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R-day, 2014

Members of the UoH family,

This is the 65^th Republic Day that we celebrate in our country. Every year it provides us at the University an opportunity to take stock of the year that has passed and to make resolutions for the year ahead. One of the most important events since the last Republic Day has been the re-accreditation of our University by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) during January 8-11 of this month. This visit by a group composed of our peers gave us a chance not only to look at our achievements in the past five years but also have a chance to clean our campus and put our best foot forward. I would like to take this opportunity to offer my hearty congratulations to the entire University family that came together as one for this accreditation; I would also like to thank the NAAC Chair at the University, Prof. Sachi Mohanty, and his team for guiding us through this process and in an efficient and sensitive manner.

In his speech yesterday, the Visitor to the University, President Pranab Mukherjee reminded us that India is not just a geography: it is also a history of ideas, philosophy, intellect, industrial genius, craft, innovation, and experience. And later on, he added that Education has been an inseparable part of the Indian experience. I am not talking only of the ancient institutions of excellence like Takshashila or Nalanda, but of an age as recent as the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, our higher educational infrastructure consists of over 650 universities and 33,000 colleges. The quality of education has to be the focus of our attention now. We can be world leaders in education, if only we discover the will and leadership to take us to that pinnacle. Education is no longer just the privilege of the elite, but a universal right. It is the seed of a nation’s destiny. We must usher in an education revolution that becomes a launching pad for the national resurgence.

Keeping this in mind, I would like to reassert that our commitment to enhancing the quality of our education is constant and enduring. The University has had a number of very distinguished visitors to our campus during the past year: Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Venki Ramakrishnan, and, among others, A. Paulraj, Sir Tom Blundell, Sir Michael Berry, Aruna Roy, André Beteille, Utsa Patnaik, Richard Gombrich, Rajasekhar Vundru, M. S. Valiathan, Nedunuri Krishna Murthy, Shereen Ratnagar, K. Satchidanandan, Irfan Habib, Mahesh Dattani, Rajeev Bhargava, and most recently, S. V. Raghavan. These distinguished visitors give us, through their lectures and interactions, opportunities to hear the many voices of a democracy, the many voices of scholarship, the many opinions that comprise the body politic and the body intellectual.

Our faculty and students have done us proud: Professor P. Appa Rao was awarded the Rangaswami Prize in Plant Sciences, Dr. Vaitheeswaran the B. M. Birla award in Physics, Dr. S. Venugopala Rao the NASI-SCOPUS award in Physics, Professor S. Kumaresan the Mathematics Teacher of the year award from INSA, Dr. V. Vamsicharan the Amartya Sen Award of the ICSSR in Economics, and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health award for Dr. Thomas Kishore. The University has instituted the Chancellor’s awards to recognize young faculty across the disciplines, and this year we will institute a set of staff awards to recognize exceptional service to the University by our non-teaching employees. There have been a host of other recognitions that our faculty have received in addition to their numerous publications and books.

Several of our students have been recognized for their research and presentations at conferences, both national and international, and P. Shankar, S. Basak and Hanumantha Rao got awards from the K.V. Rao Scientific Society. I would like to commend the Physical Education unit for coaching our students who won the Andhra Pradesh Open Football Tournament, and would also like to congratulate our runners, Mallesam and Vinod for bagging the 1^st and 2^ndplaces at the Airtel Half-Marathon.

Departments of the University have also been recognized for excellence. The Study in India Programme at the University has been given the distinguished Andrew Heiskell award for innovation in international education. The School of Management Studies has been chosen for the B-School Leadership Award and declared the outstanding B-School in the Southern Region.

In the past year we have translated our commitment to environment into two very useful actions: the first, which many of you would have noticed as you enter the campus at the main gate, is the installation of a small weather station that informs us constantly of the air quality in addition to the temperature, pressure and wind. The station measures the suspended particle matter, gases such Ammonia. Nitrous Oxide, Carbon Monoxide, Ozone. It also measures the rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, and vertical wind speed to assess the mixing height of the pollutants. This will help us to monitor atmospheric pollution on the campus in a quantitative manner. Second, the Library has been made fully dependent on solar energy, a move that has been widely applauded by universities throughout the country. To a smaller extent, many solar stand-alone streetlights have been installed to improve the security on our campus. In the coming year, we are taking up a range of other activities designed to further preserve our environment, dredging the lakes, digging more rain harvesting pits, planting more trees… And that starts from today, when we are reclaiming the old nursery and start our coconut tree plantation along the lakes of the University.

But more, we need to guard against the pollution of corruption in our lives, both inside the University and outside it. Corruption is a cancer that erodes democracy, and weakens the foundations of our state, another observation in yesterday’s speech by the President.

The University of Hyderabad is a University of Excellence in the Central University system and the prestige of the institution is of utmost importance. Our prestige comes from the character of the campus, the research atmosphere, our concerns for the environment and our contribution to the process of nation building. President Pranab Mukherjee put it eloquently: On this day, sixty four years ago, in a remarkable display of idealism and courage, we the people of India gave to ourselves a sovereign democratic republic to secure all its citizens justice, liberty and equality. In this process, we should recall Ambedkar, the father of the Constitution, who nevertheless remarked that “Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.”

Beyond religion, today there are many sources of denial of liberty, equality and fraternity. The Republic belongs to us all, but yet we have many groups who need inclusion. Across the country, people realize that many unheard and sometimes unseen sections of our society have to be included in the constitutional protection of the rights that are guaranteed to every citizen of the country. Thus the most important freedom that we need to remember on this day is the freedom from inequality. We have to guard ourselves against discrimination due to gender, sexual orientation, racial differences, regional and religious identities, physically differential abilities, in addition to class and caste. As people, we need vigilance against the threats of fundamentalism, of censorship, and in this election year, against all divisive politics.

The Constitution is the central instrument that will guarantee us our rights and freedoms. Long live our Republic! Jai Hind!

The Second Law

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely the general principle that the entropy of the universe increases, seems to apply to institutions as well as to the more restricted type of system it was first formulated for. The entropy is a measure of disorder in a system, so the second law may be reworded to say that the disorder in a system, in general, increases with time. (And conversely, this also helps to determine what is the ‘arrow of time‘ – the more disorder, almost inevitably the later in time.)

In recent weeks I have been thinking of the appropriateness of this concept outside the narrow realm of machines and engines where it was first developed. Going through some websites, I came across the following discussion, which asserts that “associated with the entropy production is the loss of ability to do work.” How valid, in general, though of course the context in which the statement was first made was quite different. And also, an “increase in overall disorder is therefore spontaneous. If the volume and energy of a system are constant, then every change to the system increases the entropy.” Change energy to UGC funding, and system to campus, and you can see that that statement still rings true!

The impending NAAC visit provides one focus for such thoughts. Although the campus has undergone quite a transformation, it has taken the concerted efforts of a large number of people, our NAAC team, the Engineering and Estate sections, among others, to bring back a semblance of orderliness on the campus. A huge amount of physical energy has gone into actually reducing the disorder on our campus- the repainted buildings are looking good, the roads are cleaner, the undergrowth has been cleared away- all in all, there is a freshness that is evident. Thanks to them all!

I don’t know what rating we will get since that depends not just on how we look but more on what we are, and the next few days will give us a chance to put forward our very best. But it is true that regardless of the NAAC visit outcome, it is getting increasingly difficult for the University to cope with the reduced funding and the consequent increase in entropy- be it on the matter of upkeep of our infrastructure, or the inability to meet the increasing demands of a larger and evolving community.

We have to look beyond the NAAC visit, even though it is very important that we take full cognizance of it. Occasions like this give us an opportunity to revisit if and why we are a University of Excellence, and what we really need to do to earn our spurs each day. In projecting the best in ourselves- and there is clearly a lot that is very good- we also recognize those parts that could be better, and indeed, should be better.

But in any case, whose University is it anyway? It is ours, and it is pretty much up to us as to where we take it in the years to come. Any change that has to come has to come from within the system if it is to be lasting. That is, of course, one of the ways in which we might be able to fight the Second Law, but more importantly, that is the only way in which we can become the University that we want to be.

The year in review, and good wishes for the New Year!

The past year has had its ups and downs (more of one than the other it seems!) but it is good to end on an optimistic note, with the hope that the coming year will be better than the one slipping away… Here’s wishing all of us the very best for 2014!

WordPress made a report of this blog’s activity, and before I turn to other matters, here it is (and many thanks to them for the quick if somewhat impersonal and automated post):

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Some noteworthy events on our campus during 2013, starting with the inauguration of the School of Life Sciences building by Dr. M. Pallam Raju on January 3, the visit of Joseph Stiglitz, also in January, the starting of a Kendriya Vidyalaya on our campus in April, the visit of Amartya Sen and Venki Ramakrishnan in quick succession in December, bringing the number of nobelists that came to our campus this year to three! Many of the faculty were recognized for their excellence, in teaching Prof. Kumaresan was named Teacher of the Year by the Indian National Science Academy, Dr Vaitheeswaran was given the B M Birla prize in physics, and Dr V Vakulabharanam the Amartya Sen award of the ICSSR. Many of the departments and Schools were recognized for their excellence by the UGC through the grant of special funds for research- all of which has made us one of the better endowed universities, at least funds-wise… There is more to tell, and much of it has been posted on the UoH Herald over the past year, or on earlier posts on this blog. Many awards, many distinguished visitors, many concerts, and many conferences, all evidence of an active and vibrant campus.

There were also some events that caused us much sadness, the loss of four students as well as some of our retired faculty and staff. And the progress of various projects on campus has been slow, particularly on the matter of constructions and infrastructure. The turbulence of the world outside has sometimes been reflected in events on the campus… I really hope that such things will change.

Every new year deserves a resolution or two. We are now into our fortieth year, a special anniversary of sorts. Let us work to make the campus a better place, and our University the very best that we can be. Happy New Year!

Greetings for Diwali!

Best wishes to all on the occasion of Deepavali! This year, and every year…

Teachers Day

Greetings on the occasion of Teachers Day– to the teachers of the University, and to our many, many teachers outside the University…

The UoH has always been known for the many great teachers who have been here from the first days, Gurbaksh Singh onwards. I’m lucky that I also had the opportunity to learn from some of them when I was a student at IIT Kanpur, and knew some of them in later years as well. We have a good reason to recall Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan not just today but most working days, given the name of our Lecture Hall Complex, and the photograph of his above, an uncharacteristically informal one, also has a nice connection to the UoH.

A colleague writes on FB, “To all my teachers for all that I am today and to all my students from who I learn everyday, Happy Teacher’s Day!”. How true, and said so well- its a day to celebrate both teaching and learning!

Déjà vu

I’ve been having something of a writer’s block these past couple of weeks. Partly due to a sense of ennui as the blog enters its third year and I feel that the issues I want to discuss often border on the same old same old… But I must recall Larkin again- the there and that of been there done that are no longer where they were or what they were, and so its best to begin afresh. With a request for your indulgence if it seems like some of this has been said before.

For reasons that are too obvious to mention, I have been worrying a lot about our campus these past few weeks. Since the rains have been good to us, it is a corollary that the campus is very green, but it also becomes painfully evident that we need to constantly maintain it. Pruning, clearing, cleaning, culling… And picking up litter- there seems to be no spot on the campus that is free of plastic or paper waste. There are some simple and straightforward rules, banal enough to not be worth reiterating, but it seems they must. Respect nature. Don’t litter. And don’t expose yourself to danger.

I recall a conversation I had with Meenakshi Mukherjee, at one time on the faculty of the Department of English at the UoH. She was a good friend during the many years when we both were at the JNU- as it happened we moved there at roughly the same time. One day when I met her at Ganga Dhaba, apropos of nothing particular (more than usual that is) she said to me, you know, our campuses are the new colonies. Explaining herself, she added, it is like we academics create an enclave that is removed from the rest of the country, where different rules apply.

I have often thought about what she said, not just this but many other things (she introduced me to the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, for one. And encouraged me in my misguided efforts to learn Portuguese for another: learning a language is a very pure skill, she told me, but I’m still not sure what she meant…).

I feel that she was essentially right in her perception that a university campus is a special place and a special space, but also that in such enclaves there is a lot of privilege, and it is all too easy for us to slip into a colonial mentality.

This post is not just about littering or preserving the (physical) environment, it is also about the more general question of how we behave on the campus. For instance, there is a lot of helmet-less driving of two wheelers on campus. Seeing three students on a two-wheeler is not that uncommon. Some of the driving tends to be rather rash, and a positive danger, not just to others but to the driver as well. The traffic rules that apply elsewhere should apply here as well… Similarly, in public spaces Smoking is a No-No and Consumption of Alcohol is a BIGGER No-No.

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There are the laws that apply in the country, and then the special rules of the campus itself, and both need to be respected. This is not to interfere with personal choices, but there are laws that apply to educational establishments, and infringement of these draws some very unwelcome attention as we have seen in the past weeks.

The campus is always under threat, it seems. We have many well-wishers and much to be grateful for. But there are also others who are not slow to sit on judgement, others who are quite happy to show up all our weaknesses. Preserving and protecting the campus space is a full-time job, and its a job for all of us. It is a huge responsibility that we all have, to keep this place as one where generations of students can come to learn, and generations can use the freedom and the opportunities that this space offers to grow and develop.

I Day, 2013

The country’s 67’th, my third, and the Kendriya Vidyalaya, University of Hyderabad’s first. Some excerpts from my speech today:

Members of the UoH Family, Let me start by first conveying my warm wishes and greetings on the occasion of the 66th anniversary of our nation’s Independence.

Today we are- as we have been for the past many years- living in interesting times. We appear to be in a state of perpetual flux, with the scenario changing frequently in dimensions that are political, economic, and with consequences of an immediate, as well as of a long-ranging nature.

Combining independence with responsibility has been a challenge not just for our campus, but metaphorically, for our nation as well. The day of independence that we celebrate or mark each year, brought the nation the responsibility of forging a modern state, one where all citizens could aspire to a life that was better, because it was free, and because we had self-determination and self-governance, swaraj. In the nearly seven decades that have passed, it is clear that we have tried hard and that we have made great strides, but it is also clear that we have far to go on so many fronts.

This is the third time I have stood here to speak on this occasion, and since last year there have been many changes that we have seen happening around us. As anticipated, the XII plan grant has not been as generous as we had wanted, but there have been rays of hope and promise on many fronts. The University has had a preeminent position in the country with respect to its commitment to excellence in research and teaching. Having seen it intimately these past years, I know that the foundation is very solid, and the base is a strong one. In the past month, in recognition of the fact that twice the UGC has declared us to be a University with the potential for excellence, we are now designated simply as University of Excellence. This is not to say that all the potential has been realized- we more than others are acutely aware of the many miles we have to traverse and the many goals we need to score- but still, we are I believe, a University with the Promise of Excellence. This appellation comes with a heavy responsibility, and that is the responsibility to continue to deliver in the future, as we have in the past, good students, good programs, and good, solid research.

Our faculty and students have been recognized nationally and internationally- this year’s Amartya Sen award, the SCOPUS young scientist award, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Award, the B M Birla Award, several KVRSS awards, AP State Football championship… the list is a long one.

Similarly, many individual disciplines have been recognized for their excellence as well. PURSE, the programme of the DST for Promotion of University Research and Scientific Excellence will shortly enter its second phase, our Centre for Research and Education in Biology and Biotechnology or CREBB, similarly, is up for renewal and extension. A crucial and significant new addition to the University is the School of Education that has been granted recently by the UGC. I believe that with the addition of this important discipline, we will be able to make progress in a crucial dimension, the marriage of instruction with technology. I see that in the coming years we will be able to reach out to larger and larger numbers of our fellow citizens in the country and thereby fulfill the responsibility that we all share, namely of educating the bulk of the country to create a modern state.

Our concerns are many. As I have mentioned on earlier occasions, we are blessed to occupy this campus, this environment, this land. Our efforts to secure the land for the future of the University and for the purposes of education are still on: that road is a long and tortuous one, strewn with unexpected hurdles, but it is one that we are firmly committed to. For this purpose, we now have a detailed master plan for the campus.

Our commitment to the environment extends to the preservation of the biodiversity, of the varied habitats, of the fauna and flora, the lakes the rocks. One achievement that attracted considerable national attention is our action of using the roof of the Library for harvesting solar power and making this building almost self-sufficient and independent of the state electricity power supply. This coming year we will do more, and while we reduce our expenditure on power, we will also contribute to building a greener campus. And a more sensitive campus as well. The Ministry for Social Empowerment has responded positively to our disability audit, and our request to make all our buildings accessible to disabled students, and in the first instance they have funded us to do so for sixteen of the main academic buildings. Our lakes remain a source of concern, and our efforts to clean them, deepen them, and improve the ground water resources in this part of the city are also always afoot. Similarly, our campus has been invaded by the subabool tree species in a manner that is harming the native flora of this part of the Telangana region. These need careful culling and replacement, and we will undertake to do this shortly.

Within the University administration there have been many attempts to streamline procedures, and one effort that promises to serve us well is the decision to advance the entrance exams, and to make the admissions more transparent. The intake this year exceeds that of last year, and many more students have been able to apply for the several courses that we offer, although it is also true that the process needs further fine tuning.

But above all, if there is one thing that I would wish for us, it is for an increased self-confidence. We are a good, solid university, and we offer a quality of education that is difficult to come by, facilities that are well above what can be found elsewhere, superb teachers and a cohort of students that is second to none. And yet, there is a strange diffidence that permeates our functioning, something that is difficult to fathom. We are very good by any set of standards, except perhaps by our own. And this, while it should help us to reach even higher levels, appears to pull us back and hampers our own growth, both physical and intellectual. The responsibility of independence, of autonomy, is one that cannot be taken too lightly. Of late the University has been portrayed in somewhat negative light in the press and media, and I believe undeservedly so. The onus of making ours a University of Excellence is a shared one, shared by all sections of our campus community, staff, students, faculty alike. Each has a role to play, and each has one’s own sphere of operation. I urge all of you to play your roles with utmost seriousness- losing sight of our ultimate goals causes us to drift, and ultimately lets us all down. We need to change this, and now more than ever, we need to be the change we wish to see.

But this should happen gradually, with deliberation, and with debate. And with wide participation so that each voice can be heard. To adapt something that I said recently in a related context, if we are to bring about lasting change in education and research in our University, there really is no alternative to slow and sustained effort. The race, such as it is, is not always to the swift. It is to those that persevere.

Jai Hind!

Water, water

As the summer hits us, newspaper headlines such as “Hyderabad’s twin sagars left to dry and disappear” have become all too common. The campus water situation is alarming, and it really needs everyone’s attention. I got a mail recently from a concerned student who had an earnest plea: Please make our wardens and their supporting staff realize their duties.

K Hostel, for instance. Water fills the tank, and then overflows throughout the night, and here are pictures taken at various times to document the fact… As the student says, “You are intelligent enough to calculate the amount of water wasted. Please increase your efforts to bring the university members from their research laboratories or offices to see our daily issues more closely.”

Wardens. Staff. Students… This is our problem, our campus, and it should be our common concern.

Please act! Don’t just watch a tap drip! Like the logo from a conservation advocacy site says, Every drop counts…

Bridging the Gap(ps)

I have remarked earlier that our campus seems to be quite adept in not transmitting as much information as might be possible quite easily: the informal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that seems to operate on so many fronts. And being connected, something that’s inevitable in these times, is more via the giant Facebook in the sky than on closer, campus based entities.

I don’t know how many have been looking at the UoH Herald, the online newsletter being run by the PRO’s office with some help from the S N School’s Department of Communication. Their byline: UoH HERALD is an attempt to save paper but connect with the world on the happenings on the campus. That said, they are doing a great job, and for the most part offer a very comprehensive news service for many things that happen on campus.

As many of you have (woefully!) remarked, we really do need a better website– the one we have at present hardly does us justice. Apart from being difficult to navigate, it is also a wonderful place to hide any information one needs to! Some effort is being made to change that, and hopefully the next academic year will see us with a new website. Meanwhile, there are some plans afoot (and near at hand) to change the way in which we connect within the campus in the coming months, and while I will post about things as they happen, I thought I would alert the campus community to the first of the bridging initiatives that we are trying.

UoH Google Apps. With the help of Google we have created a service for the whole campus community that give each member of the campus personalized email accounts. You can choose to be (details on how to get the account is given below) Your.Name@uohyd.ac.in or even Your.Initials@uohyd.ac.in. This has the same features and custom settings as the ubiquitous Gmail with 25 GB space and the usual set of frills…

Google Apps comes with a Calendar function which enables a master online calendar for UoH. Every public event can be posted, sharing information and enabling all to participate. (SMS alerts also possible!) Profiles of people, Departments and Centres, Seminars, events all possible at profiles.uohyd.ac.in/. This service is free and is open for each member of the UoH Community to edit and design. I hope that all Departments, Schools- faculty and students will make good use of it. Essentially unlimited space will be available for storing materials like lecture talks, audio, video, podcasts, and so on.

All this starts with getting your mail id: write to gapps@uohyd.ac.in to request one, along with a scanned copy of your currently valid UoH Identity Card, and a choice of username (give two options in case one is taken already…).

What else can we do to connect? Send in your suggestions to me at my new account: rr@uohyd.ac.in.

… and this

I was asked by the Dr. K V Rao Scientific Society to be at their annual meeting and also to give away their annual awards on the 13th of the month. Founded in 2001 by the friends and family of Dr. Rao (who retired as Superintendent Chemist at the Geological Survey of India) the KVRSS seeks to actively promote and encourage young scientists. This is a rare entity, an orrganization devoted to science promotion at all stages, including the grassroots- they run a number of programmes to nurture talent at the district level as well as recognising the work done in institutes of higher learning.

It was therefore a very good feeling to see that three of the awardees this year were students of the UoH, Pidishety Shankar of the School of Physics, Supratim Basak of the School of Chemistry, and M Hanumantha Rao of the ACRHEM. It was equally heartening to see a number of young students from all across the state receive commendations, and the confidence with which all the awardees spoke was very reassuring.

Another achievement of the student body is the victory of our University Football team in the Fourth Inter-state A. P. football tournament that was held at IIIT-H. As one of the team members and vice-Captain, Achyut Kulkarni wrote in a mail to me, this is a first for our University, and a feather in the captain, William Haokip‘s cap! The team came by my office along with the Physical Education Officer and their coach-

The team members are, in addition to William Haokip (Captain) and Achyut Kulkarni( Vice-Captain), Kedar Kulkarni, James Tuglut, Kunga Chongloi, Joel, Asif Ali, Bujair, Sai Abhinav, Muanpuia Tlau, Mesevito Terhiijah, Subhash Nayak, Nrusingha Behera, Sense Alaji, Leon Dailiam, and Yunus Bava.

It was such a pleasure to have all that energy in the office that day- a nice change from the usual goings on. Thanks for coming by, guys, and keep the UoH flag flying high!