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Aotearoa

Aotearoa is Maori for the land of the long white cloud, New Zealand. I’m on a week’s visit here courtesy the UGC, to see their eight Universities: The University of Auckland, AUT (the Auckland University of Technology), Waikato, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury, Lincoln and Otago.

The long white clouds have been playing hide-and-seek until the last few days of the trip. Many days looked more like the picture on the right, a set of dark grey clouds that seemed to follow the delegation wherever we went. However, this was briefly graced by an unexpected rainbow one evening…

It has largely been a week of discovery- I have known less about New Zealand than is warranted. Especially Otago- the University we visited on the final day. The southernmost University in the world, this is also NZ’s oldest university, very research intensive. The first people I met immediately asked after our School of Chemistry and our Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora!

The manner in which universities here are funded is largely indirect: the Government essentially fully funds the students who are then charged whatever it takes to give them an education. There are some advantages to this scheme- the entitlements become clearer- and the Universities have more flexibility in what they can do. In addition there are other direct funds, of course, but by funding students directly, this makes sure that the responsibility for education is shared.

Small is beautiful might well be this country’s byline, but even so, visiting 8 universities in 5 days makes for a rather rushed visit. Nevertheless NZ, for a population of 4 million people has 8 universities, while we with 1200 million people, should by that scaling, have 2400. In reality we have only about 600 in all- central, state, private and deemed. So there are many miles to go, and much to learn from others.

Sometimes the unexpected. In Victoria University in Wellington, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences includes, among other disciplines, Art History, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Nursing, Midwifery and Health, History, Philosophy and International Relations, Linguistics… Asian Studies, Literary Translation and even a University Press! The coexistence of all these areas under one umbrella is not as uneasy as one might imagine, at least that was the view presented… But even allowing for some latitude, our ideas of trying to federate the different centres that exist at the UoH should be viewed as an effort that is not without precedent or parallel.

One area that all the Universities highlighted was their efforts to include Maori into the mainstream of all efforts- academic and cultural- within the institution. Preserving the Maori language is one area where we can learn how modern tools can be used to keep traditions and cultures alive. This is a language without a script like many of ours, and seeing the loss of stories, traditions and culture if the language falls out of use has motivated all NZ universities to set up departments of Maori Studies. Our efforts at UoH have had similar foci in the Centre for Endangered Languages and Mother Tongue Studies and in the Centre for Dalit and Adivasi Studies and Translation. Perhaps there is something that we can learn from them, and they can learn from us in this area…

One phrase that kept recurring in conversations across the islands was that this was a country that “punched above its weight”. Certainly, that comes through- in fact this week’s The Economist points out that NZ has as many diplomats and diplomatic missions as India does, being about 1/300th as many in population, and some similar fraction in terms of area. Their Universities have a similarly large international presence, more than the numbers would warrant. I know these are not quite the right comparisons, and some things scale well while others do not, but it does seem that we do not always punch above or even at our weight. Mostly below, and even when we don’t need to.

The common colonial past is reflected in the names. On the drive from the airport into Auckland city, one could see a sign for Khyber Pass Road, and Wellington has a suburb named Khandallah, with Bombay Street… There is an Indian diaspora that dates from the 1860’s and more recent migrations, of course. There’s clearly a wealth of opportunities here for some serious academic engagement…

Okazaki fragments

In 1989-90, I lived for a year in Okazaki (岡崎市) a small Japanese town in Aichi Prefecture. Close to Nagoya, this city is home to the Institute of Molecular Science (and the National Institute for Basic Biology) where I was a visitor for a year. After having spent many years in the US as a student and postdoc, this was my first sabbatical abroad, and in a very new and different alien environment…

It turned out to be my year of magical living, a year of discovery and rediscovery. Among other things a time of learning an assortment of things that included, in no particular order, large scale molecular dynamics, eating properly with chopsticks (or even more properly, hashi), biking, appreciating calligraphy, ukiyo-e and the Japanese approach to aesthetics. This is pretty much what the gaijin do, so the list goes on. But perhaps above all I learned to appreciate the importance of paying attention to detail. Years later, when I went back for a visit, I could not resist taking a photograph of the manhole covers that depict their firework festival in July, something that the city is justifiably famous for!

This experience, that year abroad, made a deep impression on me… Okazaki, as it happens, is where Ieyasu the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns was born in 1543. From the time he took charge Japan was under the control of the Tokugawas until the Meiji Restoration in the 1860’s, three centuries when there was no contact with much of the outside world.

Japan still carries the baggage of that period in so many ways, particularly in attitudes and customs. A recent lecture by M S Valiathan at the Andhra Pradesh Akademi of Sciences meeting in December 2011 brought back some thoughts of Okazaki, with its schoolchildren looking like they might have stepped out of a Prussian academy of the mid-1800’s when many Japanese went to Europe to learn the culture and bring it back to Japan. It got transmuted into something different of course, but also it has stayed in a peculiar time warp.

Valiathan who was speaking of planning for growth and development in the Indian context recalled Maeda Masana, one of the architects of Kogyo Iken, Japan’s ten year Plan. Maeda had spent time in Paris, returning to Japan in 1878. The basic point that Professor Valiathan made- and why he was quoting Maeda- is that when asking as to what the most important component in the efforts of the government in building up our industries. It can be neither capital nor laws and regulations, because both are dead things in themselves and totally ineffective. The spirit or willingness sets both capital and regulations in motion….If we assign to these three factors with respect to their effectiveness, spirit or willingness should be assigned five parts, laws and regulations four, and capital no more than one part.

It’s tempting to look at our own situation and ask where and if this analysis is at all relevant. Comparisons can be odious, but still… one hopes that the spirit and the willingness is there in the ongoing efforts at development in the country, particularly on the academic front, since that concerns us all. And given the amount of money that is invested in the higher education sector and that remains unspent at the end of each of our five year plans, the cynical view that here capital is assigned five parts out of ten, laws and regulation two, and spirit and willingness no more than three… But that may not be too harsh an indictment of a system that seems to believe that pumping in a lot of money without an underlying infrastructure will yield dividends…

The biologists among you will, of course, know that Okazaki fragments are really small bits of DNA that are produced in the cell nucleus during replication… My choice of the title for this post was prompted by a set of rambling thoughts on a wonderfully cool winter Sunday of kite flying near the Golconda fort that brought back some disjointed memories of another time, another place.

Every drop counts

Kendriya Vidyalaya, Gachibowli has announced a blood donation drive on 26 January. Their Principal, Mr V Jayabal sent us a letter the other day that has been circulated widely on the campus network. I hope there will be a good crowd at the KV at 9:00 a. m. that day-

It’s a great idea, Sirjee! Passing this along, this post is to appeal to all of you: Donate blood on 26 January, wherever you are… When someone somewhere benefits, so do we all…

KV, Gachibowli has a website (www.kvgachibowli.org), email (kenvidgb @ yahoo.co.in) and phone number (+91-40-2300 0261) for those who want more information.

The giftie

Recent correspondence with Richard Zare of Stanford University brought this fragment from Robert Burns’ To a Louse to mind-

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursel’s as others see us!

It wad frae monie a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,

An’ ev’n devotion!

Professor Zare was at the University in December as part of our celebration of the International Year of Chemistry. He also visited other places in India and spoke with many of our leading scientists. Given his academic eminence, he has often been asked for his impressions (and advice, directions, etc.) of science in India (and also, as it happens, in China where he is on the national advisory board). I should also add that Prof. Zare, as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore is also concerned about general issues relating to science in the country… His observation that there is an undue emphasis on quantity- number of papers, impact factors, h– index comparisons, and a general overemphasis on metrics (X has more papers than Y, or Y is more cited than Z, or Z published in a journal with higher impact factor than did W, and so on) above any discussion of quality and significance of research prompted him to write a letter to the Editor of the Bangalore journal, Current Science. That letter appears this week, and has further been commented upon in the volume’s editorial by Prof. P Balaram, Editor of the journal (and, as it happens, the Director of the IISc, Bangalore and a member of the University of Hyderabad’s Executive Council).

Zare’s letter- which has already been reprinted in the China Science Daily (!) is about Indian aspirations to improve the country’s scientific reputation. In cautiously offering advice- which he knows to be from another society in another time and in another place- Zare tells of the criteria used by the Chemistry Department at Stanford in tenuring decisions, namely in giving teachers a permanent appointment.

First of all, they must be good departmental citizens. Our Department is a small one and we need everyone to work together for the common good.
Second, they must become good teachers. Yes, we would be delighted if they become great teachers, but we only ask that they become good ones because everyone who really wants to achieve that status can do so. […] It really matters to us that we have good teachers for our students.
Third, the Department wants them to become great researchers. This last criterion is the most difficult, and it presents the greatest challenge to our beginning faculty. It makes sense to us because Stanford University is primarily a research university.

(I have reformatted the above quote which is essentially reproduced from the letter.)

While we do not have such criteria for making appointments permanent in our University (or any other University) are these so difficult to ask of our faculty here? It is, in the end, more about aspiration and expectation than anything else, since nobody, not even the savants at Stanford, can guarantee outcomes…

In his editorial this week – and this, like the letter, can all be seen online since Current Science is an Open Access journal- Balaram has a comment that is pertinent. Given our realities, he suggests, academic performance is not demanded and academic freedom often degenerates into a licence to legitimise non-performance. While the best of institutions hire faculty with some care, the majority of institutions operate under severe constraints while recruiting new faculty. There is also a vast difference between the state and central institutions, with the former being subject to considerable political pressure. Despite the many constraints and inhibitory influences, research output from India is indeed increasing both in quantity and average quality. While both the carrot and stick are used equally effectively in the West to enhance academic performance, neither is available to most institutions in India. Administrations must follow the policy of benign neglect with respect to high performers, even while turning a blind eye to the significant dead wood accumulating in our institutions. Attempts to provide incentives by the many national award schemes are unlikely to have any impact in an environment where institutions have a limited judgmental role in assessing faculty performance.

At the University, we are sensitive to many of these realities. The PURSE grant that the UoH received some years ago was directly a consequence of DST’s metric evaluation of our academic merit, and in general the grant has been a good thing for us, enabling research and scholarly activity for the most part. For the nation as a whole, it is also probably true that the academic output is increasing in quantity but, regrettably, it is simply not enough because the quality is, for the most part, not that great. One can only share Balaram’s closing hope that the new year and the near future will add more good citizens, good teachers and great researchers to our institutions.

Campus Walkabout

What: A walk around the periphery of the campus of the University of Hyderabad.

When: 1 January 2012, 8:30 am

Where: Startoff at the Main Gate, moving counterclockwise (toward Gopanpally… )

We’ll walk for a few hours- go as far as possible- and will be led by Prof. A C Narayana of UCESS, the University Engineer and others. Please bring along (a) water for yourself, (b) sunscreen + hat if you need it, (c) friends.

The idea is to get acquainted with the campus- too many of us know very little about the place, the extent of the land that remains, and just what has been happening to it…

Walkabout refers to a rite of passage during which male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months when they would trace the paths or “songlines” that their people’s ceremonial ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. The songline here is the path along Gurbaksh Singh Wall, going past the UoH menhir where our prehistoric ancestors lived.

Do come.

It is a great way to welcome in the new year! Happy 2012!!

PS: There will be those for whom 8:30 am is way too early! Come by the Lake View Guest house between 4:00 and 6:00 in the evening then, just to meet and have a cup of tea together…

Thinking it through

As education gets increasingly professionalized and compartmentalized, it often takes great effort to argue for a generalist approach. Very serious and well-meaning educationists will make a strong case for focussed teaching within a curriculum- Course A to follow Course B, dropping Course C because that can be picked up easily and introducing Course D because thats “hot” these days, and so on. (Depending on the discipline and the degree, you can easily put in appropriate names for A, B, C, and D.)

With the changing landscape of education, its sometimes worth thinking whether there is enough freedom of choice in our programs, and whether some students might benefit from a more generalist framework where less would be prescribed (or proscribed, for that matter) and the student could more actively participate in her or his own curriculum.

I can’t see that happening in a hurry, but I think that the higher education scenario is changing sufficiently that one must give this some serious consideration. Two immediate catalysts for the present observation were a visit by two students of the present first year batch in the CIS, and a podcast I heard.

First the students. Basically they came to share their observations that when they compared the curriculum of the five-year program at UoH with that at other institutions where there are similar five-year programs, ours seemed to be much simpler and not really challenging. In some sense, this is not too surprising given that the IISERs and other institutions cater to smaller numbers and offer a specialized if limited smörgåsbord of curricular possibilities. But I think we should pay some heed to a serious comment from the end-users, so to speak. Our courses should be accessible, but not at the cost of making them not challenging enough. (As Einstein famously said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” ) Having been in a similar boat many years ago, another case of syllabus envy I guess, I tried to tell the lads to also take responsibility for their own education and learn from their peers across the country- but that is easier said than done. So should our curriculum be deeper or wider? And how can we tailor it to those who want to go faster? Or, for that matter, slower?

I was mulling over this and related questions when I heard an interview with philosopher Tim Crane of Cambridge University on whether animals (other than humans) have minds? (This is one of the brilliant Philosophy Bites podcasts by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.) The discussion was on how philosophers think we think, on how we define thinking, consciousness, and so on, and whether animals have “a theory of mind” and how this relates to our own theory of mind.

One thing that struck me- enough that I came back to this interview several times- was the deep connection between the fact of having language and the ability to imagine having a mind. Crane says- and I paraphrase- that what sets apart human thought from animal thought is our ability to think about things without thinking about their practical consequences. The pursuit of truth for its own sake is a characteristic of human thinking and, further, that it is an evolutionary adaptation that gave us the ability to learn things without there having to be an immediate use. And that this gave us an enormous advantage in the development of culture.

This is worth thinking about. Some laterality, even in structured programs of instruction, is clearly worth having, perhaps at the cost of some depth. And if this can bring about a culture of thinking, so much the better. But above all, the link is language.

Elsewhere in the interview Crane has occasion to say that philosophy starts at the boundaries of science- in this particular case, our inability to know how or whether animals think leads us to examine more closely our own concepts of belief and thought.

And this is a good thing to remember, that not only are the boundaries among the sciences blurred, at some level, even the boundary between the sciences and philosophy is. (Not for nothing was the study of science termed natural philosophy in earlier days!) What we have at the UoH is the possibility of bringing to our integrated programs of study in the CIS a diversity that only a University can provide. This is an advantage we should exploit to its fullest.

Rock(et)star

A few days ago, at the Lead India 2020:A Vision for the New Millennium programme I had a chance to see firsthand the power of our ex-President, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam to inspire.

His message is a simple one, and all the more attractive for that. A developed India by 2020, or even earlier, is not a dream, he says. It need not be a mere vision in the minds of many Indians. It is a mission we can all take up and succeed. Following the UNDP lead of putting people at the center of the development and keeping in perspective that 54% of our population is youth, Prof. N. B Sudershan Acharya integrated Dr. Kalam’s ideals, vision and mission and created a training program for the youth titled Aap Badho Desh Ko Bhadao the fundamental philosophy being Individual development leads to National Development.

Lead India 2020 Foundation, is now on the path of carrying the torch forward, focused on igniting and channelizing hidden potential in our youth. Most of the training is delivered to the students by their peers, Change Agents, who form the Lead India National Club (LINC) in their respective schools. Guided by a 10-point oath designed by Dr. Kalam, the Change Agents embrace a new way of living. Graduates of Lead India 2020 training program set high goals in life and become Change Agents to change society and environment around them. The training was first delivered to 6,000 tribal students in remote villages and then to 25,000 tribal students in the next two years. Later on mass transformation in high school students was accomplished with over 1 lakh students participating in Medak and over 2 lakh students in Karimnagar. (The above paragraphs are taken from their website.)

What is striking about the photograph I took from the dais is not the image of Dr Kalam himself- he can be recognized instantly, and the pose is now characteristic- but the look on those who are looking at him, riveted by what he is saying…The 10 point oath is a simple formula that combines a set of instructions for living that essentially nobody can argue with, and yet its simplicity appeals… Here they are (simplified even more):

I will pursue my education or my work with dedication.
I will work to eradicate illiteracy.
I will work for reforestation.
I will work towards reducing social evils.
I will constantly endeavour to remove the pain of my suffering brethren.
I will not support any discrimination
I will be honest and will endeavour to make a corruption-free society.
I will strive to become an enlightened person.
I will be sensitive to the needs of the differently abled.
I will celebrate the success of my country and my people with pride.

It is difficult to not be impressed. Mobilizing such large numbers is not easily done, and the admiration that these students have for Dr Kalam is genuine and moreover appears to serve genuinely to inspire. Earlier, when writing about the DST’s INSPIRE program I had said that in the end our salvation will be in numbers, and the numbers are here for the asking. There is a large number of our youth who can see that the only way forward is to lead from the front, to be the change, however clichéd that may sound. Seeing school after school send up children who had clearly overcome several hurdles, both social and personal, to come this far, the event was not just impressive, it was humbling.

This is the vanguard of LEAD India 2020, and in all likelihood, the vanguard of the new India.

O segundo pômfret

Many moons ago I found myself in the erstwhile Portuguese enclave of Daman, out for the weekend. In those days- and perhaps even now- Daman (and Diu) offered a variety of forbidden fruits to adjacent (and dry) Gujarat. The Union Territory also had a reputation of sorts- people would casually point out smugglers’ houses that just seemed to be everywhere. Added to which there was a pervading air of the exotic: families that spoke only Gujarati and Portuguese, the colonial architecture, the Avenidas, the Alamedas, crossing the Daman Ganga river that separates Nani Daman from Moti Daman standing in a boat… and all within a few hours of the TIFR, Mumbai where I was then a fidgety Visiting Fellow.

At dinner one night I found the fried pomfret that I had ordered to be exceptionally good. I’m not much of a foodie, but I recall it was excellent, good enough that I ordered another. But… the second pomfret just did not taste as good.

I’ve often wondered why. Perhaps the two fish differed in quality… Maybe the first was not as good as I thought it was in the first place… Maybe the first took the edge off the hunger, and so the second just did not seem as good… Maybe different cooks… Do the taste buds change after the first bite… Who knows, but I do recall both emotions clearly, the pleasure of the first and the disappointment of the second. I guess this was just my personal rediscovery of Heraclitus, that you cannot step into the same river twice…

On Inspiration

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

The three components of the program are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature@UoH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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