Ram Ramaswamy, Author at And then...

A life unfinished

cc (1) Charusita Chakravarty, Professor of Chemistry at the IIT Delhi died last Tuesday, 29 March 2016.

Charu and I were married in 1992. In early 2013, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the triple-negative subtype. She won many battles against this form of the cancer, but in the end, we lost the war.

She would have been fifty-two this coming May.

Maudlin lines from a 1970’s novel run through my mind… morphing along the way to: What can you say about a fifty-one-year-old woman who died? That she was smart, witty, beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Eliot and Tagore. And Kabir. And life.

And that she was a scientist who cared passionately about her work, her teaching, her students, that last scientific paper, that seminar given at the last conference. That she brought intensity and genuineness to everything she did, from chemistry to cooking.

The last few years were a struggle against odds, but not always overshadowed by what we both knew. She found the time and the strength to do some of the many things she wanted. And made time for people, for friends.

The memorial service for her on Saturday included poetry which she truly enjoyed. Friends and family read out verses she loved or would have loved, and I know that she would have been surprised and pleased by some of the selections. Particularly these lines from Margaret Mead,

Remember me in your heart, your thoughts, your memories of the times we loved,
the times we cried, the times we fought, the times we laughed.
For if you always think of me, I will never be gone.

A Physicist and a Gentleman

On the very untimely death of Prof. Deepak Kumar of the School of Physical Sciences at JNU.

Dr Deepak Kumar (1988) My friend and colleague, Deepak Kumar, passed away all of a sudden late Monday (25th January) night. I had seen him that day, sharing a cup of tea with another member of the faculty in the afternoon sun on the lawns of the School of Physical Sciences at JNU. The spot where he sat was directly visible from my office window- Deepak often sat there and had his lunch. I hadn’t spoken to him that particular day, but that was not unusual – there were many days like that. But it was not just another day, not like any other.

Deepak was one of the first to join the School as Professor when it was formed, and he brought a decade or more of experience at the University of Roorkee. As it happened that greatly helped the School in its early, formative years, and set the mark for how it developed subsequently, defined what it’s core values were, and the sense of purpose and commitment that it has had since.

Colleague for almost 30 years, Deepak has been a friend for a little over that, and if I were to have to characterize him, the title of this post says it as well as anything. Deepak was a scholar in the true sense of the word, and one for whom the world of physics was all absorbing. Although his professional interests were in condensed matter physics, he was both knowledgeable about, and was interested in a huge range of topics. One could go to him for just about any doubt, count on him to give the right bit of advice, and if the matter happened to be something that he knew well, his intellectual generosity was limitless.

This is not exaggeration. Not for nothing was Deepak the most collaborative colleague that we have at the SPS: of the 20 or so faculty that we have in physics, Deepak has actually written papers with no less than seven of us. And with something like twice that many students, either as their formal or informal supervisor, as a mentor in the best tradition. Indeed, he mentored the first Ph. D. that was awarded from the SPS, and both directly and indirectly showed many of us the way in which one could bring out the very best in our students.

There is so much to say about Deepak- his academic contributions in condensed matter and statistical physics, the several awards, the recognition. But this above all: This was too soon and too sudden. There were many many good years of physics one could have had from him, and many years of physics that he would have enjoyed. Even the last day, on Monday, he gave a lecture, there was another scheduled this week. And last semester he taught a course for the MSc Physics seniors. He was working to the end, and he went with his academic boots on…

I know his ethos will continue to guide us, and I can only hope that we will not forget his calming spirit that often brought hot tempers down, his somewhat other-worldly smile, and his gentle sense of humour that helped us all see that there were many ways of reaching conclusions. We all will miss him deeply, the community that he helped build at JNU, and the larger community of physicists in the country that knew and admired him.

Reality and Myth

ddk Some years ago, a friend of mine at JNU proudly told me about a book that he had picked up from the library “sale”, a book that had once belonged to D D Kosambi (DDK). Apparently it had not been checked out for years, and was therefore deemed unworthy of staying on in the library, as if finding a place on the library shelf was just some sort of evolutionary game, a survival of the fittest and no more…

The JNU had, at some point in time, acquired Kosambi’s personal collection of books, that was, according to Mr R P Nene (DDK’s friend and assistant, in an interview in June 1985) “sold by his family after his death to the JNU at the cost of Rs. 75, 000.” Details of how this happened are not too clear- Kosambi died in 1966, the JNU was founded in 1969, and the initial seed of the JNU library was that of the “prestigious Indian School of International Studies which was later merged with Jawaharlal Nehru University.” Our website goes on to say that the “JNU Library is a depository of all Govt. publications and publications of some important International Organisations like WHO, European Union, United Nations and its allied agencies etc. The Central Library is knowledge hub of Jawaharlal Nehru University, It provides comprehensive access to books, journals, theses and dissertations, reports, surveys covering diverse disciplines.”

09d8db678a716ec2ebc8487af584ae82 The amount paid suggests that the books were viewed as very valuable: Rs 75K in the late 1960’s was a huge sum of money. And given that, it was quite amazing that the collection had not been kept as one, but the books had apparently been shelved by subject (!) and were then like any other books, and so subject to the periodic culling that most libraries undertake to clear shelves and make space for new books. (In some sense I was not too surprised, having myself bought a book that had been owned by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and that had somehow made its way to Princeton. The initials AKC were pencilled in on the first page, but apart from the bookplate, there was little else to show that it had been his. Unfortunately that book is no longer with me, and in hindsight, I think that when libraries acquire collections from scholars of note, they should make some attempt to keep the collections intact. Mercifully the JNU has done that now with more recent acquisitions..).

Untitled 5 Nevertheless, a chance conversation shortly thereafter on the vagaries of libraries and the nature of intellectual inheritances started me off on my exploration of Kosambi and his mathematics. The idea was, on the face of, a simple one. What was the extent of Kosambi’s mathematical contributions compared to, say, his contributions to history or numismatics. How would the math stack up? Having been in TIFR before I came to JNU, I had also heard of how he travelled from Pune to Bombay every day on the Deccan Queen, how he was fired from TIFR, etc. etc. But I also found out that precious little was known of DDK’s other life by the historians. That the mathematics was too different and far too difficult is all too true, but still.

Untitled 2 To start with, I thought it would be good to put together his life mathematical, namely all his math and stats papers. Much of that was on the web, except that it was in bits and pieces, and all over the place. No single bibliography was accurate, and no matter where I looked, there were gaps. Many of the Indian journals where he published were not (and still are not) digitized. Some of the names that were given in the existing lists were incomplete or incorrect, many papers were missing. The Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei or the Sitzungsberichten der Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-mathematische klasse were both uncommon journals that were impossible to locate anywhere in India, for instance. I went to the Ramanujan Institute in Chennai in late 2009, looking for copies of the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society and Mathematics Student where DDK had published a lot of his work in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It’s too depressing to recount that visit… Nothing could be located, and I left empty-handed after a wasted morning.

Untitled 4 In 2010, though, I was visiting professor at the University of Tokyo for a month, and luckily, the Komaba campus where I was located, housed the mathematics department and more importantly, its library. It took a few hours spread out over several days, but before long, I not only had the bulk of DDK’s papers in photocopy or in digital form, but I also discovered, via MathSciNet, of DDK’s nom de plume S. Ducray, under which name he had written four papers. I also had access to the reviews of many of his mathematical papers by others, and could see many very famous names among the reviewers. As an aside, I should add that the library of Tokyo University is one of the few that have the complete sets of Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society and Mathematics Student, including the volumes published during the World War II years, when Japan and India were on different sides…

Untitled In addition to English, DDK wrote in German and French, and there were Japanese as well as Chinese translations, at least one of which was the original language of publication. I was able to put together the titles of about 67 papers that were on mathematics or statistics and then set about getting physical copies of all of them. Some were easy- the Indian Society for Agricultural Statistics is on Pusa Road in New Delhi, the Indian Academy of Sciences has digitised its entire collection, and so on. For some I was lucky- I was invited to Hokkaido University in Sapporo from where the journal Tensor (New Series) is published, so I was able to get two of his papers, and work took me to the Academia Sinica in Taipei where I was able to get one more paper that he had originally published in Chinese. The papers in Comptes Rendu (in French) came via an old student who was in Paris, the one in the Prussian Academy journal from a friend who used to work for JSTOR, and the paper in the New Indian Antiquary via an old student who was in Chicago. Some of this vast international effort was probably unnecessary (in the sense that I could have found some things closer home and with less sturm und drang if I were a properly trained historian of science) but it all seemed good fun as it was happening. And it was, so to speak, a side business anyhow…

In the end there are only two works by DDK that are now not available, both books. One was sent to the publishers a few days before he died: this manuscript, on Prime Numbers was never found. Its loss was not followed up, and now it is too late. The other book, on Path Geometry was submitted to Marston Morse at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and that was also never published. It so happened that I had spent a sabbatical year there in 2004-5, and had actually met Mrs Morse, so I wrote to ask her if there was any record of the submitted manuscript among the Morse papers (Marston Morse had passed on in 1977). By then Mrs Morse was in her hundredth year, and although a search was made, nothing could be located. Other than these two “missing works”, copies of all other papers can be had for the asking; a listing of all DDK’s papers is now available in the Indian Academy of Sciences Repository of publications by Fellows, DDK having been elected one in 1935.

But also in 2010, I was introduced to Meera Kosambi via email (I was still in Tokyo then) and she in turn introduced me to Professor Toshio Yamazaki who had by then retired from the History Department at Tokyo University, but who had been a student of DDK and H D Sankalia at Deccan College in the late 1950’s to early 1960’s. We met for a coffee one morning, and apart from taking a grim picture (a pre-smartphone selfie, as it were!) to mark the occasion, we chatted about DDK and Yamazaki-san’s Indian experiences. Getting to know Meera Kosambi – Meeratai as she insisted she be addressed- turned out to be a major turning point in this enterprise. For one thing, it made it just that much more concrete and worth the effort involved when I realised that even she was largely unaware of her father’s contributions and the complexity of his mathematical reputation. A few conversations with her cleared up many things – of how he never had the Ph D degree for instance, or of the family dog Bonzo and how he had grown so fat that DDK called him a pig (dukker in Marathi) and so on. All of which was summarized in an article that was published in EPW in 2012 on the mathematical legacy of DDK, the abstract of which I quote below:

Today, D D Kosambi’s significance as a historian greatly overshadows his reputation and contributions in mathematics. Kosambi simultaneously worked in both areas for much of his adult life, and to understand the body of his work either in the social sciences or in mathematics, an appreciation of the complementarity of his interests is essential. An understanding of Kosambi the historian can only be enhanced by an appreciation of Kosambi the mathematician. In a fundamental way, Kosambi embodied the multidisciplinary approach, channelling diverse interests – indeed combining them – to create scholarship of high order.

The same article was published in a book, Unsettling the Past (Permanent Black, 2012) that Meera Kosambi brought out later that year. Perhaps conscious of the limited time that was left to her, she was keen to see the intellectual legacies of Kosambi Père et Fils firmly in place. (For whatever reason, and in my opinion unfairly, she constantly judged herself by their mythical standards and fell short. As indeed, who would not…) In the aftermath of the the D D Kosambi centenary (2007-8), Meeratai published at a furious pace- Dharmanand Kosambi’s writings in translation, his autobiography Nivedan, Gender, Culture, and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema before Independence, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History, Mahatma Gandhi and Prema Kantak: Exploring a Relationship, Exploring History, Feminist Vision or ‘Treason Against Men’?: Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature, Women Writing Gender: Marathi Fiction Before Independence, something like ten books in the five years that I knew her. She always had a book to write, and as those who knew her more closely told me, when the end was near, she was ready to go only after she finished the very last bits on her forthcoming Pandita Ramabai: Life and landmark writings.

Meera Kosambi also gave the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library most of what she could of DDK’s papers and writings so that they could be properly archived. But fortunately, this was after she let me, and more importantly, Rajaram Nityananda, then Director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune look through them. In the process Rajaram had many of the papers digitised, and there was much in there that was (and still is) waiting to be discovered – unfinished manuscripts, unpublished notes, letters and so forth.

00000328 In particular, there are typescripts of many articles and notes. DDK’s notebooks from Harvard, where he had taken lecture notes as an undergraduate are also among the papers. And not just mathematics notebooks, either- in short, material that is ripe for some amount of scholarly analysis. For instance, there is an article on C V Raman, (the somewhat more palatable) half of which was published in People’s War in 1945 by “Indian Scientist”. The latter half of the article seems to have been (correctly, in the opinion of several who have read it) deemed to be left better unsaid. There are also the edited typescripts of several essays.

And then there are letters, several of them. Like many in the pre-email era, DDK was a chatty correspondent. He made good and lasting friends as a teenager and young adult, those that stood by him pretty much through his life. Letters to the (R. J.) Conklins- a few of which have appeared in Unsettling give an unusual and somewhat American view of India in the 1930’s in the period when the freedom movement gained ground. Norbert Wiener remained a close friend, and professionally, he remained close to André Weil through his life, and for a brief while to Élie Cartan and Tulio Levi-Civita as well. Their correspondence, what remains of it, needs to be seen, as also his letters to Divyabhanusinh Chavda. The pictures that emerge of DDK, warts and all, need to be confronted. Of his personal angularities DDK was all too aware as he was of his many talents and his intellect. He was unapologetic, but also, occasionally, un-self-critical, refusing to see what he might have achieved through compromise and (academic) collaboration. As he says, when speaking of the Riemann debacle, at the end of his autobiographical essay, Adventure into the Unknown, with ample self-justification and more than a hint of self pity,

“Let me admit at once that I made every sort of mistake in the first presentation. There is no excuse for this, though there were strong reasons: I had to fight for my results over three long years between waves of agony from chronic arthritis, against massive daily doses of aspirin, splitting headaches, fever, lack of assistance and steady disparagement. It was much more difficult to discover good mathematicians who were able to see the main point of the proof than it had been to make the original mathematical discovery. How much of this is due to my own disagreeable personality and what part to the spirit of a tight medieval guild that rules mathematical circles in certain countries with an `affluent society’ need not be considered here. There is a surely a great deal to be said for the notion that the success of science is fundamentally related to the particular form of society”.

Not being au fait with either the historian or the mathematician’s insider view of DDK, I had to discover many things afresh, such as his use of pseudonyms. This is one area where it is clear that some serious work is needed, given the range of his contributions; I have only poor hypotheses as to why he did this. In three articles, DDK signed himself as Ahriman, Vidyarthi, Indian Scientist, but after he invented the persona of S. Ducray in the early 1960’s he used it professionally in no less than four papers. Meanwhile, Kosambi as Kosambi was publishing Myth and Reality in 1963, and The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline in 1965, as well as the occasional mathematics paper sent off to select journals! In many letters to friends, DDK signs off as Ducray; in one of the papers in the Journal of the University of Bombay, Ducray says “My debt to Prof. Kosambi is obvious”, while in another, the acknowledgment reads “This paper would not have been possible without the constant labour of Prof. D. D. Kosambi.”

Weird. DDK had, as has now been recounted several times, been responsible for the first mention of the name Bourbaki in the mathematics literature. Although the name Bourbaki is a collective pseudonym for a group of (largely French) mathematicians, there is a somewhat light-hearted frivolity to the naming part of the enterprise while the mathematics itself is of the highest order. Not so with the Ducray business, and it is difficult to see it through a hagiographer’s eye, as a piece of childish chicanery and no more.

Clearly there is much more work that needs to be done on Kosambi himself and this goes beyond putting together his articles and situating them. This blogpost started off as a way of my keeping track and not just a vehicle for self-promotion. Two of the discursive essays that were found among his papers have now been printed for the first time in the book Adventures into the Unknown that I have edited, and which is published by Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon. My “Collected Works” of DDK project is also under way, though it will probably take the better part of this year to complete, and will become a “Selected Works in Mathematics and Statistics” in the process.

Within a relatively short working life – he died at 59 – DDK made many original and fundamental contributions to many aspects of scholarly enquiry. The Promethean epithet applies very aptly to Kosambi, though- when the Gods give such gifts, and they do not give these to many, there is a price to be paid… A verse from Bhartṛhari that DDK surely knew (having three monumental contributions on the works of the 7th c. poet) says it all too well:

Nor do the gods appear in warrior’s armour clad
To strike them down with sword and spear
Those whom they would destroy
They first make mad.

Causarum Investigatio!

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The annual meeting of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences was held a few weeks ago in the Festive Hall of the Austrian Academy of Science. The building originally housed the University of Vienna, and one of its remarkable features is a spectacular ceiling, decorated by a fresco, the Allegory of the University.

Four faculties occupy the four sides – theology, philosophy, law, and medicine- recalling a simpler time when there seemed to be fewer boxes into which knowledge was categorized. What struck me (as my attention wandered to the ceiling, between the talks) was the motto (in Latin) that accompanied each:

Theology – Notitia Divinarum, Divine Knowledge,
Philosophy – Causarum Investigatio, Investigation of Causes
Law– Iusti Ac Iniusti Scientia, Knowledge of the Just and Unjust
Medicine – Ars Tuendae et Reparandae Valetudinis, the Art of

Maintaining and Repairing Health.

The faculty of Philosophy, at that time, included both the natural sciences and mathematics, hence the injunction to find out why, to investigate causes. Of the four mottos, though, it is the only one that sounds vaguely imperious: Causarum Investigatio! Go forth and investigate! It might well be an incantation (of the kind made famous in the Harry Potter series- Lacarnum Inflamarae!, for instance) but an imperative: Find out why! is a good motto to have for a natural scientist.

Speak for Science

When we became an independent republic, our founding fathers adopted the Constitution of India which demands that its citizens abide by and uphold reason and scientific temper.

The Inter-Academy Panel on Ethics of the three Academies of Science in India (namely the Indian National Science Academy, INSA, the Indian Academy of Sciences, IASc and the National Academy of Sciences, India, NASI) issued the following statement on 27 October 2015. The statement is available on the website of the INSA, and is reproduced below.

When we became an independent republic, our founding fathers adopted the Constitution of India which demands that its citizens abide by and uphold reason and scientific temper. Scientific temper encompasses rationality, rights and responsibility in equal measure. It crystallizes what Tagore wanted India to be, namely, a nation

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action,

Into that heaven of freedom… let my country awake.

Yet, we note with sadness and growing anxiety several of statements and actions which run counter to this constitutional requirement of every citizen of India. It is important that exemplary punishment be given to such trespassers of reason and rights. We also appeal to all sections of Indian society to raise their voices against such violative acts, so that they are nipped in the bud.

NET Loss

The latest move by the UGC to stop the so-called non-NET fellowships is another nail in the coffin of higher education in India.

On October 21, 2015, a news item informed that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has decided to discontinue non-NET fellowships of Rs 5,000 per month for MPhil students and Rs 8,000 per month to PhD students at central universities from the next academic session. The proffered reasons were these: this scheme was considered “discriminatory” as it was available only to researchers in central universities; there “was no way to be sure that it went to quality, meritorious students” and it was delivered in the ‘direct benefit mode.’

And today, while it seems that the UGC has back-tracked to some extent on this decision after the protests that erupted, there is no immediate reason for any sense of relief, or of victory. This is not about politics. The issue is an academic one.

For some time now many of us – students and teachers alike – had indeed been asking for a review of this fellowship scheme. The Non-NET amounts are less than half the NET fellowships, but more importantly, they are given for 4 years while the NET fellowships are given for 5. What was really needed was to make sure that all fellowships are given for the same duration, namely 5 years, which is what it takes to get a Ph D in most disciplines in most universities in our country. Enhancing the amount, or at least rationalizing it, was an additional need of the review. In this context, the decision to do away with the fellowship altogether was a major shock: the UGC is expected to encourage research, not to retard it.

The non-NET fellowship that was introduced in 2008 was one of the initiatives of the UGC that had the general support of academics across the central university system. This was a real boost to Ph D programmes, enabling students to get some financial support at a crucial time in their academic careers. It also sought to address the fact that our country produces a surprisingly small number of Ph D’s each year, given the size of the student body and the number of universities. Most academic programmes perform well below par, well below what they could be doing. The leading “research” universities in India produce fewer than a third the number of Ph D’s as they have staff (namely, with N faculty members across disciplines, fewer than N/3 Ph D’s are awarded each year on average). Elsewhere (read China or the US) the numbers are more than double that. And given that there are so few research universities to begin with, the dismal state of affairs becomes only too apparent.

Take the sciences, for instance. The following facts need to be seen in conjunction.

The NET examination in the sciences (5 areas: Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences) awards approximately 5000 fellowships each year. These are given by the UGC and the CSIR jointly.
Only something like 50% of the fellowships that are awarded are actually availed. And for reasons that include (a) a change of plans, (b) going to study outside India, (c) joining the Ph D programme at institutions that already have scholarships for their students and (d) not being able to secure admission in time, at least half the number, namely 2500 students do not join Ph D programs.
Divide that number among all the university science departments, after removing the number that go to research laboratories, and you have the true picture- in any typical university department, it would be surprising to have more than two or three students on average who have the NET fellowship.
Given the fact that again, on average, a typical science department has between 10 and 20 faculty members and only three students with the NET, there is the corollary that if you restrict research to only NET qualified students, most university research programmes will simply have to shut shop.
If research programs are to sustain, there need to be more students (at least one per faculty every other year is not unreasonable). Without the Non-NET fellowship, it would be impossible to support the numbers of students that are necessary to sustain an academic research program. Most students in university departments cannot afford to be there without some support.

There is simply no way in which these requirements can be satisfied with only NET qualified students. There just aren’t enough of them! But beyond this, there are any number of reasons why we need to see that the Ph D programs in universities need strengthening, not destabilization.

New areas of research need to be supported. Frequently, there are no NET examinations that prospective students could take, especially if they come from different backgrounds. Say for a subject like computational biology. If an engineer were to want to move into this area, what is the qualifying NET subject that she or he would take?
We need more Ph Ds, not fewer. The quantity and quality of research that is done in the country has a real and positive correlation with economic growth and the general quality of life.
There are not enough qualified academics to staff the large number of new universities. We need to seriously ramp up research- each faculty member of a research university needs to mentor at least one student each year. Or something close to that number if we are to be able to staff these various universities with qualified staff.

There indeed are issues with the present system of NET and non-NET fellowships, and the view of the Commission seems to be that that latter are being badly misused. The fact of the matter is that whatever misuse there is goes across the board: a rationalization of the overall process of how we (in the university system) support Ph. D. students is needed, not that the non-NET fellowships need to be scrapped. If anything, the scheme needs strengthening and widening, to bring State universities into the fold at the very least, and to be made more accountable at the same time.

There is more at stake than the giving or withdrawing of a small number of fellowships. There is the future of independent academic research to consider.

SOMe more on SOM

In my previous post, I wrote about SOM or self-organized mediocrity, the unnecessary but seemingly inevitable fate of many academic departments in the country. Some colleagues wrote in, a few in agreement, but a few to express dissatisfaction with what I had written.

I thought I would take the chance to expand the discussion, with a little help from my friends. On the face of it, there is little to disagree with the idea of SOM. Most cases of institutional decay seem to be nobody’s fault but those of the protagonists. But in writing on issues like higher education and other public matters, one challenge is to go beyond stating the obvious. While the problems are quite apparent, as are some solutions, their resolution seems to require near superhuman effort at least within the constraints imposed by the existing system.

As my friend SR said: Yes! Very nice to read. Then what……? What does one do about this? Accept that this is so? Do we see a change? Do we see a change in theory? In practice?

Many questions, SR, but the post was meant to provoke an individual reaction. What should you do? You too have been in a position of responsibility. If only I had a prescription for what we all should do! I personally don’t believe that one has to accept the inevitability of SOM, but avoiding it will only come with some hard work and harder decisions. Some of it is knowing, like the Red Queen, that one has sometimes to keep running as fast as possible to even just manage to stay in the same place. And as for how to make a palpable change, one that one can see, an answer was to some extent posed by another friend, AD. Of which more below.

Our Departments and Universities are to be seen always as works in progress, projects under construction. I think that point of view gets lost, once some success has been reached. But with the smallest slips – like a bad hire – one is saddled with a liability that does not go away easily. In fact, it propagates easily, as mediocrity breeds much faster than excellence.

AD’s diagnosis is that a major cause for SOM is hiring people who are less than top quality in both technical AND social skills. It is pretty easy to evaluate technical skills and thus to hire only A-level people technically. But, social skills are much harder to evaluate. People who lack the desire and ability to work together to build an organization will ultimately kill it. Such people are interested in building their own careers, groups, fiefdoms, etc., but not the organization.

The desire and ability to work together is an absolute essential when it comes to nurturing an academic institution, or perhaps any large enterprise as AD also wrote, This could also have been written about many academic institutions in the USA as well as businesses around the world. It likely true for almost all large government organizations.

Another friend, MP felt that I had deliberately pulled [my] punches which would have made this a telling piece. I don’t agree with your analogy because the sand pile retains its shape, but mediocrity digs bottomless pits! To which I kind of agree and kind of don’t. The only linen I would have to wash is predictably petty, and actually with the passage of time, I find the details less interesting than the broad brush-strokes. Sure, every department has its politics, and some of it’s denizens are cursed with a long memory for trivia, the griots who keep alive a list of past injustices, of academic and non-academic skirmishes and battles. But my concern was more that this story seems to get played out everywhere, with an occasional change of cast, but the same institutional ecosystem. And MP is absolutely correct that the critical sandpile keeps its shape, but the mechanism of SOM ensures a flat and uneven landscape. The pits, in short.

The crab mentality also makes sure that nobody rises above the low mean. And the most recent instance that prompted my somewhat bitter comments had to do with trying to establish a department to study a major new discipline, only to find opposition on the most flimsy grounds. Each campus also has its Kaikeyis, who remember every past promise, and for whom a personal advantage overwhelms that of the group. But let me not say more on that- each of us has tales that are better told in convivial company. I’m not pulling my punches, MP, but there is just so much one can say. Without naming names, we do know that the landscape is littered with departments that had everything going for them have not stayed anywhere near their peaks.

Of course, the worry is always one’s own. The School of Physical Sciences at JNU started off in 1986, and now 30 years later, one keeps worrying about how it is doing… I had tangentially suggested (appealing to a comment of D D Kosambi) that some of our difficulties come from the challenges of trying to build alien structures without the requisite resources- the sad consequences of growing an expensive research enterprise in an under-developed country. But when I said “from the inside one cannot easily tell if the half-life has been crossed or not“, my friend KK pointed out that the job had to be done by oneself.

In a thoughtful note, he went on to say that measures of half-life can be gauged internally by asking some difficult questions. I’ve edited his note to share (here is a recipe, SR),

Rate of change: Lifespan of faculty, and how has the faculty strength changed over time. Is this competitive? Sustainable?
Average age of faculty retained for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years since inception. Many departments don’t have the freedom to hire as they choose, but it is possible to plan on keeping a desirable age profile.
Students: Are they generally getting better or worse in grades/skills/capability/employment? Are teaching laboratories keeping up with the times, given the resources.
Process time: Is the university a faster or slower place to implement a decision compared to what happens in society? (Agility in making a purchase etc.).
Infrastructure: Are the basic facilities outside the university better than that inside? Why?
External connections: Are connections getting built with targets outside the University? University departments should eventually benefit some group, especially in industry or in different sections of society.

There may be more ways, but the basic point is clear: Look within. If you want to know how to avoid self-organized mediocrity, most of the answers are there.

Self-organized Mediocrity

In the late 1990’s Per Bak, a vastly talented theoretical physicist, wrote a book titled How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality. The title of this blogpost is more than a little inspired by him, and could well be How Universities Work: the process of Self-organized Mediocrity.

Sadly, there is really no attempt on my part to be tongue-in-cheek. The process of self-organized mediocrity is all too evident in department after department in institution after institution in the country, especially the less endowed ones.

As for self-organized mediocrity, or SOM, once one has give the phenomenon a name, what more is there to say? But like T S Eliot might have said, giving it a name is a difficult matter, it isn’t just a holiday game… And like the wonderful idea of Gross National Happiness one might equally well say that there is not much more to the concept than the name, but indeed there is… It makes sense to draw attention to the fact that a country benefits more from the happiness of its people than what it produces for others.

Nevertheless, SOM will bear some elaboration even though the “effanineffable” name itself conveys much of the basic concept. There is a long-standing in-joke among academics, that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Variously attributed to Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, Wallace Sayre and others, the basic sentiment apparently goes back to Samuel Johnson, in whose times, the universities had very different structures. But in some sense the joke rings somewhat hollow these days, particularly for the Indian university. The stakes are not really all that small at all, and the internal politics at most academic institutions can be vicious. Regrettably, its also not just the internal politics- the world outside the campus walls has a way of sneaking into academic affairs and in many of our institutions, the (external) political positions inform and guide the internal.

This is a particularly difficult time for higher education in India. There is not enough money, the resources are stretched almost to breaking point, and there is little appreciation of what higher education truly entails. In some sense, the old model has exhausted itself: it is simply not possible to educate the large numbers of students (at present and in the future) with the tools and techniques of the 1970’s and 1980’s, which is what is extant at most institutions at present. And the style of the 1980’s differs too little from that of the 1950’s, while the youth of today are light-years apart from those of the 1980’s or the 1950’s, in mentality, in preparedness, and in motivation. Apart, not ahead.

Universities tend to succumb to inertia, and public universities inevitably succumb to an inertia fueled by public cynicism and low expectations. The demand for high quality higher education at negligible cost is a hangover from colonial times, regardless of how it might be dressed up as a state responsibility to provide good education to its people. This has resulted in our country creating small enclaves of privilege where a few can indulge, at state expense, in scholarship without having to pay for these privileges by having to teach others. Some find asylum in such enclaves (and then proceed to educate others on the need to respect “merit”) while others who gravitate to universities find the environment plagued by excessive political interference and few resources.

And what little is available is bitterly fought over. The crab mentality in academic institutions is well known the world over – one does not mind not having something so long as one’s colleague also does not have it, and one can do a fair amount by way of machination and petty politics to ensure that nobody does better than oneself. Except that in pulling others down, the only denouement that is ensured is that all are at a uniform low level: this is the self-organized mediocrity. And Departments will do the same to other Departments when it comes to space, students, or any other resources, gradually driving institutions into mediocrity…

[I should here acknowledge the inspiration behind this nomenclature. The theory of self-organized criticality or SOC has been around and quite influential for almost three decades now. It deals with systems whose dynamics – without external impetus – drives itself to a critical state and maintains it there. The archetypical example is a sandpile depicted in the charming illustration above: adding more and more sand beyond a point leads to a sandpile that maintains it’s shape by letting off sand in avalanches. The picture is, of course, incomplete without another denizen of the beach, the crab.]

I recently found that one of my heroes, D D Kosambi said something to the same effect in an autobiographical piece he wrote towards the end of his life. In the early 1960’s, K. Satchidananda Murthy and K. Ramakrishna Rao of the Department of Philosophy at Andhra University in Waltair invited a number of thinkers to contribute articles on their personal philosophy as researchers. This collection eventually appeared as Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, a book that was published in 1972 by Andhra University Press. One of the articles therein is by DDK, titled Adventures into the Unknown. This essay runs to some twenty pages and has been excerpted, bowdlerized and re-published as Steps in Science in the DDK commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress.

DDK-pic2 — D D Kosambi in his mid-twenties

Both versions of the essay were published posthumously (Kosambi died in 1966) and they largely overlap, except that the more widely circulated commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress, has been somewhat sanitized. The wit of Kosambi is largely missing in this autobiographical piece, and given that the original is very articulate on some of the more difficult aspects of Kosambi’s life, it is a pity that the editors of the latter felt the need to remove these bits. (I hope to discuss the articles and the changes in a subsequent post on this blog; I have my theories…)

One bit that was not excised in the second essay was on Kosambi’s perceptions of the working conditions for the scientist in India: The greatest obstacles to research in any backward, under-developed country are often those needlessly created by the scientist’s or scholar’s fellow citizens. The passage of time has not done much to change the appositeness of this observation even if it was deeply coloured by the personal tribulations that Kosambi had faced towards the end of his life.

One of the sadder aspects of self-organized mediocrity is that it is both not inevitable and is really quite unnecessary. And at the same time, the academic landscape is littered with universities that were great, departments that had seen better days, all described with more than a tinge of “what might have been”, and regrets for what was not achieved.

I have been mulling over the present post for some time now. In part it is occasioned by responses to an earlier post on the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur. A comment made by more than one of my friends was that successful examples of institutions in India were uncommon enough that one needed to analyze just why they were successful while others were not. But that would require the efforts of a gifted analyst of the sociology of institutions, or maybe an institutional historian and archivist.

When the School of Physical Sciences was just established at JNU, well-wishers told those of us who were there at the time that twenty-five years was the half-life of most departments in the country. Its been nearly 30 years now, but from the inside one cannot easily tell if the half-life has been crossed or not. But one thing that has become obvious in recent years is that the present funding pattern of the UGC makes it very difficult for universities to achieve any kind of excellence. In fact, carrying out the routine tasks of teaching and research (at whatever level) can take all one’s effort-

But to get back to Chemistry at IIT-K, one of the things it seems to have done was to evolve with the times. As an IIT, the institution was also insulated, by and large, from the sickness of poor funding. And regardless of what the internal dynamics might have been, the Department has always stood as one. Regrettably, this does not happen in most other academic departments, and the consequences are out there in plain view for all to see…

The Fellowship of Those who Wait

Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell

When William Morriss wrote the words Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell in his 1888 novel, The Dream of John Ball, he could hardly have imagined that this aphorism would resonate so strongly among the graduate students in India in the present decade.

Of course the Morriss quote meant something quite different in its context: the Fellowship is a brotherhood, and the lack thereof, the hell, is professional isolation. Nevertheless it is telling that the quote applies so appositely to the manner in which Ph. D. studies are supported today in our system of higher education.

For the most part, Ph. D. scholars need institutional support. For one thing, at the age when most enter the Ph. D. programme, they can scarcely rely on others financially. And furthermore, research scholarship is a national need: across the world, governments support their research scholars. Except that in India, this support is intermittent for the most part.

The intermittency is most evident in the manner in which the funds finally reach the research scholars. Without exception, what unites Ph. D. scholars across the length and breadth of the country is a continuous concern about financial support, waiting for funds to arrive, paperwork to be done, and the fear that for some new reason, things will be delayed… again. Except in research institutes where the fellowships are given directly by the research institutions (and where it must be acknowledged, the numbers are fairly small), and in the IITs and IISERs.

The problem is not unsolvable, but as the years pass and the number of national scholarships increase, it seems that they get more and more difficult to manage. There was a time when the fellowships were only given by the UGC, and then by the CSIR, and then… Today, the DST, DBT, CSIR, UGC, ICMR, ICHR, ICSSR, ICPR… There are many more agencies involved, each with their own modus operandi, their own scales, entitlement and so on.

As research supervisor, I have frequently seen university students suffer- support does not arrive for months together, and then there are months of plenty. Years of famine, years of abundance, so to speak. Contingencies are not paid for years, and then they vanish altogether. And the sheer indignity of it all, having to prove time and again and to various officials, that they are bonafide students. Research is difficult enough without these hurdles to cross.

And this is not a problem that is easily solved by university administrations either. Over the past few years, funds have indeed dried up. The problems and delays are quietly transferred to the administration’s doorstep, and for the most part, this is a body that is ill-equipped to deal with it.

So in the spirit of trying to find a solution, here is a Modest Proposal for Preventing the Research Scholars From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.

1. Have a single scale for the Ph D scholarship. No disparities between the different agencies, no disparities in ancillaries such as contingency or house rent allowance.

2. Have a common code. If a Ph. D. takes five years on average, fund for five years. Not for four (as the UGC non-NET does) or for any length of time (as many institutes do). Or have a proper (and uniformly applicable) funding protocol: Rs. N1 for the first year, N2 for the second, and so on. Put a ceiling: one may be entitled to state support for a research studentship for M years at most.

As it happens now, there are many different levels of funding operational in one institution- some get funded for four years, some for five, and the amount of money can vary widely, even when it is the same funding agency! The point here is that there is a common source: our taxes. And some sensible planning should make it possible to respect all disciplines and fund them equally well.

3. Link the fellowship to the individual in a more transparent manner. Have them register with a unique ID- some state governments use the Class X mark sheet- and monitor the entitlement directly. Each person should be able to avail the support only once. (Today, there are many examples of people hopping between fellowships in an unmonitored way, simply because Agency X does not talk to Agency Y.) So if one takes the fellowship for 2 years at one university and moves to another, one can only draw on the balance number of years (M-2), not the full M again.

4. It might be simpler if the funding agencies would communicate directly with the student. They fund, and they should trust, or at least learn to trust. And also to take a breach of this trust as a serious and punishable offense. As it happens there is a small number of students who will abuse the privilege of being supported for the Ph D by not taking the enterprise seriously in one way or the other- not working with integrity, not completing a study, or by willful fraud. And a similar small number of research supervisors are culpable as well. However, to tar every scholar with the same brush and put in place a tortuous set of rules is a case of agencies being unnecessarily overzealous. Ultimately, this has hurt the cause.

5. Universities could take some of responsibility as well. Today, given the level of funding of the public universities, once students are admitted to the Ph D program, they are left to the not-so-tender mercies of the funding agencies that can take a year or more to simply “verify” papers. University funds are also typically insufficient to cover an “advance”, especially when it not clear when or if the agencies will pay up: the amount of monies owed by the agencies to our public universities are fairly substantial.

The fact of the matter is that research needs to be supported publicly, and it should be supported well. Not just in the declared amount of fellowship, but in the manner of its delivery as well. The present methods adopted by the funding agencies almost conspire to ensure that none but the most dedicated will pursue research in a public institution. I’m sure the above proposal – modest or otherwise – will not find public favour, but it is worth making all the same. Today’s research translates into a better tomorrow, and we need to recognize and respect that.

Academic Ghosts

On fraudulent academic practices such as “complimentary authorship, surrogate authorship, writing of papers/theses for monetary considerations, publishing against payments” all of which fall in a moral twilight zone.

A type of academic fraud that is widespread and strangely enough, not strictly illegal is that of ghostwriting or (as Wikipedia informs) ghosting, where articles and even complete theses (at the M. Tech., M. Phil. and Ph. D. levels) can be written by one person for another, usually for monetary considerations.

Academic ghosters can cite many famous precedents: Mozart is known to have written pieces in the name of wealthy patrons, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein (although probably not just for money) and speeches (or tweets) of most of our public figures are written by others, but in their names (usually as part of their jobs). Nevertheless, when it comes to academics, there is something repulsive about the practice which is essentially fraudulent and which, when detected, should invite punitive action.

This post has the following genesis. Last month I was invited to Bangalore to talk about publication ethics to a group of science students, all spending the summer in various laboratories, and who were mostly pre-publishers (namely they had not yet written their first scientific papers but very likely will do so soon). In my presentation, I touched upon the standard types of unethical behaviour- data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, etc., but the editor of one of our leading journals happened to be in the audience, and he pointed out to me later that I had not talked about fraudulent practices such as “complimentary authorship, surrogate authorship, writing of papers/theses for monetary considerations, publishing against payments” all of which fall in a moral twilight zone.

Upon reflection, I agree I could have talked about these in the context of publishing ethics, and in the future I probably shall. The problems are many, but there are also many shades of gray here and as it happens, the inhabitants of this twilight zone are of various sorts (but all have gone across to the dark side in one way or another).

The issue of what constitutes authorship of a paper is getting to be difficult to discern in these times when some academic papers can have over two thousand authors. Within each discipline/community though, there is broad agreement as to what entitles you to have your name on a paper in the field, but more importantly, what does not.

The most common form of complimentary authorship is when names are added on to a paper for their having (a) headed a laboratory (quite routine in some of our big laboratories!), (b) supported the other authors financially through public grants, say as head of the research group, but made no intellectual contribution to the work, or (c) value (real or perceived) in getting papers accepted for publication. (Sometimes, but rarely, this gets done without the knowledge or consent of the person being given the complimentary authorship; a colleague bitterly recounts the difficulty he had in getting his name removed from such a paper after it was published… How does one even begin to explain this to journal editors?!) Quite correctly, this is a practice that cannot be supported, but it is also difficult to detect, even when the journal asks (as many increasingly do) of the role of each of the authors in the paper: much can be hidden in lists. And then there is the apocryphal story of a well known academic who – for a price – agreed to add as coauthor an acquaintance who needed the paper for his own professional advancement.

Direct ghosting gives rise to surrogate authorship – one person does the work and writes the paper in another’s name. This practice is probably going to increase with time, especially when regulatory bodies like the UGC insist on a minimum number of papers in journals to compute the API (or Academic Performance Index) Score for employment or promotion. Not that asking for academic performance is a bad thing – on the contrary, it is difficult to imagine what else one would ask for. But since ghosting is not quite illegal, there are any number of agencies that provide this service, some of which advertise themselves very openly. As an article in The Telegraph reports, the job can be quite lucrative: many of these companies have their own websites, and others list themselves on websites (like Quikr!, eBay or Olx) and offer to do everything from A to Z.

Indeed, the services offered are comprehensive. I quote from one such vendor; the originally execrable text of the advertisement has been edited to be more readable. They say “By opting for our service, over 90% of our clients have reported grades that were better than what they expected. Our service will increase the chances of approval of your academic documents. We have experience, having completed 2000 Ph Ds from 15 countries like USA, UK, Iran, China, Korea, Brazil, Russia, Africa, etc.” Companies like this are willing to give a Ph D candidate help with “Topic Selection, Synopsis, Thesis, Research Proposal, Research Paper, Research Paper Published in Reputed International Journal, Software Based Project implementation, PhD Presentation”.

Isn’t this what should be done at one’s home university along with one’s Ph D mentor? One might argue that companies like this exist in order to fill a niche, the vacuum of academic guidance and mentorship at our existing universities, but that is neither here nor there. The surrogacy of authorship goes well into the realm of academic fraud, especially when they assure you that “the work” is “delivered with Plagiarism Report checked on License Based Software”.

Some months ago there was a sting operation at Ber Serai, the market that lies midway between JNU and the IIT Delhi. Theses can be purchased there pretty much for the asking, and come in two flavours. In Model A, existing theses (that have earlier been submitted to some other university) are available, and all that the customer has to do is to “change the initial credits and the name of the university”. In Model B, one can get “original content written […] It will cost you two rupees per word for the original content. For a 10,000 word thesis you will have to pay 20,000 rupees. It won’t be detected in any plagiarism software, that is our guarantee.”

The existence of such “thesis shops” in the neighborhood of many universities has been an open secret for a long time, and the resistance of some universities to openness in sharing their scholarship through digital academic repositories has been partly driven by the fear of having their theses copied (or discovered to have been copied!).

One can even go a step further and dispense with being a bonafide student altogether. Some years ago, another exposé revealed that “educational consultancies can help you to get certificates for Class 10 and 12, degrees in Ph D, B Tech, LLB, MBA, MA, MD and MBBS from a range of universities, irrespective of whether it is a regular or distance learning programme. The cost depends on the degree one is keen to acquire. If needed they can even organise mark sheets for several examinations at the same time.”

But if one were to just purchase a degree, one can go online and get a degree purportedly from universities in the US (or elsewhere) for your “life and work experience” so far and, of course, a substantial sum of money. One such site declares, “Being called a doctor even if you are not a medical doctor by degree is such music in the ears. To buy a doctorate degree gives a level of competency. Since it is the highest possible academic degree, you can explore a lot of opportunities if you have credentials that would prove a doctorate degree. If you buy a PhD you will achieve promotions at your workplace without having to write complex projects and attending classes that will ruin your family or work life. If you buy a PhD from our company you will get unlimited career opportunities and you will gain the respect of your employers and co workers.”

Let me leave it there for now.

There are two versions of publishing against payment. In one, the journal that accepts a paper may, after the peer-review process is over, require a fee for publication, usually to make the paper open access or for other processing charges. (The journals are quite legitimate and of quality, it is the publication model that requires that the cost of publication be borne by someone, and in this case, it is the author.) In the second case, which is the fraudulent one, the journals do no peer-review and merely publish articles based on the fees charged. Such journals – and there are many of them out there – will publish literally anything if the price is right, and some persons (one hesitates to call them academics) gravitate to such journals since they have an ISSN number, and anything printed therein can be claimed as a publication when computing API scores.

In the end, it is usually all about the money. Academic advancement comes about with publications, and a ghosted thesis or papers usually results in a job or in promotions and higher salaries. Complimentary authorship is typically a quid pro quo for favours granted earlier. To be sure the fraction of academics who indulge in these practices is small, but the numbers are not negligible (especially at the M. Tech. and M. Phil. stages).

But, as recent events on the national stage demonstrate, fake degrees have a way of being found out, as do fake theses or fake publications – it often is just a matter of time. In the process, though, more is lost than merely the illusion of scholarship. Time and effort, indeed. But also trust, and the belief in shared values of an academic ethos.