Ye jo desh hai tera....

"aap kitne saal se ho B'lore mein? Kannada mein baat karo phir" I understood there is a problem, its a genuine question and I should answer this. Then i chatted with the Auto driver at leangth explaining him that why its a problem for me to speak his language although i follow it. I am a extremely tiny creature to talk about India, i just thought to share some of my views about the recent "outsider" problem.

In the centre for contemporary studies at IISc, Dr. Ramchandra Guha gave a fascinating lecture on how there is a country called India. Initially i was bit skeptic about the topic. It never struck to me that "unity of diversity" is maintained through some institutional processes such as constitution, Judicial system, Indian railways and not through an emotion called patritiotism. I proudly say to everyone that except Delhi i have roamed all the bigcities in India and got an opportunity to mix with common people more than others. I sensed in everyplace that "outsiders" are nowhere welcomed easily, and the other part which was kept silence is that "outsiders" too dont mix with the people where they reside. This problem exists in every city, north indians aren't welcomed warmly in south and vis a vis. Someplaces both are not welcomed. Again i am mentioning Dr. Guha's comment, he said, Hindi wasn't accepted at all in the non-hindi speaking states when it was pushed in as a national language, but hindi movies became popular all over the country and people from those places speaks hindi because of hindi movies, the main reason is that language wasn't pushed here. Couple of years back i was travelling to Lucknow for a conference, in lucknow me and one of my friend from Mangalore went together in a shop to buy some stuffs, my friend tried to communicate in english, there was a barge of comments came on him and they wern't soothing at all, similarthing i experienced in Chennai, a city where outsiders aren't welcomed well. If one thinks that east india is free from it then read this one , Kolkata is also not free, last month i was in Kolkata and i witnessed how non-bengali speaking people hates bengalis. Does this migration creates problem? I did bit of research on this and found 8% of Maharashtra population consists of people migrated from other states Gujarat has 5%, Delhi has the max, more than 30% (there are reasons for that) where as WB and Kerala has 3% . India as a whole has 4% of the population which was migrated, I collected this data from census site. It is understable that before IT boom, western states were the employment hub hence the people migrated there because they had a certain skills, now comes the big question, don't they have no rights to migrate? answer is probably hidden somewhere here, Many people compared Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi with Newyork, saying that Newyork has more migrants than any of them and they stay peacefully. Its very much true but then they all speak English! here we speak 256 different language and eventually peace takes the back seat. A migrant speaking alien language becomes an alien and some goons thought that they have every right to kick the other. India is different from any other democracy all over the world and the best way to handle is that as one of my IAS freind put it after his country tour got over said, you can criticise or discuss other's culture but please dont hate them. Communication is really the key here, my friends from Kerala likes Saurav Ganguly more than me as the mode of communication is different, previous case its cricket morecommunicable for them than language. The solution is not lying with bashing and forcing people out from some place but its in making people to learn the language and culture, not with stick and guns but with proper socializing. In india all of us have different skills depending pearts we hail from and i think each one of us is indispansible someway or the other for everyone. So its sensible to show patroitism by helping the migrant to adapt to the new system and not to repel them. Mumbai will have more space then....

Advices

I never did this earlier, but i just couldn't stop myself writing this in my post. I have a motivated friend who always wanted to serve the country and resisted all kind of temptation to go abroad for higher education or any kind of visit. He always believed if once we had the best scientific minds in our country then they must be here now too, and it is our responsibility to preserve it. We praised him a lot, infact he was a motivation for many of us to stay back. So he joined a famous national lab here in India, i had very little contact for last 4 yrs., yesterday i got a mail, he said he has quit the job! and decided to go abroad, he added he'll try his best not to come back! . he read pretty sentimental, he had some advice for me too, i want to keep this piece of advice here in my space:

.....I am requesting you too do something similar, i hope you will agree, dont join any R&D lab in India immediately after PhD, go for a Post Doc abroad and then come back to India, because we are great we dont have any faith on our abilities. if you go abroad and come back then at least people listens to you, this marks that you are worth paying attention, otherwise you are worthless. I HAVE EXPERIENCED THIS, I am not cooking up anything. I felt it and faced it also.
You know well that for us the big national labs are a dream place to work but really it is not like that. I term it as SCIENTIFIC MAFIA DEN, Believe me i have experienced it.
Inspite of all these I have proved what we can do. They did realize the point i wanted to make, but it was late and i ran out of patient. I have decided to quit and wanted to a take a revenge, not in a usual way, i made them to depend on me and gave them this shock in once nice morning, i just had put my resignation, i guess they understood. This was certainly a shock, they started to depend, exploit me and was becoming greedier. I also helped them. I wanted that. I wanted to make them realize what youngsters can do. You cant imagine in our lab the young people are so enthusiastic and motivated, i am sure that they can shape our country better than USA in science and technology. But the authority and superiors are demoralizing them.
Anyway I am telling some worthless thing, there is no point in raising such issues once i am quiting the battle, thats why i am writing to you, ponder over it, I couldn't change their attitude and if a new person goes there, he/she would face similar pain. I am not sentimental it is the real world of research i am talking about....

Disclaimer: If you are angry over me for writing such thing about research here, then my answer is: this quote is fictitious and no such guy exist in this world, sorry i just wrote a fiction.

..Its really touchy

....today Abi's post on first women scientist in IISc was really a touchy one. I hope things have changed quite a bit now but still it is very upsetting to know about plights of women scholars, especially in places like indian institute of science in 30s. I am sure there are more real life stories and i feel quite depressed everytime i hear them... Guru's comments to this post also contains some interesting links.

Not so Magical

I got this idea in the morning, probably couple of hours of sleep made me so imaginative. Its kind of wierd, still felt like putting it down.
Have you seen magicians in the schools, I have watched them, watched them too closely, when I was in Kindergarten I saw this magician with very gorgeous looks, had thick paint on his face and a blue colored long jacket on. He never looked like a normal human being, he was a ‘magician’. I marveled at his skills and magic, at the end on his show we all agreed that there is something beyond our understanding, yes! I met with some “axioms”. During high school time it was even worse, the guy was fooling the whole school and he was not even looking like a ‘magician’, that was very surprising and challenging too, challenge was to crack the code! By the end of the show we all knew it was some trick and how to do that, but many couldn’t support the reason and thus it became a axiom such as only magicians can take rabbits out of their hats, we never knew how it happened. They weren’t the ones who float the semi nude girls in air but still they had larger impact. See for example, myself, keeping a vivid memory of the events, why? because I didn’t have an answer or my dad or the teachers.
How good is the idea to take kids to a magic show? Its fun but not so much, it’s a death of an inquisitive mind. This is probably one stage where we are taught to believe axioms. Recently on of my colleague, after a bucket of beer argued to me that, you can not progress a single inch in science if you don’t believe axioms! He is an astro-physicist! I did not like the idea of this magic shows in the school. I know many magicians say its pure science or pure trick, but as long as the reason is elusive, it’s hard to believe. Its easier for me now to understand why such things happen, but 20 yrs. back I needed a man to tell me what is not so magical about this. I still don’t know many of the tricks how they show on stage, but now I know I am fool at that point, but a kid surely requires a better treatment. Another unfortunate observation is; when you mention about magic shows, people spontaneously tell oh! I will take my child with me…(of course to make them a big fool!). I have all sympathy and regards for the magicians but I have a problem with the audience….

Ek doctor ki maut.......

People say when grad students talk you can summarize the whole conversion as a collage of complains! Well sometimes i do similar things but i didn't want my blog become a complain book, coz I am sure after a year or two they will sound extremely silly. So i will scribble something different than what I was doing. Reading a person like a book is something I do regularly, and I feel it’s harmless as long as I am not disturbing anyone. Before I deviate more I should say that I am feeling like writing about some one.
Recently, Anandabazar Patrika wrote an article in editorial page, it was on a marriage! I was surprised that a news paper like that is covering marriages!!! and later cursed myself for my ignorance, I came to know that it was the marriage of Kanupriya Agarwal,“durga”, the first test tube baby of India. Her birth was a scientific experiment with a huge scientific importance and the persons who carried it out was Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay and his group. His group consisted of doctors with a potential, but I will write only about Dr. Mukhopadhyay, who passed away just 25 years back. He was a pioneer researcher with great achievements committed suicide on 19th June, 1981. Who is a test tube baby? In short a baby who was born through a technique called in vitro fertilization in medical terms. In this technique eggs are fertilized outside woman’s body, at the beginning it was really a tricky experiment . The first “test tube baby” was Marie Louise Brown. Dr. Patrick Steptoe and Dr. Edwards’s successful experiment gave birth to Marie on 25th July, 1978, but was that really first? Scientific world is a cruel place, Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay and his group brought the first test tube baby to the world on 3rd October in the same year, just 67 days later! Those who have worked in Kolkata knows why it was an achievement, the follow up incidents proved this more evidently. Both scientists faced stern criticism, for Dr. Mukhopadhyay it was not the world, because this news never reached the world. Outside India it was Dr. Indira Hinduja who was the first Indian to perform IVF in 1986, which have birth to Harsha in Bombay. This was a documented fact till the beginning of the 21st Century. Why he was not given the credit? I don’t know how many people really know why this happened or what really happened? Unlike Dr. Subhas Mukhpadhyay, in spite of criticism the British scientists could carry out more successful experiment and published their work. West Bengal government took few very surprising steps and banned his research. He was due to attend a seminar in Kyoto University in 1979 which also he was not allowed. The only published document of this work was a report, submitted by Dr. Subhas Mukhpadhyay to the government of West Bengal, as he was instructed to do so. This document carried very little data as it was not a scientific report. He wanted to carry out further experiments to establish the technique but the government prohibited him from doing any kind of research in that field. They were not satisfied with this, they transferred him to an eye hospital that did not have any facility to carry out such research. This was a huge loss since the technique Dr. Mukhopadhyay used was different from the one from the British group. This must have been a testing time for his family and him, the medical research community in Bengal was also not very friendly to him that time and these lead him to commit suicide in 1981. This would have been the end of the story, but it was not. His friends and colleague such as Dr. T. Anand Kumar, fought for his right then on. This whole event reached the ear of masses through Dr. Tapan Sinha’s outstanding movie "Ek doctor ki maut" in 1991. This movie was based on Dr. Mukhopadhyay’s life and received applause from all corners of the country and the world. In the year 2003, British medical council celebrated the silver jubilee of this event in a grand fashion, and this fortunately during the same period Dr. Subhas Mukhpadhyay got due recognition. In October Indian Council for Medical Research and National Academy of Medical Sciences accepted Mukherjee as the ‘first’. In the Indian Academy of Science premises in Bangalore they felicitated his group members along with Kanupriya. It was recognition which took a long time to come. This was really a sad incident for Indian science since this was a discovery with immense scientific importance, till now a million people have born through IVF technique!


Links:
Current science

Dr. Robert Edwards won the Nobel for medicine in the year 2010

Attack inside IISc !!!?

This is the same J. N. Tata Auditorium where the peace ambassador Desmond Tutu talked about peace in this part of the world. This is the place where we saw “Keepers of the flame”, the life documentary on Tatas and we were shown future path of our country, and yesterday we encountered the path which we are traveling through. Few cowards with automatic Kalashnikov has fired indiscriminately on delegates of an international conference in front of J. N. Tata auditorium. When I heard the shooting sound from the lab it was like firecrackers which lasted for 30 sec. In my worst nightmare i haven’t seen such act. Though jolted by the news, frantic calls and ambulances really perturbed the campus, life became normal in the night It was really shocking, we all mourned at the demise of prof. M. C. Puri, and we wish a fast recovery of the others injured in the shootout. Prof. Vijay chandru is a quite known figure in the campus and we hope he’ll be back on his feet very soon.
Inside the campus we always get bugged when a byke’s accelerator crosses some limit, no doubt this incident perturbed the campus but within one and half hours only TV channels were busy discussing it, most of the student had gone back to work. It’s a busy life in the campus; the spirit always carries through day and night in silence. It a shame on the guys who attacked un-armed delegates and researchers. I don’t know their purpose, whatever it is we believe there is no novel cause which can justify such acts. If they have strong will they should come forward and fight not with arms, it is cowardly and if they had thought they will hit a weak zone, certainly they have chosen the wrong place. They should come to the campus and see that nothing has changed except some physical marks they left here yesterday evening. I don’t know whether this/these guy(s) will be caught or not, but it is sure, in India we have learnt to live with it. So if someone wants to create an impact, they better find some new tricks!

You want to succeed ?

You want to succeed? You need to be a good leader; you have to learn how to “manage” people. We hear these line so many times from our childhood that at some point it really becomes a fact. There is nothing which is absolute, from my childhood this is the one thing I have learnt. If you say when, well there is always plus and minus. If you say this is the end, then there is nothing call end, an end marks a beginning. I used to wonder and now always feel something that eludes me is an understanding of these facts. I always knew if I buy a chocolate I have to give the price the shopkeeper asked, but never realized why there was a bargain when I wanted to buy a T-shirt. I can not remember how many times I was directly and indirectly told that there is no fixed price for something, we can always “adjust”, this is an understanding and a balance. Then comes the big institutes, if you see the instructions booklet, you as a student will find the class room as the safest place on earth and if your actions are put under microscope you will break numerous rules each day, if you think they are strict rules then you always live under guilt, but there are guys, who know there is no rule, you can break them to any extent and get away with it, of course if you are a good “manager”. There is a third way become indifferent about the happenings around you. Once my friend Pratap in an argument pointed out that if one always go straight without any diversions, then all lives will be parallel, no interaction and hence no society, its the society who kept you alive not the individual. He has a point and any discussion in this matter boils down to one fact, small adjustments which don’t make much difference are ok, after all you are in a society. So take help from individuals don’t even bother to thank him, because you are going to return it to the society, the return need not be in the same magnitude as nobody can compare potato and apple. Everyone adjusts, compromises; human beings are small creatures even the earth has compromised her shape, its not completely spherical, sphere has been slightly tapered at the poles: a small adjustment but enough to keep us alive, but I am rigid M who will never understand this simple logic.
It’s a pleasure of not being argued in the middle of cribbing so that I could put down quite a few lines of my own here. Disclaimer: this post is not pointing towards any individual or organization :)