And then... - Page 9 of 19

Welcome! and Welcome Back!

The start of an academic year is a good time- things seem fresh, even if we have been here before, and its a time for new beginnings. The rains have really washed things clean, and the whole environment looks and feels special. So before anything, welcome to all the new students, and welcome back to all the returning students! The campus has not been the same without you… Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

And what better way to start than with the announcement of the Chancellor’s Awards. From this year onwards, the University has instituted five awards for younger faculty, for teaching and research. Nominations will be invited later this year, and the awards will be announced at the convocation in October by the Chancellor, Prof. Hanumantha Rao. This is one small way in which to recognize excellence, and all of us will have a say, both the students as well as other colleagues.

There is a group of happy campers who have been setting up some new resources for the campus. These are in development, so no criticism please, at least not just yet, but here is a list.

All courses that are offered at the University will find their way to the Courses Page: http://courses.uohyd.ac.in

There are way too many gaps, but we also need volunteers to put up the information. Write in and offer to help if you can.

The University needs a place to engage in discussion, and soon we will have a Connect UoH site, where all can post comments, raise issues, get information, and so on…
A job portal, both on G-HAN, as well as more specific to the University.

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And, starting along with the semester, the conference season gets going as well! Perspectives in Nonlinear Dynamics, is a meeting that we are organizing along with the TIFR, Hyderabad, from 15 to 18 July. This edition of PNLD is the fourth in a series, and the aim of the meeting (that is being held in the Science Complex) is to focus on the open issues in nonlinear science and to identify the directions in which the field is developing. The themes that are being explored at the conference include Chaos, Nonlinear Phenomena in Engineering Sciences and Applications, Nonlinear Phenomena in Biological and Medical Sciences,Synchronization, Bifurcations, Time-delay systems, Extreme events, and so on. All are welcome!

G-HAN, जी हाँ !

The city of Hyderabad is home to many academic institutions- and an amazingly diverse set at that. No fewer than three Central Universities- apart from the UoH, there are MANUU and EFLU (the only other city with more is Delhi that has DU, JNU, JMI and IGNOU), and several state universities- OU, Telugu University, technical universities BITS Pilani, JNTU, IIT and IIIT, several CSIR laboratories, several defence laboratories, NALSAR, the Indian School of Business, the Administrative Staff College of India… The list is long and very very varied.

Navigating through the academic landscape can be hard. Admittedly most of us don’t need to do it often, but if one did want to know where one could study a specific topic or degree, there is no easy way to get the information. Some time ago, when then Human Resources Minister of State, Dr. D Purandeswari visited our campus she asked many heads of institutions to come together to discuss, among other things, how we could network. It was quite an eye-opener, both as to what expertise there was in the city, and how little mutual information was shared.

And how little resources could be shared. For a brief while, there was some talk of the “meta university” concept, some sort of virtual coming together of academic institutions in cyberspace. But like all virtual enterprises, that too evaporated- one of the biggest difficulties in making things like this a reality seems to be economics- it is just impossible to do this on a nonexistent budget.

Nevertheless, we thought that it would be possible to go part of the way, and this is GHAN, the Greater Hyderabad Academic Network. This is a website where we have brought together information on all the academic institutions that are located in the city of Hyderabad. This is interpreted somewhat generously to include as many as we can, even if distances between the outermost entities are nearly 100 km.

To begin with, G-HAN is a collection of introductory information pertaining to all organizations devoted to various aspects of higher education and research. Given the fact that these are scattered in the Greater Hyderabad area, forming several clusters, this site is an attempt to give the visitor a quick introduction to,

where an institution is located
what it is about, and
what expertise is represented there…

As of now, there are about 100 institutions listed on this site, but this is just the beginning since we have started with the governmental (both central and state) and semi-governmental sectors. There is a FaceBook page for GHAN as well. We hope to be inclusive and therefore we will be adding privately funded institutes and laboratories. If you have suggestions of what more should be there, please write in to the GHAN Team at ghan @uohyd.ac.in.

One small step, but hopefully a useful one, जी हाँ !

PS: Read the Indian Express story about GHAN-

My hovercraft is full of eels: నా హోవర్ఁక్రాఫ్ఠ్ అంతా ఈలు చేపలతో నిండిపోయింది

In 1971 or thereabouts, with what now seems to have been considerable prescience, I purchased a copy of the modestly priced “Telugu without a Tutor” by H. R. Rao (Sahitya Siromani, Etc.) from Higginbotham’s bookstore in Madras. My aim at that time, if I recall correctly, was to learn enough Telugu to appreciate some of the more common carnatic music compositions. That never came to pass, and for 40 years the book languished, unread.

I brought it with me to Hyderabad when I came here two years ago, but it still is something that I only dip into, since the book was written in another age when there were rupees and annas, and when the pace of life was very different. There is a charm to it, of course, and I can now easily find my way around the Aden dockyard, should I be surrounded by Telugu speaking lascars… It does not have the infamous నా postillion పిడుగుపాటుకు చెయ్యబడింది phrase, but there are similar gems on many pages.

In recent weeks I have taken to learning some conversational Telugu, and my progress is hastened by having a tutor, a conscientious one at that. Each day I struggle with adi and idi, the specious similarity with Tamil and my decaying language module that confuses nenu baagunnaanu with genki desu. Hopefully in some time I will be able to understand, and to an extent, be understood, but I think that with passing years, learning languages gets more and more difficult.

And then there is the seductiveness of technology. Searching for some phrases the other day, I came across the Omniglot site which lists the very useful translation of “My hovercraft is full of eels”: నా హోవర్ఁక్రాఫ్ఠ్ అంతా ఈలు చేపలతో నిండిపోయింది (naa hoavarkraapht aṅthaa eelu chaepalathoa niṅdipoayiṅdhi). Ah! to live in a Monty Python universe where this was a common enough occurrence….

The Four Year Transform

This post has been a while in the mulling, and several news items in yesterday’s newspaper (The Hindu, 11 May 2013) that seem to be of considerable importance as far as we are concerned has prompted me to write.

One item focussed on the comment of the Visitor, the President of India, who said at the convocation of the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow, that he was unhappy with the education given by Central Universities. His drawing attention to the quality of the education, the employability of the graduates is germane, and since he comes hierarchically at the top of the pyramid of all Central Universities, it is necessary for us to take cognizance of the comment. The report adds, editorially, that higher education must be made affordable for students, especially from economically weak background. It should be brought closer to the population by innovative techniques and knowledge-sharing.

The need for innovation seems to be at the heart of a second news item, on Delhi University’s ambitious four-year undergraduate programme that is apparently now a reality with the Executive Council on Thursday approving all the courses, examination schemes and amendments to university ordinances that are required to introduce the new structure from this July onwards. July 2013, that is. This move has also prompted a number of academics and organizations to ask the Visitor’s intervention in this matter, since DU’s decision to implement a four-year undergraduate programme has far ranging consequences.

The central issue is the nature of undergraduate education in India, its form and shape in the near future. Since this has quite obviously an impact on the nature of graduate education, on employment and employability, there is a need for all of us to be engaged in the debate, and not just leave it either to politics or to the powers that be, no matter where they be or what they are.

As is quite well known, the four year format is the norm in the US, and the merits of a flexible curriculum in the US university system as a whole is well documented. Having the youth enter the workforce at the age of 22 or 23 is also desirable, so a degree that would enable the majority to get jobs at this age would be quite welcome. However, the US system has its own internal consistencies, its own system of checks and balances that have been worked out over a long period.

Even in the Indian context, the four year undergraduate programme is not new- the various academies of science have a Science Education Panel that has this structure as an explicit recommendation, and indeed the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore has started a four year programme in the sciences last year. However, the numbers involved are, at the moment, small, and what is offered is a B. Sc. (Honours) degree.

A third news item on the same day, reported that the Government “would not interfere in the Delhi University’s decision to introduce a four-year undergraduate course, but would look into the concerns expressed by some sections. Any decision on deferring the programme by a year would be taken by the University, which was an autonomous institution, it clarified.“

My concerns are less about the nature of the four year programme at Delhi University, and the voices of doom that assure “chaos and academic disaster” at Delhi University if this is implemented from July 2013, and more about what it means to the rest of the country. There have been many op-eds in the papers recently that are specific to the DU experiment, as well as many other blog comments and it is clear that the overall curriculum is not as well thought-out as it might have been. There have been as many voices on the side of change and that is really an internal debate.

When a large and influential university such as DU- and as Indian universities go Delhi University is one of the largest (about 4.5 lakh students) and very very influential- makes such a fundamental change in the structure of it’s undergraduate programme, the MHRD, and more importantly, the University Grants Commission, should be concerned. Very concerned.

There are many ways in which this affects all of us in general, and the UoH in particular. DU students will not get the B. A., B. Sc., B. Com. (or their Honours variants). Instead, the exit options that are being chosen for the Delhi University students is at the end of the second year is that of an Associate Baccalaureate, at the end of the third year, a Baccalaureate, and after four years, a Baccalaureate with Honours in his/her major discipline subject or a B.Tech. degree.

When the Minister for HRD says that “We should not be seen as dictating to them or questioning their wisdom. If they feel comfortable to go ahead, we do not want to come in the way,” one wonders why this coyness? Why not question the wisdom? And is the comfort really as widespread as it is made out? When the Government is so deeply involved in the functioning of Universities- most notably by the manner in which funds are given, or to the point, not given in time- why should the HRD ministry not comment on what is surely one of the more revolutionary moves that has been proposed in the Indian University system? Especially one that appears to be as hastily implemented as this.

It is not about university autonomy and whether the Delhi University academic and executive councils have followed procedures while endorsing the programme. As the President has remarked, for the majority, a University education is really about employability, and the various degrees that DU has put on the platter do not appear to offer any advantage over what exists now, while it does promise to increase the costs of a degree by at least 33%, if not more. And the cost of additional infrastructure (that does not exist in most colleges as of now) is another factor that should be viewed in the context of the low funding that most colleges have in the first place. It is therefore inexplicable why the UGC, which certifies all degrees, has not entered the debate so far.

The change in the school educational system from the 11 year pattern to an 10+2 pattern was an equally momentous one, and while it was generally good for education all around, one system that did not benefit from it was the network of polytechnic institutions in the country, which remain to this day a poor option for those that pass Class 10. I mentioned this in my talk at the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram, at the recent Centenary Celebrations India Today: Looking Back, Looking Forward conference when I had to speak in a session on Science and Education, and was asked specifically to focus on Science, Education and Research: Problems and Prospects. I mentioned that this has resulted in very poor inputs into the industrial and manufacturing sector. Similarly, the introduction of new and poorly conceived degrees should be viewed with some concern, and the employability of persons with two years of college seems, at this time, to be in considerable doubt.

This also impacts two issues that affect us more. The mobility of students has been viewed in recent times as highly desirable and indeed necessary from a purely academic point of view. This move by DU will make it very difficult for their students to move to another university for their subsequent degrees. At the UoH we have greatly benefited by having DU undergraduates enter our Masters programmes. Where the Bac. (Hons) or B. Tech. are going to fit in our system is a moot question. And would they come? And vice versa, when our Masters’ students go to DU, where do they fit in? And even later, will we employ them? Will they employ our graduates?

More to the point, what does this say for undergraduate education in the country as a whole? It is not generally feasible to have parallel systems that are radically different when the numbers involved are so huge. (The business schools are, on this scale, minuscule, and it hardly matters if one institution offers certificates and another offers diplomas- in the end, they both offer brand names and enable very lucrative jobs.) The move by DU will naturally affect all other universities directly or indirectly. Our own five year Integrated Master’s programs are continually being reviewed, and one question that we have been asking is whether there could (or should) be an exit after the third or the fourth year. Maybe it is time to factor in the ongoing changes in the rest of the country into our own discussion as well.

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…

Ku·dos UoH

There has long been a need for a major award in the social sciences, something to parallel the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards in the sciences, and finally the ICSSR (the Indian Council of Social Science Research) has stepped in and instituted the Amartya Sen Award for “Any citizen of India/Overseas citizen of India (OCI)/Person of Indian Origin (PIO) below the age of 55 years, engaged in research and who has made outstanding contribution–theoretical and/or empirical–towards the advancement of knowledge in any field of social sciences, is eligible for the award.” The naming of the awards after Prof. Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in Economics, is in itself another recognition of the exceptional contributions that Prof. Sen has made to the social sciences in India and up to ten awards will be given each year. These awards were announced by Kapil Sibal, then Minister for Human Resource Development, as part of a five-point agenda to rejuvenate social science in India crucial for sound policy decisions. “Unless we are able to lift the quality of research in India in social sciences, we will not be able to get the kind of data which are fundamental for policy makers to take decisions.”

It is therefore a distinct pleasure that one of the first set of awardees is our colleague Vakulabharanam Vamsicharan, Associate Professor in the School of Economics. Vamsi earned his Ph D in economics from UMass in 2004, and has been at UoH since 2007. His research interests center around the nature and changing dynamics of inequality in the contemporary economies of India and China, on globalization and agrarian change in India, and consumption and wealth inequality during the period of economic reforms in India and China.

Our alumna, Kalpana Kannabiran, Director of the Council for Social Development in Hyderabad is another of the awardees. A founder member of the Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Kalpana has worked on rights of indigenous communities and with community based disability rights groups in rural areas. Her work has focussed on understanding the social foundations of non-discrimination, violence against women, and questions of constitutionalism and social justice in India. Kalpana’s MA in Sociology was from UoH, and her Ph D from JNU.

(The University of Hyderabad connection to the awards is stronger- another of the awardees, Surinder Jodhka, Professor of Sociology at JNU, started his career here at UoH, and Amartya Sen is the one recipient of an honorary doctorate from our University who has not yet visited our campus to pick up the degree … )

But this is not all. In the Centre for Health Psychology, Thomas Kishore has been selected for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Award given by the Indian Association of Clinical Psychologists (IACP).

A Ph D from the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi, Kishore was at the National Institute of Mental Health, Kolkata prior to his joining the UoH a couple of years ago. The award is given to the Fellows of the Association who have contributed to the field of Child and Adolescent Mental health in India and will be presented at the next National Annual Conference of the IACP.

Great news to get as the academic year 2012-13 closes. Bravo all!

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!

Scope this,

The National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) in Allahabad is the oldest of the three scientific academies in India. Founded in the year 1930, with the objectives to provide a national forum for the publication of research work carried out by Indian scientists and to provide opportunities for exchange of views among them, the NASI Memorandum of Association was signed by seven distinguished scientists: Meghnad Saha, K. N. Bahl, D. R. Bhattacharya, P. C. MacMohan, A. C. Banerji, Ch. Wali Mohammad and N. R. Dhar. Several colleagues at the University are currently Fellows of NASI.

In recent collaboration with Elsevier, publishers of numerous scientific journals and books, NASI have introduced the NASI-Scopus Award for young scientists. From the Elsevier site, I gathered that the Elsevier Scopus Awards, started in 2005, recognize and reward the talent, knowledge and expertise of young scientists around the globe in a variety of disciplines. Currently, 15 countries have participated in the award, each marked with an event co-organized by Elsevier with prestigious national consortia, funding body or society. Traditionally, these academic groups nominate an award committee to recognize scholarly output, citations, and prestige of their region’s outstanding researchers across a range of subject areas. Publication and citation information provided by Scopus helps the committee to assess country-wide research strengths and rising talent.

Winners are selected after a fairly rigorous process, so it is particularly gratifying that one of our own has been named the NASI-SCOPUS awardee in Physics for 2013, one of 8 this year: Dr S Venugopal Rao of the ACRHEM.

Venu came to ACRHEM in 2007 from IIT-Guwahati, where he had joined the faculty of the Physics department after a postdoc in Scotland. His doctoral work was at the UoH, on Incoherent Laser Spectroscopy for the measurement of ultra-fast relaxation times and third order nonlinearities in a variety of organic molecules.

The philosophy of the Scopus Awards program is to celebrate science, and this has been emphasised over the years that the awards have been given.

Our heartiest congratulations, Venu!

Going back

I studied at Loyola College, Madras from 1969 to1972 when I graduated with a B. Sc. in Chemistry. Until last week, when two events took me back there, I had not returned, though I have kept in occasional touch with several of my classmates and many other batch-mates. My years at Loyola were formative, although I should admit that in the callowness of youth, I did not always appreciate just how crucial the discipline of the institution- as well as the freedom it gave me- were. As was the early exposure to a research environment that had nurtured (and been nurtured by) great scholars like Fr. L M Yedannapalli, the physical chemist, and the mathematician, Fr. C Racine – apart from the presence of superb teachers like Klaus Bechtloff, Emmanuel Raja, A V Ramaswamy and N S Gnanapragasam, among others. We keep discussing now whether we should have teachers from outside India in our Universities, but at such institutions then this was not considered much of an issue- Racine was French, Bechtloff was German, and I can also remember an excellent course of lectures on quantum mechanics given by a visiting Belgian, M Mareschal (on the invitation of Dr Gnanapragasam) that was open to all chemistry majors. As I realize more now, those were the good times.

What took me back after all these years was the special ceremony that we organized in order to deliver the Doctor of Science (honoris causa) degree that we had awarded the eminent mathematician C. S. Seshadri in 2012. A collateral advantage was that the same ceremony, we were able to give David Mumford the D. Sc. (h. c.) that we had awarded in 2011. Neither of them is able to travel to Hyderabad to receive the doctorate, so we did the next best thing and went to Loyola College, Chennai. As it happens, Seshadri is an alumnus (as is M S Narasimhan, the other eminent mathematician whom we honoured in 2012 and who spent a few days at UoH in October last year) so it made a lot of sense for us to have the function in the recently built LS Hall at Loyola. A number of eminent mathematicians and other colleagues from a number of institutions- Madras University, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Central University of Tamil Nadu- were there. The ceremony was just about two hours long, and included, in addition to the citation and the degree award, a short seminar on Seshadri’s work and an appreciation of the mentorship of the Rev. Fr. C Racine.

Racine was the moving force that inspired generations of bright students to go into mathematics research. Ordained as a Jesuit priest in1929, he obtained a Ph D in mathematics in Paris in 1934, studying with the finest: his mentors were Élie Cartan and Hadamard and his friends included André Weil and Henri Cartan. From 1939 till his death in 1976, Racine was in Loyola, and I recall seeing him walking in the grounds when I was a student (though he had stopped teaching after his retirement in 1967). Prof. Narasimhan gave a memoir and appreciation of Racine at the function, and here is what I gathered from that talk.

Father Racine had worked with the French mathematicians Hadamard and Élie Cartan and counted among his friends Andre Weil and Henri Cartan among others. More importantly, Racine was well acquainted with the then current trends in mathematics and brought three things to Loyola College, and to Madras University. The first was a new mode of teaching- no rote, no static lectures, a new style of presentation and discussion that engaged the student. The second was the introduction of new courses at the higher levels- something that Madras University had not heard of, a flexible curriculum! And finally, the most important- Racine encouraged his students to go beyond, to find the best places that they could do mathematics in. And so a number of them went to TIFR: K. G. Ramanathan, C. S. Seshadri, M. S. Narasimhan, Raghavan Narasimhan, C. P. Ramanujam…. As well as those who went elsewhere, and that list is even longer…

Going back to Loyola was one way of acknowledging debts, and it reminded me of the Princeton alumni song, “Going Back to Nassau Hall”, the notes of which ring loud every June on the Princeton campus when the alumni gather. 6 April was also the 88th College Day, so I was able to return to Bertram Hall (which I had last seen in 1972 when I wrote the B Sc final paper for Inorganic Chemistry, with sweat flowing freely down my forearm…). The tradition of a strong alumni group, that meets and remembers the value that the institution adds to education is very important, and a good way of recalling ones debts to one’s alma mater. And American universities have learned well to capitalize on the goodwill of this group, the Alumni.

At the UoH we are only slowly beginning to realise the value of forming Alumni Associations and fostering an external support group for the University- after all, the Alumni are the one group that has the highest interest in the standards of the UoH! We recently had Dr Ch Mohan Rao, Director of the CCMB come and share his experiences with us, and earlier, Sri R V Balaram of the IRS did so too. We need to have more of our old students come back and tell us what makes the UoH such an enabling environment, and how we can make it better. I’m sure we already have enough illustrious alumni who can show us just how much can be achieved… We have an Alumni Cell at the University- do write in with your suggestions, here.