"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.

Biotechnology-the bane of Indian education

We are very fond of fancy words. It took me two years of M.Sc to realize that I should have never done biotechnology because I did not learn anything and forgot everything about chemistry. It took me one year of hard work before I was confident to appear in subject GRE. It is a different matter that I did manage to get 98 percentile and that UVa offered me a PhD seat based solely on that score.

As I sat through one more year of PhD interviews and listened to students telling us that they had done biotechnology in B.Sc and M.Sc, I felt throttling the person who dared to perpetrate this bad joke on the Indian Universities. Every one offers Biotech and all possible variations of Biotech. In addition, there is a B.Sc Biochemistry, B.Sc Microbiology and all other sorts of fancy courses. These students know nothing of biochemistry, or chemistry, or physics, or math, or biology. In fact they know nothing!

Today I was at National Institute of Plant Genome Research (some time later I will spew out my rants on Institutes)as an external examiner. The objective was the same- select candidates for PhD program.

Some of the students who attended the interview had done biochemistry and knew about enzymes. Now enzymes are catalysts. They bind to a particular compound called substrate and help it to be converted into a product. The affinity of an enzyme for a particular substrate is constant. However, the rate of reaction is altered. So my question was very simple: If you keep the enzyme concentration constant and vary the substrate concentration, you will get saturation at a particular point. From this graph, you can calculate the affinity of the substrate for the enzyme. Next, what will happen if you increase or decrease the concentration of the enzyme.

Not a single student knew what would happen.

We are mean at times. We take pot shots at them. We expect them to know the very basics like how to make solutions. What is 1M solution and how will you make it? What is a buffer?

The student knows all about hi-fi techniques- the latest in the field. But none of them know what is a buffer, the very basis of a laboratory reaction.

What does one do?