are not just a University of Hyderabad, we are a University for Hyderabad… I hope that we will see more efforts in the coming year to integrate us in the city. Our campus radio station is a year old today- this is a very important way in which we reach out to the communities that sustain us, and an important way in which we can give back to those that sustain us. But there are other ways in which we can and should integrate. We need to have more engagement with the city, with issues that are current and relevant, with discussion and debate. Some of our campus events have been shared with the city, music, theatre, lectures, but we need more.

Let me close with reiterating what I said last year, that we need to carve out a set of freedoms for ourselves. In particular, we need to hold dear to the freedom to excel. Too often, we perform to the levels set by others and achieve goals set by governments. As academics, we know that the best standards are internal, set by the disciplines themselves. We need the freedom to pursue such ideals, without fear or favour, without interference from anybody else. Be Excellent!

Once again my greetings on the occasion of Independence Day to all of you. Jai Hind!

BhK

Professor Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, third vice-chancellor of our University passed away on the 11th of August, last Saturday. I had met him once last year, an evening of pleasant conversation and gentle wit. It was clear that even long after retirement he thought often about our University and various matters concerning its well being.

One colleague who was very deeply affected by the news of his passing is Probal Dasgupta who is presently at the ISI Kolkata and was earlier in the CALTS, the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies that Prof. Krishnamurti had founded. I asked him if I could adapt what he had written in his mail for this blog post.

The news of Professor Bhadriraju Krishnamurti’s passing which reached me on the 11th of August first shocked me – he had been aging gracefully and one had expected him to last a lot longer than eighty-four – and then, on reflection, also drove home a social fact. I began to feel that the University of Hyderabad community, which he worked so hard to shape seriously and durably, may have reached a point in its trajectory that makes it hard to see just what his contributions were all about. So let me throw in a few personal comments, for what they are worth, hoping that this might help some of you to achieve some clarity about what the man did for us. Before I start, since I no longer work for UoH, I suppose I need to tell many of you that I worked there from 1989 to 2006; time flies.

I first met BhK – as he encouraged many of us to call him – in 1980 at an international conference in the Osmania area of Hyderabad; at that stage few of us had heard of HCU. I had just finished my PhD at New York University. I was happy to find that he and I, across the generation gap, shared an enthusiasm – we both felt it was important to use Indian languages in official life, in the public space, in higher education, and to incubate cutting edge research especially in the humanities and social sciences. When we began to exchange thoughts we were not just crossing a generation divide; BhK was also going out of his way to befriend a younger person across turf boundaries – he and my mentor in linguistics had crossed swords a couple of times. By ‘friend’ I emphatically don’t mean just a chatting companion (though he was that too, and a good conversationist). He was a well-wisher willing and able to translate words into action. It was BhK who went out of his way to give me a break in the 80s. I was just one example; he often went way beyond the call of duty to support non-conventional scholars. BhK always did his best to ensure working conditions for them that were as optimal as one might expect, given the overall institutional circumstances in our country – and he expected these scholars to walk the extra mile to improve these circumstances for others. BhK was a rare combination – he was as committed to institution building as he was to scholarship itself.

I can vouch for the fact that BhK worked both privately and publicly to create an interpersonal ethos that would foster excellence and the democratic virtues, but that he did not believe in an opposition between merit and social justice. His appreciation of excellence never lapsed into elitism; he also never made the opposite mistake of pushing the appearance of democracy to the point of suffocating the quest for intellectual and cultural excellence. His willingness to cross boundaries was evident for instance in the fact that despite his life-long support for a centrist form of politics he was explicitly appreciative of writings emanating from the radical left. Again, I’m talking about actions, not just words: BhK was the Vice-Chancellor who expanded the scope of reservations in the admission process of the University of Hyderabad to help the democratic conversation to flourish. Some day, writers capable of eliciting serious public attention will give him credit for this social achievement which grew directly out of his academic convictions.

This is not the place to comment on BhK as an academic in any detail. I’ll just finish by telling you an anecdote. BhK and I were travelling to Calcutta to speak at a Suniti Kumar Chatterji centenary seminar. Chatterji (1890-1976) was arguably the greatest Indian linguist in modern times. On the way, BhK said, “Probal, there is a question I have been wanting to ask you. Those laws of sound change that were stated in Chatterji’s 1926 book – they still stand, don’t they?” I reflected for a moment and said, “Yes, they stand.” He simply said, “That is what I wanted to know.” The point BhK was driving home, in his own quiet way, was that we who are working today should repeatedly ask ourselves: Are we writing anything, today, with enough rigour to make it likely that commentators 64 years hence will still cheer for what we are writing today?

Thanks Probal. And thank you, BhK.

Green, Greener. Blue, Bluer.

This post is about the various initiatives that are currently under way to make our campus bluer and greener than it has been. Given the fact that when we got our campus in 1974 it was, to put it mildly, bleak the change in these forty odd years has been quite phenomenal. I recall visiting here first in 1980 when there was little more than the CIL building and the sheds… It has taken considerable effort of a large set of dedicated people to transform it to what we see today, the lakes, the patches of dense woods, the blue and the green.

There is a tree planting drive being undertaken by the Hyderabad Metro at this time- 40K trees all over the campus, with a promise to take care of the entire project including maintenance of the saplings, providing tree guards and fertilizer for the next 6 months. Earlier major efforts of this kind have been undertaken, most notably the Energy Plantation Project (1985-1992) that was sponsored by the Department of Nonconventional Energy Sources (DNES). The idea was that the trees would be harvested periodically for biomass. That did not happen, and as a result we have large green tracts. The trees are not ideally suited for the region, though, so in the coming year we will see how to systematically replant some of these areas with indigenous flora.

The photographs in this post are through the kind courtesy of Prof. M N V Prasad- the dry scrub that was, the Bignoniaceae in bloom, the plantation drive in 1986- and these should give you an idea of the scale of the work that was involved, and comparatively how much easier we have it today…

The lakes are another issue, again being newcomers, at least at the sizes they are now. Peacock Lake, Buffalo Lake (or Gundla Kunta, its other name), as well as a number of unnamed but large water bodies that dot the campus are all in need of three things: Cleaning, Desilting, Strengthening. Sewage from the hostels and other buildings flows freely into all the lakes- the illegal canteens being among the worse culprits. Mercifully the Engineering branch is looking into some of this, but we need more action. The lakes are also getting deepened, thanks to the GHMC Commissioner and his recognition of the University’s efforts, and there is a concerted move to strengthen the check-dams and bunds on the campus.

You will all have seen the visible results of the campus cleanliness drive. Please help in the afforestation as well as in water preservation. Several students have come forth and offered their help. The NSS coordinator, Dr Srinivasa Rao as well. The efforts of Profs. Sachi Mohanty, A C Narayana and others need to be both acknowledged and bolstered, to make the campus green greener and the blue bluer!

PS: Suggestions and photographs welcome.