Paranoia

Before coming back to India I never believed the crab story as told by Rajiv Gandhi. Apparently the crabs from India were being shipped in an open container. When asked why by a puzzled westerner, the firm said that these are Indian crabs. The moment one tries to go up in life, the others will pull them down. So no one can escape the container.

I was naive. I thought this could never happen. I mean all it takes is hard work- teach properly, and do good research- and rewards will be yours to reap. Well, I was wrong. In the fourth year of my academic work in India, I am learning the hard way that the more popular you are, the harder you will fall.

Today, a colleague of mine, whom I avoid like the plague, told to me in a honey sweet voice:

"You are very popular amongst the summer school students. Every second student has opted for your lab. Actually," she amended her statement "You are very popular amongst the Ph.D. students. Every Ph.D student wants to join your lab."

Given the proximity of the colleague to the powers to be, I wonder what this portends for me in the University.

Amma's glasses

When I was in class IInd, we had a story to read: Kuchu's glasses.
Amma has high power in her eyes but she has refused to wear glasses thus far. She and my periamma, who too refuses to wear glasses on principle, have had many adventures together when they ventured out without glasses.
Therefore, yesterday...
Around 5pm my darling mother exclaimed:
"Now I know why I get headaches!"
I looked at her in surprise. She clarified:
"I have got power in my eyes, no. You see, Valli (her maid servant) always says that whenever she does not wear glasses, she gets headache. I used to be so surprised. But now I know why I have been suffering from headache for the past few days."
And with that she started wearing her glasses.
Of course, now I am trying to convince her that she can get headache even if her BP goes up. Getting her to the doctor is another story.

The story reading session

On Sunday the teacher's association writers forum (I did not know that it existed!) held its story-reading session. Thanks to a strange sequence of events Dr. Choubey who was organizing it came to know that I too write stories. And therefore invited me to read a story. It was fun, after all it was my first story reading session even if the audience consisted of 10 students and six faculties. (of whom three were reading stories). Susan Viswanathan, who is at the School of Social Sciences, began the session by reading two stories from her book Something Barely Remembered. It is a book I need to now read.
The rest of the readers were Mohammed Janabade (from SLL&CSS) and Devendra Choubey (also from SLL&CSS). Devendra Choubey read a story that he had written in the aftermath of Babri Masjid about how few people in a village grab land from another resident in the pretext of building a dam. Mohammed Janabade's story dealt with the quest of identity. There was also a guest reader but unfortunately I did not catch his name properly. He is a professor of economics from Bareilly and also works on child labour issues. His stories deal with this as the central theme and he read us a story that has now been included in NCERT text books. It was a lovely story even though the ending was predictable.
I read the story that was published long time back in The Bathtub Gin called "Welcome to the World, Baby."
The entire session lasted two and half hours and the only thing that I was little worried was the presence of the Dean from my school. I have no clue how he is going to react to this aspect of me.

The peacock dance

March-April is the loveliest season on campus. The bougainvillea is in full bloom, the amaltas is preparing to burst into a yellow rhapsody, and for the peacocks it is the mating season. Today morning, I went out as usual to inspect my flowers (the jasmines, roses, and the hibiscus have been flowering madly) when I saw the peacock dancing. For the next 30 minutes I was treated to a fantastic performance by the peacock. The only problem was that the peahen for whom it was dancing was more interested in food than in the dance. She had a bored look on her face as though she was saying, oh okay, I have seen this before, chuck it, will you?

The NGO world

There are many out in this world who believe what we do is fake and that we are making money. The unfortunate part is that there are many such NGOs who float organizations to make money. Their paper work will be perfect, their auditing will be wonderful, every paisa will be accounted- after all it is easy to get fake vouchers and receipts.
For example, there was one such organization whom I visited in Sonbhadra District when I was in Benaras this past month. The site visit had been requested by a chapter in the US. Before sending the funds the chapter wanted the mandatory site visit done. So from Naugarh we landed in Robertsganj, Sonbhadra district, without prior warning.
It was amazing. The village was on the road and standing on the edge, we could see the primary school on the other side of the road. When we questioned the children, they blurted out that all of them are enrolled in schools and they hardly ever come to the non-formal education centre, for which funds were being sought. They were very critical of the teachers who were supposed to be teaching at the centre.
Then we asked a question that had been bothering us:
"Why didn't you go to school today?"
They threw a glance at the project coordinator and then said:
"We were told that people are coming to see us and that we will be given new clothes."
Needless to say this is one project we are not supporting.
This is just one example. Every funding agency has its repertoire of favourite stories of NGOs out to make a fool of them. My cousin, Madhu, who works with the enviornmental groups was regaling me with stories. My favourite was the one where he landed up in Chidambaram to meet an NGO who said that they were working on Mangroves. The address turned out to be that of a store selling utensils! The owner lived in Dubai and had hit upon this as a scheme as one way of making money.
These NGOs do much to discredit those who work hard and selflessly to bring about change. There are those, like the couple I met few of months back, who have just given their entire life to the cause they believe in. And then are those commercial merchants who see this as an opportunity to line their own pockets.
It takes all sorts to make this world.

Of recalcitrant students and harassed advisors

I wish I did not have to write papers. Not when I have recalcitrant students who cannot understand why I insist on that perfect data. The students believe that once an experiment is done, it is done and over with. I, on the other hand, want it to be repeated and then worry why the results are not perfect, why is it little different from the previous experiment, and then I insist that it be repeated, and again repeated till we have get reproducible results. Pravin, who is going home on April 19th to get married, is the worst affected. He has been given April 18th as the deadline to finish all his experimental data and that too as perfect as possible. He is sure that he can come back and complete only I, and my collaborator, want to submit the paper(s) for publication and cannot wait till he comes back from home. Hence, the deadline. He would like to see us dead, poor chap.
Then there is this student of my collaborator. As I read through the paper, which is based on his experimental data, I was horrified to discover that all his experiments were done with a protein where there was one amino acid change.
"Do you have the original?"
"No."
"No?" I screeched.
He smiled, amused to see me getting into such a flap.
"But you need it for even your thesis. Any reviewer is going to ask you for the original."
"Yes."
"So when you can get it done?"
"I will try."
Aaaaaaaaaaargh!