The student attack in JNU

The hacking of a girl student on the campus was horrific and symptomatic of our problems.  There are no arguments that we (barring few pockets in the country) are a patriarchal society with emphasis on boys.  Boys are brought up with the belief that everything they ask for is theirs.  So if they like a girl, she has to reciprocate. It is constant theme of our movies. Ranjanhaa is a classical example of this kind of obsession.
On the other hand, the girls are constantly given the message that their worth is only as a daughter, wife, and mother. So girls end up with low self-esteem and many times get into relationships that are not worth it. When trouble does rear its head, they do not know how to deal with it.
But beyond it, in this age of instant gratification, children are ill-equipped to deal with rejections, with defeats, with the concept that things might not go there way.  And both these students were undergraduates and the kind of the freedom they got was something they would have never experienced and had no clue how to deal with it.
We are really need to incorporate life skill development as part of the curriculum. I think the FYUP in DU is now going to start life skill development as a core course for their students. We need it at JNU too. I remember few years back attending a life skill development workshop  at Prayas, an NGO in Delhi that works with girls at risk. The program was fantastic as the resource persons dealt with issues of self-esteem, relationships, how to deal with stalking/obsessions, and whom to approach in case of problems. We need courses like this.

Petunias from my garden

When I shifted to the new flats (some call it Mall View Apartments as we face the mall on the Nelson Mandela marg), I was little apprehensive about my garden.  It took me some time to establish it but we (my gardener and I) did it.  The balcony attached to the bedroom is long and east facing so I get the morning sun. My plants love it. 
We planted petunias, pansies, nasturtiums, dahlias, phlox and asters.  The petunias are the desi variety. They are available only in two colours- white and pale violet.  We also planted some of the hybrid varieties. Very showy and very colourful.
I was fascinated by the anther and the stigma.  There is a difference in the inner floral patttern between the desi variety and the hybrid variety.  Take a peek below.

Desi white petunia

Desi pale purple petunia

Hybrid petunia

By the way, there is a fantastic book by Alick Percy-Lancaster titled 'A sahib's manual for the mali'.  Alick Percy-Lancaster was the main person behind the splendid Sunder Nursery in Delhi and his manual is a delight to read.

Where are the boys?

I visited one of our projects yesterday. The project runs non-formal education centers in slums around Bhatti Mines area in Delhi. We have been supporting the project for long time even though I have reservations about the effectiveness of non-formal education centers. The good thing about the project is that all the children attend the government school in the morning and come to the center in the afternoon. At the center they are given further coaching/help with their classes. The effectiveness of the government school can be judged by the fact that most of the children have poor reading and writing skills.

The centers have children of all age group though attempts have been made to segregate them based on their ages.  What stuck me most was that in the age group of 6-8 years there was equal numbers of girls and boys.

However, the age group 11-14 consisted of girls. There were only 5-6 boys; the rest were girls. Where did the boys go? The project coordinator did not know. They had not tracked them or tried to figure out why they had dropped out.

The girls were eager to present skits. I watched two skits, written and acted by the girls themselves. One of the skit was termed "Lazy" and the other one was on child labour.  Both the skits were great! But what was amazing was the gender attitudes. In both the skits men were portrayes as good-for-nothing. In the skit "Lazy" the man was completely lazy, lolling/sleeping in the house, too apathetic to even prevent the robbers from looting his house.  In the skit on child labour, the man (husband/father) was a drunkard who sells off everything to feed his addiction.  In both the skits the woman (wife/daughter/school teacher) was portrayed as active and energetic who is capable of shouldering the responsibilities. The house is managed and run solely by the women. They are the breadearners and the managers and everything.

The portrayal was really surprising because the girls had written the skits in their own dialect.  So it was not as if they were being fed the notion. Rather, it is something that they have observed and noted and down.

So is the gender imbalance a reflection of the role models that these children observe in their community? The girls are eager to learn (they want to learn computers now) because they understand that the house will be run on their income.  Whereas the boys drop out because they see the men around them being completely worthless.

On Sexism and Misogyny

The week that Julia Gillard spoke out against sexism and misogyny, we in India were witness to our leaders proclaiming that the marriageable age for girls should be reduced as it will prevent rape. I have not still figured that one out but what was noticeable was the silence from all the political parties and aspiring leaders.  Fortunately, the MahaKhap rejected the suggestion.
I have listened to Julia Gillard's speech. I just wish some one would have the courage to speak out against sexism and misogyny that exists in India.
When I joined the University, a senior professor told a women colleague and me that he always feels sorry for the male faculty who join as assistant professor as they have to run the household on pittance.  Then there was another faculty who believes that man is the head of the house. 
Women scientists are meant to be dismissed off unless there is work to be done. Fluffy headed just doing some thing to keep themselves occupied.  If we are aggressive, we are labelled bitch, grudgingly given our due because we yell.  If we flirt then we are to be dismissed off as lightweights. If we do neither, then anyway we are not going to get anything. Or rather as a sop they will give us National Women Bioscientist Award.
I usually ignore my male colleagues because that is the only way I can survive. What really gets me upset is the attitude of the male students who, seeped in the patriarchal ideology, dismiss off their supervisor because she is a female.  I get upset too when female students write letters to me addressed as Dear Sir.  I get upset too when my female students believe that men are more superior than them. I get upset when my women students decide to leave all the decisions to the men of their family.  I get upset when my women students decide to get married and quit their studies because they have to follow their husband. I have no issues with their getting married but I wonder if they ever ask themselves or those who make decision for them that isn't their studies/career important too?
I worry what kind of role model my women colleagues and I are providing.  But then they see us struggling, they see us not getting the awards that we deserve, they see us sidelined, so why should they not believe that men are superior? 

Should young scientists hit the road?

There is a letter in Science by Mark S. Cohen wherein he argues that it is bad advice to ask young postdocs and graduate students to seek position in places other than their home institutes. Of course it is practice in US universities not to hire their own graduate/post-graduate students. The underlying opinion is that this prevents inbreeding and clique formation. Mark argues that young scientists should be encouraged to work where they are most productive and if it happens to be their home institutes, then they should be allowed to do so.  
Is Mark S. Cohen right?
In India it is the norm to hire our own graduate/post-graduate students. Only few institutes like CCMB have made it a policy not to hire their own graduate students. IISc too had a similar policy when Prof. Goverdhan Mehta was its director.  However, the departments were very unhappy and were waiting for Prof. Mehta to leave before reversing the policy.  I do not know the current policy at IISc.
Being in a place where the department has made it a norm to hire its own graduate/post-graduate students, I have seen the harm such appointments do.  Given the hierarchical nature of our education system where graduate students are never encouraged to question their teachers, hiring back our own students ensures that the policy decisions formulated by the senior faculty are never questioned. Further, it ensures that there is never any dissent. Also, there are no new ideas. there is no growth in terms of scientific ideas and outputs.  Worse, many of these faculty do not get out of their student mentality and fail to make the transition from student to faculty.
I have no problems if the students hired back as faculty are brilliant teachers/researchers. But very often the ones who are hired back are bad teachers and bad researchers.  Essentially the ones who are good sycophants are the ones who are hired back.
I sincerely believe that one of the reasons that India never made great strides in science/social science field is the inbreeding that we encouraged.

Ethical issues- What does CNR Rao case teach us?

Prof CNR Rao has been making headlines for the wrong reasons.  Of course he has told the newspapers that it was not his fault but the fault of the students.  I never had great opinion about Prof Rao, especially after I interviewed at JNCASR and met him for the first time, but this statement takes the cake!  Of course nothing much will come out of this. Prof. Rao is not going to reprimanded. The Indian Academy of Sciences has already issued a statement in support of CNRR. So is it even worth talking about ethical issues?  

I ask myself this question because every year I try to teach the M.Sc students about ethics in human genetics and  in research (I cover the plagiarism, acknowledgments, how to cite references).  However, what is the point if the scientists in India who hold positions like Advisor to the Prime Minister, President of various academies of sciences, Directors, Vice-chancellors etc condone transgression?  After all then the only message the new generation of scientists gets is that it is okay to indulge in unethical practices because there is going to be no punishment.

Unethical practices occur in other parts of the world too. But in the US, which is what I know most about, the punishment is severe enough to deter unethical practices. At least, the scientists know what would be the punishment if they are caught.  Here all we know is that even if you are caught nothing is going to happen.

Under such scenario, what do I teach my students?  This year has been extremely hard because I am dealing with a bunch of students who have no concept of right and wrong. Is it even worth the struggle?

Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011)

He was a molecular biologist and an Indian- the scientist who was pointed out to us when I was doing M.Sc. He had of course won the Nobel Prize also.  The work that he did was truly pioneering.  He devised the methodology to string individual nucleotides to create an oligonucleotide. This was important because scientists were trying to figure out the genetic code. The DNA is made of four kinds of nucleotides: A, G, T, and C. Their arrangement is critical.  Three nucleotides together define one amino acid. Strings of amino acid make a protein.  The other way to think about this is that the nucleotide are alphabets.  So if you had a soup of alphabets: T, H, A, E, F, O, X, and N, this could be rearranged to say:

THE FOX ATE THE HEN

Similarly, A, G, T, and C can be arranged to make cellular sense. So for example, if ATG occurs, then it means methionine. But if is written as AGT then it means serine. This is what Khorana figured out through a series of elegant experiments. And for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968.

When I moved to the University of Virginia, I did my first rotation with Mark Braiman, who incidentally had done post-doctoral work with Har Gobind Khorana. By then Khorana had moved on to understanding the role of rhodopsin amongst other things. They were using vibrational spectroscopy to map the conformational changes.  It was very interesting but it was simply too much mathematics and physics for me and so even though Mark wanted me to be in his lab, I decided not to join it. I knew my limitations.