Refreshed

Finally the refresher course is over. There was a fracas. One of the persons who came to give a talk decided to tell us that he was an expert in Helicases. These are proteins that unwind DNA during replication, transcription etc.  I have no problems in someone declaring that they are experts as long as they are willing to substantiate that claim. To be fair, I think he thought he would be safe in making that declaration because the refresher courses are generally for college teachers and as they do not do research he decided he could get away with the proclamation. Unfortunately, I was there in the audience and once he pompously announced that we should keep quiet during the lecture as it was a difficult topic he was explaining, I decided to have some fun. I asked a very legitimate question and he was furious. Then my colleague with whom I collaborate for doing biophysical studies decided to ask a question which he could not answer. He boiled with rage when I prompted him by taking names of the scientists who done the work and therefore, if he is an expert, he should immediately recall. That cooked my goose.  The next opportunity he got he went for me with all guns blazing. The end result was that I happily walked out of the class and he ranted that we were all stupid. Which got another of my colleague riled up and there was a lovely fracas. Hopefully, we will not ever get him to give another talk.

Take home lesson:  Never take your audience for granted.

"Common Wealth" Games

I do not know why there is so much fuss about all the corruption. After all it is Common Wealth, so every one is helping themselves to it.

Bachi Karkaria as usual nails it down in her column.

The CPWD with its 160 years of experience has created world class facility. Where in the world will you have stadium with leaking roofs?  Where else can you find seepages in brand new constructions?

Of course the roads caved in. It is part of the monsoon charm. The month of Sawan...

Two days back we had a 11 hour power cut. The Government is ensuring that we become acclimatized to the long power cuts because that is the only way they can provide power during the games.

Meantime, I am spending time getting refreshed yet again. The University refuses to believe that having projects and papers are sufficient proof that I am constantly updating myself. Most of the lectures are terrible so we sit in back giggling and making comments. It helps in passing the time.

Decision making-whom to accept as PhD student

This year there was a deluge of applications to join my lab.  There were applications even before our interview processes took place and of course after the candidates were selected, all of them made a beeline to my lab. Chromatin remodeling is the latest buzzword. While I can preen myself on it, it also made life difficult for me. How do I select a candidate?

The first thing is that I do not look at resumes. It does not tell me anything. Given the Indian University context, it tells me how good a student is at memorizing stuff. Beyond it I do not get any information about the student. Is she/he creative? What do they like to do? What is it that they find fascinating?

I took recourse in the way interviews are done abroad. Where the faculty and the student essentially chat. All my interactions were one-to-one. As I told the student about the work we were doing I was looking for responses. Is the student curious? Do they find a phenomenon interesting? How do they react to unusual data?

I interacted with 20 students in all. I found 2 who were very interesting and keen. It was a pleasure to interact with them. 2 were responsive but not curious. The rest were not curious.

All the students were asked to interact with my lab. The feedback I got back from my students was then matched with what I had observed in my interviews.

Unanimously we have narrowed down on one student. I do have back-up names but I know whom I want to have in my lab.

I have not yet announced my decision. Funnily none of the 4 students are toppers in any sense. They are good but they are not the kinds who have won awards. They have not even topped our merit list.  But as I said in the beginning, resumes in India are meaningless till we stop evaluating students based on what they have memorized.

New Web Page

Finally, I pulled myself together and created a new web page. Or at least I put the material together and Ritu Nidhi from CIS created the web page.  There are some glitches that need to be taken care off. But for the present there is a web page that provides information about my laboratory. It can be accessed here:
http://www.jnu.ac.in/Faculty/rohini/

Monsoons and Commonwealth Games

My gardener, Nanku Ram, was extremely upset this morning. Yesterday's downpour has wreaked havoc in his home. Water entered the house and everything, from atta to bed, was soaked. His children were pulled out by a neighbour as they tried to wade through waist high water. The family finally had dinner late in the night that they purchased from outside because there was nothing to cook.
Nanku Ram lives in Munirka.  Of late, Munirka has been receiving attention in the form of flyovers. They have been built one after another on the outer ring road to ease traffic problems. Of course, small unimportant things like proper drainage for the rain water has been forgotten. As well as subways/footbridge for the pedestrians. The pedestrians do not exist and it is the houseowner's problem to make sure that their house is built in such a way that the water does not enter in during rains.
Munirka does not have bus shelters either despite a plethora of buses plying on the route. On the other hand, GK-I where no bus plys has two bus shelters. Go figure!
Delhi is a chaos.  The Chief Minister has made a comment today that Delhi is appearing dirty because all the construction activity is going on simultaneously.  What can one say? This is the CM who also said that she was unaware of CVC report on corruption in CWG.  Blind, that is what she is. Someone give her glasses please.

Graduation party

Yesterday, two of my students submitted their thesis and we celebrated the event with a dinner party. It was also a sort of surprise farewell party for Pravin who graduated earlier this month. Here is the photo:

The new academic session

Officially classes start tomorrow. However, our M.Sc semester students have not joined as those classes will start sometime in August.

This year I have been inundated with PhD applications. The applications started coming even before our M.Phil/Ph.D interviews were held. Only one set of results have been declared and the other set is yet to be declared. Meantime, I am being forced to take decisions.

I understand chromatin remodeling/epigenetics is the new "in thing". Just like molecular biology and stem cell and all the other fancy terms. Everyone wants to work on it. Unfortunately, the reality is different from the glamour. Really speaking my lab also does those very boring things like purifying plasmids and running agarose gels. The experiments fail, even the most perfectly designed ones. There is more sweat than anything else.

This year four of my senior most students have or are graduating. It is little poignant because the first students always remain in one's memories. They either make or break labs. Mine were fantastic bunch of students who helped build my lab up. If my lab is doing well then all the kudos goes to them. I sit in my office in front of my computer. They are the ones who have to deal with the vendors, failed experiments, and M.Sc project students and all the other load that I dump on them.

This week we are going out to celebrate their graduation. As I took a head count of the members I realized that we will be at least 15 of us. It shook me a little bit-that number. As a post-doc when I was dreaming of my own lab, I remember telling Brad, a graduate student in Charlie's lab that I wanted a small lab. Couple of students whom I would teach. We would do good work of course. There was to be no compromise on that because of my Phd and post doc advisors. Brad was a dreamer too and he dreamt big. My small lab idea appalled him. I wonder what he would say now if he were to see my lab.