Category: MSc

Never in a modest mood

I could have easily written the first line, I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood, substituting any number of my Science Talent batchmates’ names for Crick’s.

Untitled 2Well before I read The Double Helix I could have just as easily written the first line, “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood”, substituting any number of my Science Talent batchmates’ names  for Crick’s (myself included).  I first got to meet many of them in Jodhpur in the summer of 1970.

Today’s KVPY and INSPIRE programmes can proudly trace their origins to the National Science Talent Search Scheme (usually abbreviated to NSTS) that the NCERT initiated in 1963. The idea was to attract students to the pure sciences, and the version of it that was operational in the late 1960’s and early ’70’s, when I was in high school and in college was, in a word, great.

There was a certain simplicity to the NSTS. One wrote an exam (I remember doing that at the Government Arts College in Chennai), attended an  interview (mine was in Kolkata, probably at the ISI) and one had a project (and even then mine was more theoretical than practical), and if selected, all one had to do was to sign up for a pure science degree. Luckily that suited me just fine- I was not going to do medicine (no bio in my school) or engineering, and this gave me a way out.

Without exaggeration, getting the scholarship changed my life.  The NSTS gave one a monthly stipend, a book grant, and some tuition fees, but the real game-changer was the opportunity to attend Summer Schools every year up till the MSc degree!

The first was in Jodhpur… Four weeks, from the 11th of May to the 9th of June. Nearly 40 of us from all over the country landed up for one of the Chemistry summer camps (there were several others) in the University of Jodhpur’s Chemistry Department. At least half the group (see the group photo below)  was in the wrong place as it happened- some confusion, several mathematics undergraduates were mixed in the chemistry group-  but for many  of us, it was a refreshing change to the way things were at our home institutes (mine was Loyola College in Chennai). We had lectures in the morning, lab experiments in the afternoon. And a lot of one-upmanship virtually all the time.

jodhpurIt was a good summer. Hot, to say the least- it was Jodhpur after all, on the edge of the desert,  and my first experience of standing up after a lecture to find one’s anatomy embarrassingly outlined in sweat on one’s trousers…The lectures were mostly new material, the lab experiments too. I had decided I was going to do a project on organic synthesis, and spent much of my time making dyes- probably the last time I ever did any…

The teachers of the Department were a dedicated lot who did much to mentor us, but for the most part, it was mainly from one’s peers that we learned. To be honest I was more than a bit unprepared for the summer camp, coming as I did from the relative backwater of Madras University. We had just had a strike of sorts there, agitating for a more modern curriculum, and places like Delhi University and Bombay seemed just that much more mainstream. It was a time to catch up on what everyone else was doing, even if Shankar (who was clearly one of the smart ones) would preface every answer with some put-down (the mildest of which was that his kid sister knew better and in any case much more than you).

We also discussed the next big step: where to go for the MSc. There was little doubt in our minds that IIT Kanpur was the place to go, and from that batch, 4 of us actually did. Some others became very good friends, friends whose lives have followed parallel and occasionally intersecting tracks.  Lined up in that group photograph are at least two future Vice Chancellors, several Heads of Departments, some Senior Professors of well-known national institutions, and at least one CFO and one CEO.

UntitledAnd one partner in crime. The Mehrangarh fort dominates the Jodhpur landscape, and visiting it was essential, and something we did the first possible weekend we were there. A pile of rubble in the fort attracted the eyes of two of us, clearly some archaeological debris… Pretty soon another expedition (a mini raiding party, truth be told) was organized, this time we took along two satchels. I’m not sure anyone really cared, but we came away with little bits and pieces of history… A fragment of a trellis, a stone flower… These have stayed with us to this day, as has the excitement of the summer, the science, and the cameraderie.

This cameraderie of the science talent scholars was, I believe, one reason so many of us went on to make a career in science. (There is a very large fraction of NSTS Alumni in Indian academe, so by that token, the scheme was really very successful!) The example of one’s peers is too hard to ignore, and there was always someone to learn from, and the more they made you aware of it, the more there was to gain. I very quickly realized that Bombay University’s BSc syllabus was way better than ours, so I got a copy and studied from that far more diligently than I attended classes in Loyola…

Pakeezah 2I missed the next camp that was held in Roorkee, but made it to Chandigarh which was another memorable summer but (owing to some indiscipline on our part, I think) it was not quite the full four weeks.  That summer was dominated by the movie Pakeezah, and we heard the songs so often on the Panjab University campus, that to this day they remind me most of the rajma-chawal in the hostel in the summer of 1972, with another set of science talent friends.  Some had been there in Jodhpur and many who had missed that camp but who had gone to Roorkee. For all of us this was also the last such camp since we had all finished our BSc examinations- and even for those who were going on to the MSc the summer camps would all be individual laboratory placements. The discussions of what next, what research fields to pursue, where to go… all these dominated our evenings.

This is something to think about, especially given that every year now there are almost 2000 students who participate in the Inter-Academy Summer programme. The way it works now is that students go to individual laboratories for six weeks or more during their summer vacations. The research opportunity is good, but each student is (by and large) isolated- there is no community being built. It would not take too much effort to do this, given the fact that there are large numbers of students at some places like the IISc, Bangalore or the University of Hyderabad. A few lectures together, some evening programmes, some opportunities for them all to be in a less than modest mood… maybe there would be something to it.

The Mother of All Chemistry Departments

There is a very real Masonry of IIT-K Chem alums: strong ties bind us to where it all began. For all of us- teachers and students alike- this was a great initial condition to have.

snake1972 was a very good year to join the IIT Kanpur Chemistry Department as an MSc student. Some 15 of us, bright eyed and bushy-tailed for the most part, did. There was an incredible air of modernity about the place, from the architecture, to the teachers, their teaching, the labs, the hostels, the facilities. The passing years have coloured the memories and blurred some of the edges, but nevertheless, I can still remember the freshness of the campus and the feeling that we had arrived somewhere special.

Most of us- barring the Delhi University sophisticates- were from colleges in somewhat provincial universities. And in those days, universities in Madras, Kolkata, Pune and Bombay all were to varying degrees provincial, and we had classmates from Madurai, Kolhapur and Burdwan as well… All plagued by poor and outdated syllabi, bad teaching, the works. Many of us were also scholarship holders of the National Science Talent Scheme, that great initiative of the NCERT, and we had been exposed to some of the more modern ideas, so we knew the good places to go to. And without doubt, IIT-K was the place to go to if you wanted to do chemistry, with the added attraction that if one did reasonably well, it was a direct line thereafter to the US aka “Fatherland”.

The Chemistry Department, to put it mildly, was rocking! Our teachers were (and many still are) legendary. Almost from day one, the classes were in a completely different category from what we had been used to- no notes for one thing, surprise quizzes, open book examinations… It was not unusual to get homework from the latest issue of JACS, the Journal of the American Chemical Society- giving us the feeling that this was what an international education was all about. And it was.

Arguably, the Chemistry Department at IITK in those years was competitive with the best in the US. The faculty line-up was exceptional and the publication standards were better than most. All the big names were there- and let me not name them, the faculty at that time was the who’s who of Indian chemistry. But more than being famous, they were really inspirational. I can still recall- almost verbatim- a course in Group Theory that we all took in the second or third semester (another innovation in 1972!). And the course in Synthetic Organic Chem. or that in Phys. Chem… The geeks amongst us (mostly all) had it good.

It was a time, the first that I remember, when I was immersed in a group that, by and large, loved a subject. We talked chemistry, did homework together, did projects (some crazier than others). My undergraduate years had been spent largely in goofing off- most of those who came to the BSc course were there to pick up a degree and move on to the rest of their life- IAS, MBA, whatever- and the few who were interested in the life academic were oddities.

173_001Peer group pressure (and there was plenty of it!)  and teachers apart, there was a steadily growing set of seniors that were setting standards. The ones who had gotten into Harvard, or Chicago, or wherever. The ones who had written research papers as MSc students (and in Nature, no less). The ones who were clearly going to be the next big things… This made us, for the most part, academically very ambitious. In the days before rankings had reduced everything to labels like top ten and so on, there was mostly reputation to go by, and when we applied, the bar was always set high. A few in our class decided not to go on with a Ph D in chemistry- IIM Ahmedabad and BARC were the alternate choices, but for the rest, the next step was to Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Indiana, SUNY, and so on. But in 1973 the level of competition that one sees today was just not there; all it took to make an application was a respectable GRE score and an aerogramme…

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Prodipto Banerjea (note the deadpan expression) and I in a friend’s hostel room in Hall V, IITK. Early 1973, given our attire and the cut-outs on the wall.

This post actually started out as a long answer to a short question by one of my students as to what “were your thoughts then?  On aspects of academic/extra-academic life… I mean, how did you see the world that time?”. Truth be told, the thoughts were all in the short term. Very short term (as the pictures on the hostel room wall might suggest). Competition was strong, so one wanted to be at a local maximum at the very least, but one could also see what the milieu was throwing up. The B. Tech. batches were very gifted and this was before the coaching classes had dulled the sheen of the JEE rankings. The talents were visible and aplenty, with enough 10. someones, as well as the clearly very cool set.  The faculty was very liberal- in some ways more than what we see now: I recall, as an MSc Chemistry student, taking MSc and Ph D courses in the Physics Department, for credit. Not too many questions asked, and it figures on my transcript. (At the two Universities where I have taught recently, I can say with certainty that if this happened at all, it happened with much sturm und drang.)

And our teachers experimented with pedagogy. With a lot of thought, as even a casual look at the course curriculum would tell- it is, even now, a surprisingly modern curriculum. And with an ability to change. Willingly, as some teachers introduced Bio into Chem (it was not that common then) and unwillingly, as when some of us trashed the attendance requirement and told the instructor we would only do tutorials and the final exam, not go to his classes.

There was a downside, of course. We did not share a certain kind of easy friendship that a less competitive atmosphere might have engendered. Of my 14 classmates, I have not met 4 in the last 40 years, and only 4 of them more than once or twice in all that time. Five of our class chose careers outside science, four were in industry, one went to a national laboratory. Academics eventually attracted only five of us, two in India and three in the US, making the connections more and more tenuous with the passage of time. And now most of us are reaching retirement, so in retrospect, and there is only retrospect now, this was a major shortcoming. A sense of community certainly helps beyond the science, and grass being greener apart, I think that other groups of the same times have bonded better. Maybe it was that we were only together for two years- not a long time, admittedly- but still.

17235.iconBut there was more, much more to IIT K than just the classes, and enough attention to these aspects had been given when the institute was set up. Extracurricular activities apart, there was an airstrip, and a TV station as well- that actually broadcast programs on campus, including the 1973 England vs. India test match that was played in Kanpur, Gavaskar and Bedi being the stars then. And as for the airstrip, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name, but his nickname was Pilot because he knew flying, and I- in retrospect foolhardily- went up with him in a glider. Given the level of safety that we all subscribed to, its a miracle that there were no major accidents! (I would do it again gladly, of course.)

But to get back to the title of this post, the IIT-K Chemistry department was, in many ways, the progenitor of many others that were set up in the 70’s both in style and in content. Many of those who taught us were to leave shortly thereafter to take up positions in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore and elsewhere. In a sense, the research and teaching culture spread, and flourished.

There is a very real Masonry of IIT-K Chem alums: strong ties bind us to where it all began. For all of us- teachers and students alike- this was a great initial condition to have.