Landour Days by Ruskin Bond

It all started with a book that I purchased at the airport en route to Chennai in December. The bookcover was fascinating- it was covered with flowers, a lady sitting in the middle, and a boy standing near her. The title of the book was "The Prospect of flowers" written by Ruskin Bond. I will confess. I purchased the book solely for the cover as I had already ready the short story "The valley of flowers" in Reader's Digest long back. I had loved that story.  The volume contained some stories that I had not read before including "The Blue Umbrella" that was made into a movie by Vishal Bhardwaj.
I went on to purchase two more books- Rusty Runs Away and Landour Days- at the book fair.
I like Ruskin Bond because of the language he uses (simple not convulated) and the stories he tells of people you and me meet every day on the streets. Sure some of the stories are recycled.  The Prospect of Flowers was also present in Rusty Runs Away as an incident that happens to Rusty.  I also felt Rusty was semi-autobiographical, a story of a school boy who is an orphan for all practical purposes. He has a guardian whom he dislikes He is sent to a boarding school and the book tells of his adventures.  It ends with Rusty leaving the guardianship and striking out on his own. It is set in the pre-partition India and the most evocative story was the friendship between Rusty and Omar.  On partition, Omar moves to Pakistan and dies in India-Pakistan war.
The final book that I read was Landour Days. I read this book sitting in the UGC office while waiting for my turn to present before the committee. Ruskin Bond is an inveterate dairy writer and I enjoyed his reflections.  The best part of the book was his musing on Landour, the writers who flock there, the houses built by the colonists that are empty and decaying now, John Lang-the lawyer to the Rani of Jhansi- who is buried there, and a gentle pace of life that is missing in the cities.

UGC M.Phil/Ph.D guidelines 2016

The new guidelines for M.Phil/Ph.D are in and woe betide any university/institute that does not follow these guidelines.  We have been breaking our heads over the guidelines for the past few weeks. At the outset let me state that some of the guidelines do make sense given the way Ph.D. degrees are handed out but if the UGC thought that the new guidelines will make our Ph.D. system more accountable and productive they are way off the mark.  While the entire guidelines can be accessed at the UGC site, I will just point out the most problematic one out here at least for the scientists:

"All students will be admitted to M.Phil program only. They have to do 2 years M.Phil and then only can go for Ph.D.  Further, to complete the M.Phil program successfully, they need  course work and one paper.  Peer-reviewed." 

I do not know whether to laugh or cry.  Our students do course work the first two semester. The first semester is tough and they spend their time in the class room and in the lab, learning the techniques. They start working in the lab in the next semester. But they also have to write a term paper and present a paper.  So the time spent in the lab is not sufficient to generate any data.  They really start working only from the Summer break.  It takes a student (all of us went through the same thing) at least two years to understand what we are doing. The first few experiments always fails.  A hypothesis starts forming somewhere in the third year.  The speed picks up in the fourth year and by the fifth year, you have a paper written up. Then you start plugging the loop holes, you submit it for review, the reviewers ask for more experiments, you do it, and somewhere towards the end the fifth year, a paper in a fairly good journal gets published.  So how does the UGC expect a good publication from a M. Phil student?  On one hand they want to categorize journals and want us to publish in good ones (there are incentives built in for promotions) and on the other hand you are going to force us to publish half-baked work in shoddy journals.

The students are freaking out.  The faculty is upset.  But who is listening?  If a student does Ph.D from India and wants a faculty job, they need a certificate stating that all the rules and regulations were adhered to at the time of award of degree. The administration will not issue such a certificate unless we adhere to the norms.

So there it is. I do not know what will happen in the coming days. All I know is that it is scary.