Book release: "Vikram Sarbhai-a life"

It’s a long time since I became a irregular to Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS), mostly because the talks are more technical in their respective fields, but last week when I saw this notice, i was immediately interested in attending it. It was a book release function. Not an usual event to occur there. This book was on Vikram Sarabhai a name know to many of us. It is a rare event in India that people write biographies of someone whose name is not Gandhi, but Amrita Shah did a formidable job in writing her book called "Vikram Sarbhai- a life", this book is published by Penguin and costs around Rs. 425 ($10). Book release function was very much unlike an iisc event, media thronged the premises with flash bulb and high profile guests like Dr. Kasturirangan and Prof. Balram, it appeared a bigger event than the once i expected. after the release Prof. Kasturirangan talked a bit about his association with Prof. Sarabhai, the early flights of their dream to reach the space in RPL, in Ahmadabad. The Amrita Shah read out couple of chapter from her book. First one is about his association with IISc. How he fared in the institute and how his dreams were unfurled and how he became the pioneer for Indian Space dream. There was a question answer session which followed her book reading event as usual it was very amusing as someone Asked "How indigenous is our space program" well Prof. Kasturirangan came as a savior. There was some light hearted humours, Prof. Sarabhai came from a wealthy background, So someday when somebody raised the question "Why are you wasting 4 crores of taxpayers money behind the space program,?" Sarabhai answered politely "Please don't worry i was not wasting tax payers money, its me paying more tax that 4 crore".
There has been reviews on this book already, and its a talked bout book inside media too,but somebody rightly pointed out the book is slightly costly for us: the PhD students :)

Photo courtsey: CCS webpage

Book festival 2006

The fourth Bangalore book festival has begun in Palace grounds from today and it will go on till 19th November. This festival has been organized by Bnagalore book sellers and publishers association, Festival hours: 11 a.m to 8 p.m. everyday. The ten days book carnival draws people from all corners of Bengaluru. This is a ticketed book fair and the ticket price is Rs. 20/-. Today I went to the book fair along with Deep and Santanu. It was Saturday and the crowd was thin inside the fair. We had plan a to identify stalls which we will target for thorough browsing first and then move to the others. It wasn’t a big fair so within half an hour our targets were identified and then we started our close look sessions. There were few publishers who brought the technical books: Oxford, Cambridge, Orient Longman, CBS are the places where we found some technical stuffs. There is a good collection of old and new books. Though the collection of classics is probably not much as Santanu appeared disappointed, but this was just the first day and I know we can explore more. There are few books which you can find in lots of stalls; Kiran Desai’s “Inheritence of loss”, Orhan Pamuks’ collections, Chetan Bhagat hovered the book fair. John Grisham or Jeffry Archers’ presence you can feel from the time you step inside the fair. Absence of stall from strand book shop was noteworthy! All three of us bought few books. Deep took wide spectrum of collection! Fron Sheila Dhar to Amitav Ghosh, I bought couple of books: “Maximum city” by Suketu Mehta and a small biography of SN Bose. There are 8 PCs with net, available in the book fair premises which are providing a soft copy of the book catalogue and also some details about the festival, few food stalls are also present outside the bookstall premises, to fill the stomach of the book worms and a stage where cultural programs will be held.
The experience of this festival is quite different from the “Kolkata Boi Mela”, well there can not be any comparison here, and still it’s a good effort in a city where people are becoming comfortable reading e-books. I am looking forward to visit the fair few more times and explore some more stuff, old habits doesn’t disappear soon!

Word of caution: avoid visiting the place when crowded. The stalls are small and become quite stuffy when crowded in the daytime.

nano2006:Day III

Crowd on Wednesday morning was less compared to last couple of days, and I knew that those who didn’t turned up missed something. Prof. Subra Suresh delivered a fascinating lecture today. He is an engineer who is too much inside microbiology and his talk primarily focused at making things better microbiologists through nanomechanics. He talked about basically couple of cells, first one is red blood cell and the second one is cancerous pancreatic cell. Malaria parasite, plasmodium falsiperum which attacks the red blood cell, increases the stiffness and makes the cells sticky hence causes blockages in the vein. He showed the change in stiffness in tensile tests conducted using optical tweezers. The interesting point was to remove an antigen called RESA from the parasite and exhibiting reduction in stiffness, which is desired for these cells. For cancerous cell he observed just the opposite trend and its his ongoing project. By far his talk was most exciting for an engineer. The second talk was delivered by Prof. AK Sood, his name rippled the campus when he got his paper in science. Although focus of his talk was electron conduction through CNTs, he discussed a part of his old work. They passed pure water through a nanotube with an inner diameter of 1.4 nm and observed a suppression of freezing point of water upto -50 oC. Later he proposed that it’s a single chain of water molecule which becomes supercooled, great work. The second phase of his talk was mostly on measuring the electron transport through the tube and also attaching particles like Pd to the tubes for better electrical property, also he talked a bit about the application on nano rods for optical tweezers. So I got to see 3 different optical tweezers in last 2 days. I missed the rest of the sessions as I need to consult the doc in the morning, my poor knee! During second half I had plans for attending few talks; I started with Dr. G. K Deys’ lecture, his grp. in BARC does quite a bit of TEM and here also he presented the work on Zr based BMGs. Good microscopy and followed by the age old question whether there is crystallinity in the shear bands, answer from him was no. I wanted to attend Rachman Chaim’s lecture but he did not turn up. Dr. Wang’s talk on insitu TEM was exciting as much as other in situ experiments that excite me. I had to Rush because today I had my poster presentation. My work was on low temperature creep in YTZ, I had some new stuffs there, couldn’t get good crowd to explain them . I had couple of productive discussion with Prof. R. Andrievski and Prof. Hahn. There few issues related to electron microscopy and grain boundary segregation came up during discussion. Altogether it was a nice couple of hours. I couldn’t get much opportunity to go through other poster though, Prasads’ work on nano Ni drew quite a bit of attention and curiosity. This brought us to the end of the poster sessions in nano2006. In the evening there was a dance program and since I am quite culturally challenged successfully skipped it! The dinner was excellent, people boozed more than yesterday, fortunately there was to trouble today trouble makers were identified and surely some nice surprises were there for them.

nano2006: Day I

Yesterday there was an indication and today it was a reality. The 8th international conference on nanostructured material started today with a bang! We anticipated the no. of people going to turn up will be quite large and it was evident from last night attendance in the mixture party, more than 450 delegates! The conference was inaugurated at 9 in the moring and J. N. Tata Auditorium was just packed. Many of the big guys talked about nano science and technology and theme of the in augural session was of course anticipation for a productive 5 days ahead. Prof Balram, Director of IISc emphasized more on interdisciplinary research and agreed that he really have tough time in bringing science and engineering department together. Although his last statement, which did not make me elated’ was that chemistry in the key for nanomaterials. Mr. Director its material science and physics, maths and bio is now equally important brothers. The first plenary lecture was delivered by the pioneer in nano research Prof. CNR Rao, Prof. Ranganathan introduced the only Dan David fellow in India. Prof Rao started his lecture by describing an oxide which behaves as a metal (ReO3) at nano stage. His talk was concentrated more on the nanotubes than any other properties, the innovative work was to form thin films at the liquid-liquid interface. This lecture set the tune of the conference, but still it was started with the chemical note. There is little doubt that Atul and Kamanio really had tough time making this big event a reality, the way our faculties slogged for last few months was really impressive. The sessions I followed and will be following is taking place in the J. N. Tata audi, and few talks I will attend in bio materials and few in the functional material sessions. I am not going to Satish Dhawan audi where the theme D talks are going on. CNR’s talk was followed by the talk by Ruslan Valiev in structural materials session. He talked about the SPD process, the interesting part of his talk was to describe the amorphous phase that formed in Ni during parallel channel ECAP, Vikram rightly added issue of grain size dependence on the amorphization. Prof. Amiya Mukherjee’s replaced Helena and gave a very stimulating talk. Highlight was the strength of Cu and the Si3N4 with toughness nearly 15??!! Rightly the work reached Nature. The talk on Biomaterials in the hall c in the afternoon session was also quite informative for people who are new to this field. Prof Yang stressed on the nano ceramics required for biomedical application. I missed the last talk by Ramu, he is in a new field and quite happening one: it was the SWNT doped nano composite for high mechanical strength application. Prof. Mukherjee’s talk gave us the information that the CNT fibers have strength of 1 TeraGPa!!! It appeared to me that this nano will be dominated by CNTs; last nano2004 surely paved the way for CNT technology for this one. There were tons of posters there; I was looking for few guys who did not turn up. like Takeli, anyway it had few very good works to go through. Whether it is Krisanu’s HREM or the scientist's work from TIFR, had shown that nano materials are in the heart of technology today. Let’s see what day 2 unfurls, by the way, Abi’s hall management gang or the guys in the registration were quite sharp today, but extra credit goes to the people taking care of transportation they are having a tough time, i hope situation changes tomorrow.

Candle lit vigil

Today the students in the campus have decided to have a candle lit vigil in front of the main building. It is a geture we carry out to pay homage to the souls who are no longer around us and for spreading the message of peace. It was a very peaceful gathering of 150 students. The director, prof. Balram was as usual very inspiring but appeared really weary, of course because of the unusual circumstances he faced. We condoled the sudden demise of Prof. Puri, and hoped for a faster recovery of those who are recovering in the hospital. After the vigil we had put the candles at the steps wher J. N. Tata is standing tall. The glowing light carried a promise to walk ahead and and remeber the Prof. Puri. At the end the gathering was asked to speak a few words but the silence was talking; We all despised this heinous act.

spread your wings and fly eagle.. Desmond Tutu

The notice on a pink colour A4 paper remained un-noticed in the campus, and it gave some of us an opportunity to listen to Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace prize winner for the year 1984. I miss most of the Nobel laureate lecture in the Institute because I reach late and the halls will be completely filled, this time it was in J. N. Tata auditorium and because of mentioned reason I could hear this piece of lecture. The presence of sniffer dog/bitches from the police near the stage gave really a wrong introduction to right event.
The speaker of the 7th and the last J.R.D Tata memorial lecture, organized by NIAS was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was really humble at the beginning of the talk. He spent almost 10 min. in thanking us, the Indians. I rarely hear someone talking about Mahatma Gandhi with such emotions. If I am hurting someone, then let me confess I heard very few of them. He sounded more like a Global Spokesman of peace than an arch bishop from Capetown, who fought apartheid and the man behind the reconciliation mission. Of course, South Africa has moved ahead from the apartheid era, but still I wonder how this reconciliation is done; atrocity must be at a level where punishment is the solution. His talk was a reminder of the last century’s blood bath all over the world, and the born of so called super powers who carried that legacy to the next century in the name of west vs. Islamic terrorism. He criticized the America and Britain for their unwanted and unnecessary invasion in Iraq where thousands of people were still getting killed. If the description of the talk is becoming serious then let me put down that he also had a humorous touch in his talk and he mixed them really well. He described the incidents, one about the women who came to the reconciliation court and was requested for forgiveness, and the other of the hotel manager in Washington who mistook him as a chauffer, with equal intensity! There were parts of the lecture where he talked about the oppression, quite depressing but when I read his Nobel lecture, I found he actually didn’t talk about oppression much. Surely, he followed his talk titled “is there hope for humanity?”. Arch Bishop Tutu, is in a UN committee called alliance of civilization and he is carrying out the job for getting together the civilizations around the world, according to him, we can prosper only when we are together. Human being lives in the world of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luthar King (junior), and they are like eagles that fly towards the rising sun and disappears. It was a quite unusual lecture for us but hats off to the man from Capetown!

Few links!

His Nobel lecture

His peace centre

in CHENNAI for NMD

I feel sometimes myself like the Shepard in Alchemist. Though I don’t dream about pyramids, but I always grab opportunities to visit places whenever possible. This time it was Chennai, and NMD-ATM, annual technical meeting of metallurgist from all over India. Along with the meeting I actually wanted to visit IIT-Chennai. So now I have seen two IITs. ATM followed FDM, the international conference on future of materials where Atul presented a paper, and I was fortunate enough that he had put my name in it! Thanks Atul! Before ATM I have to mention NMD because on that day Dr. Phanikumar got the young metallurgist award and I want to congratulate him.
I heard before the conference that ATM is a low profile conference, but was elated to find that a portion of the talks were really good. The participation was really huge, posters as well as speeches. A whole gamut from materials and metallurgical research came here. Truly speaking conference was very general and I had to find talks of my own interest. There were three parallel sessions. I was especially interested in the mechanical behaviour of materials, some functional stuffs and then Ceramics of course. I had attended few sessions on mechanical behaviour of materials. First day, 15th Nov. I found some interesting stuffs about Spark Plasma Sintering processes. ARCI is currently doing lots of work on that, with Dibyendu around I would also try something! Guru’s rafting was as usual good and I guess serendipity is knocking his door. There was a talk by Vendervort, the king of metallography and also days end Vikram mesmiriesed audience with a 10 min talk on wear. Second day it was bit hectic, as I wanted to attend the talk on metallic glasses, it was interesting session, Krishanu presented his paper on non-equilibrium solidifation which was good, better was his answers ( Dr. Dey, from BARC showed some beautiful HREM micrograph of the metallic glasses, again the controversy begun whether there is crystallization at the shear bands, Prof Ramchandra Rao, pioneer in the field was also present there. Rejin, hurried through his beautiful talk! Just for attending Vikram’s lecture, but his experiments for exhibiting Ductile Brittle transition was really good. Vikram was fascinating in his talk on the amorphous ceramics. Its really a magic material only requires good magicians like prof. Jayaram.It was more like our class room, but I wasn’t happy with the explanation he tried to give in support to the densification at high temperatures. The nano grains grow so fast, it is really difficult to differentiate between densification, creep and grain growth processes. I would be unfair If I miss the last talk which a girl from IGCAR delivered. They were using Infrared camera for strain measurement during tensile experiment. Not only the local strain it was possible to measure the stress distribution in the specimen, for large component which may be a good tool to use, but what I understood is that there are limitations in the shape of the resolution of the camera.

Its like writing a summary of Ramyana, I would have loved to describe each of the talks I participated but that’s some other time. What I really want is to thank all the faculty staffs and students, from IIT Chennai, life were really tough for them in that last week.

A Night Club with difference!

Students from the Department of Metallurgy in IISc are extremely active, and those who work talk really little! It is reflected well for years through TMS night club talk series. Last Wednesday it was the 325th night club talk. In the campus, academic community knows about looking around, Sci forum and newly born CCS, which are perhaps much younger talk series compared to TMS night club talk series, its run by a TMS students’ chapter and apart from the invited talks, all night club talks are delivered by the students and believe me it is one of the longest running TMS Students Chapter in the whole world. We have our own world, we have our own prestigious talks, and we have our own discussions. In a faculty & staff driven institute it is really amazing that without any force (driving I meant) students volunteer to talk. The figure 325 is really huge; and it is an honour to speak in these occasions as they are the milestones for the series. Though I did no have the chance to speak in these occasions, but I have attended more that 150 talks! It covered all spectrums. From bacteria to self assembly, from ALE to casting, from NMR to DSC, from iron making to spintronix, from mobile phones to chips; we heard almost every field of material science. Technology changed, from OHP we shifted to digital projector and from the seminar hall we had shifted to Brahm Prakash Committee Room, but the character remained the same. A legacy we are carrying for a decade and it is like Prof. Ranganathan says(on some other context) “…it is in the memory of the department” . So join us at 9:30 p.m. in BPCR on Wednesday, we will share thoughts and “a cup of tea in the tea board”.

Materials, Mimicry and MEMS by Dr. Julia King

It’s all about fans! Prof. Julia King, from rolls royce today delivered really a fascinating talk on aero-engine in our prestigious faculty hall. When I first saw those real huge jet engines, I wondered how much science and technology must have been gone into it. She today talked about the physics, engineering and design of the fans and the engine as a whole!
Her talk started with the general concern on global warming and the contribution of aerospace industries to it. She showed a B-52 bombers emitting considerable amount of un-burnt hydrocarbon. According to her noise pollution due to high engine noise levels is also a cause of concern primarily in cities. So she addressed all the problems in sequence. Her presentation began with an animations on how an engine works. It was evident that materials design is the key for the turbines blades inside the engine! The material they use for the fans are Ni bases super alloys and there is a problem with the randomly oriented polycrystals. The grain boundaries parallel to the air flow is a bad news: they are the site where the fatigue crack initiates under cyclic loading so the blades were processed with oriented grains with boundaries perpendicular to the air flow. Final step towards this grain boundary engineering was to remove the grain boundaries, i.e. use of single crystals! No boundaries so no flaws. It is important to reduce the weight of the blades which is a new field of research and shape memory alloys and metallic foam appeared to be potential material for that. There was a job also for the combustion engineers but from the material scientist point of view it was necessary to talk about the chamber material. Composite materials were shown to have better run for that. When the discussion boiled down to noise she mentioned how the noise is generated from the engine, the solution for that was to have a turbulent mix of two kinds of air coming out of the jet, for that it was observed serrated outer wall of the jet instead of smooth wall is quite effective. The criteria was it should remain close while it is flying at low altitudes (high temp. region) and at high altitude they should open up . In a nice experiment she showed actually how shape memory alloys acts as an actuater under changing temperature; it was really a nice piece of experiment. There was an ineresting info: eagles can fly at a speed of 200 Mph and consume an energy equivalent to only 10% of its own weight. At the end of her talk she showed some video clippings of some testing on the fans. They were amazing! First one was under tremendous water flow, 2nd one was fans performance under cold condition (T= 233 K), 3rd one was what if a single blade breaks? And final one was what happens when birds hit the jet, I am not going to tell you what happens then, you have to listen to Dr. King. I could not put any of her slides which I would loved to post, may be some other day......

Jumpstart 2005: an evening with winners

It all started in a rain soaked evening in Gymkhana managing committee room, we were planning for a sports fest and at the end we decided it will be called “Jumpstart2005”. There was a whole spectrum of events held during this literary and sports festival of I.I.Sc Gymkhana. It was Santanu who was the initiator, motivator and supervisor of the show. The events included Chess, Carom, Athletics (the biggest), Swimming, and the literary events (Dumb charades and Quiz), Table tennis. We had clubbed the marathon event along with the freedom run around the campus.
The evening started with a Sharod recital, it was as usual a mesmerizing music! This was followed by a good show put up by “Rythmica” a part Gymkhana Music Club. They were also winners but on different field and different game. Our prize distribution ceremony started in the middle of the music programme. The Satish Dhawan auditorium was completely filled with people. Arjun Deviah an international athelit came as a chief guest for the occasion. The prize distribution started with ladies events. Although the female participation in field events was noticeably less the picture was different in literary events. In the male section in Athletics it was a keen contest, few performed exceptionally well, Hasta in the jumps in short distance races, Arun in short distance Run and Prakash again in jumps and short distance run. Prakash’s long jump of 5.7 m was really watch worthy. In the long distance run Claudy really dominated along with Rejin, Santosh and Sundar around, Kottada and his group came strong in relay. In throwing events Sachin was ahead of all; in discus, javelin, shot put he threw the max. In Swimming again it was “the big boy” Rejin who dominated, won 5 out of 6 swimming events, Anath also gave was a strong contender for him. In Carrom Debabrat won the singles also one doubles event, Atul, Tejaswini also performed well in doubles and in mixed doubles. Rahul played well enough to beat others in classic chess, Sachin kept his mark as a chess player along with a good athelit. Thomas outplayed others in rapid chess section. In TT Debraj showed his class and won the singles tournament, the doubles went to Kartikeyan and Ganesh. MRC lifted the departmental event by beating Physics in the finals. The last in the list were the marathoners; in the first Bangalore marathon held this year, almost 21 guys participated and we had decided to felicitate them on behalf of gymkhana, it was really a good achievement. The concluding part of the prize distribution ceremony was an inspiring speech by the chief guest. Rythmica took over the programme and it got over in an excellent note, as our ‘host’ Srini said all good things come to an end.
We had three category of prizes, first was the track suit upper, second one was t Shirt with Jumpstart logo and third one which I liked the most was the white coffee mug with gymkhana logo as well as jumpstart logo. I hope every recipient liked it!
A huge effort from Viswanath and Vivke for athletics and literary, respectively with Sushil in swimming made this big event a success, but the little man behind the screen has actually done something bigger, yes I am talking about Jackie (Santanu). I hope Jumpstart will not stop and will get some more face lifting next year. So JUMPSTART………