Citizens March

On Saturday, 23rd November, there was a citizen's march from Mandi House to Parliament Street. It was supposed to be till Parliament but we were stopped just before the Parliament Street Police Station.

I participated. It was spur of the moment decision.  I had planned to surrender my landline that day but when my friend asked whether I would like to join, I decided I had to do it.  The landline can be surrendered any other day but showing solidarity with the students did not come every day.

I would like to add some caveats here: I belong neither to the Left nor to the Right.  As another friend of my mine put it, I just am with what I believe is right (as opposed to wrong).  I will also add here that the continued lock down of the School/University administration fills me with apprehension.  I do not see a plan B or a way out of the impasse. I also do not think there should be only one fee structure for everyone but that can be debated later.

Hopefully, things will resolve this week.  I fervently hope so.

Back to the March.

Our students were there. So were many teachers. And many ex-students. There were students from other Universities.  I was delighted to see AIIMS- very unexpected-but they were there with a banner.
Talking of banners, there were some very delightful ones including one that said "To count condoms also one needs Education."  A very nice dig at those who said that condoms are found everywhere in JNU.
The police/CRPF were there.  But nothing much happened. We marched and came to halt near the Parliament Street Police Station.  A dais had been put up and the student leaders gave speech.
My friend and I decided to grab lunch and return home.

On the way home the autorickshaw driver said that he supported us because we were right.  If the prices increase, he asked, how will I provide education to my children.

In reality, school education is a right whereas higher education is a privilege.  In the US, school education is free and compulsory.  There are private schools but only the rich can afford them.  Everyone else just sends their children to the government schools.  Higher (college) education is expensive. There are scholarships and many students do end up taking college loan that they have to repay.  Also, not many end up taking college education.  They have other choices in terms of community colleges.

Of course in India everything is complicated by economy, patriarchy, religion, and caste. Neither school education nor higher education is accessible to many sections of the society. We need to make both accessible.

The fee hike in JNU

Yesterday my cousin called me and asked am I okay?  Given the fact that JNU was in turmoil, she was worried about my well-being.

Over the past 14 years, I have learnt one thing about JNU: Our student never resort to violence against their teachers.  I have never seen them doing harm to the teachers.  Despite all the turmoil and all the protests, our students are attending classes.  Protests and learning happens hand in hand.

The current turmoil/protest is over the fee hike and changes in the hostel manual-both of which was done without consultation with the students.  The changes in the hostel manual regarding the timings and curfew has been dropped but only after the students protested and the MHRD intervened.  It needs to be pointed out the HRD minister talked to the students on the day of convocation and assured them that he will look into the matter.  The 50% cut for the BPL students was, in fact, first tweeted by the MHRD Secretary.

So let us look into the fee hike. 
1. The room rent has been hiked from Rs 10 per month for a double seater to Rs 300 per month.  The room rent for a single seater has been hiked from Rs 20 per month to Rs 600 per month.  
2. The mess bill is as per the actual and ranges from Rs 2500 to Rs 2800 per month.
3. There used to be charges for utilities (electricity and water) but now the students will be charged as per the actual consumption.  As no numbers are available, we cannot make a guess as to how much this will be.
4. There will be also a service charge which will cover the salary of mess works, santitation staff and all other personnel.  In the draft, it was put as Rs 1700 (as per actual) per month.  In the EC meeting, this was modified to as per actual.  So this will come to Rs 1700 per month.
5. Then there other charges like security deposit of Rs 5500 (In the draft this had been increased to Rs 12000 but in the EC meeting this was reduced back to Rs 5500).   There is an Establishment charges of Rs 1100 per semester.  Rs 250 per year is charged for utensils and Rs 50 per year is charged for newspaper.
6. Therefore, the total costs now comes to about Rs 75,000 per year without the utility charges for a double seater.  The room rent, service charges and mess bill will add up to about Rs 5000 per month plus the utility charges for a double seater.

A student who belongs to the BPL category and does not have any fellowship will pay 50% of the charges.  Everyone else will pay the fees as laid out in the new manual.

What the students are protesting about:

1.  First,  how will the poor students pay these charges?  It has been partially addressed by giving 50% concession to students belonging to BPL families. However, the devil is always in the detail.  How will the University define a student belonging to BPL?  This has been elaborated in this article: https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/who-are-jnu-s-bpl-students-who-get-50-concession/story-zEWLc4FWsNL8exOoNK2ZCO.html


2. Second, the students are asking why should we pay for the services?  Of course, we all know.  It is openly whispered around that mess workers, sanitation workers, and the supporting staff are going to be privatized.  Therefore, the money for these people is going to come from the students.  There is also an hidden clause.  Obviously, the salary for the workers will be increased every year and therefore, the service charge will go up every year.  The students are objecting to this proposition.  This is, in fact, the main point of contention.

3. Third, the hike is going to be implemented with the present batch of students.  Many of them are saying that introduce the hike from the next batch.  At least the students who are joining will know the exact cost and they can make an informed decision.  The way it is implemented now will lead to lot of hardship. 

The maximum affected will be girl students from the poorer sections of the society. In fact, one of MSc students, who is really good and asks interesting questions in the class, told me that she cannot afford the costs and she will have to quit.  I was stunned. It was at that point I realized the extent of the problem.

Most of us agree that the room rent needs to be hiked.  None of us support the vandalism that the students restored to.  They had no right to destroy public property.  The least they can do is to clean it up.

However, there is a caveat:  I really wish that the administration had not taken away their spaces for posters.  The walls of JNU used to be alive with posters- some of them were exceedingly good.  But the administration declared that posters can only put on notice boards specific for that purpose.  The walls are now dead.  There is anger on that issue too.  There are other issues too that the students are upset about.

The net result is that:

Every thing boiled over.  And I do not know where it will end.

  

Of this and that in JNU

Things are little funny at the moment.
The administration asked for the CVs of all emeritus professors who had crossed the age of 75.  For once I was very happy that Prof. Asis Dutta took a stand and refused to send his CV to the administration.  Exactly who is going to evaluate the CV of Prof. Asis Dutta or Prof. Romila Thapar?  It is so silly.
And then the administration decided to dig out the JNU hostel manual and implement it in toto.  Of course time limits are mentioned in the hostel manual but should not the administration pause for a moment and ask itself whether the Ph.D. scholars are children?  As for the dress code, the only thing I can conclude is that we love to show our power and authority.  Dress codes, especially for women, are very popular across Colleges and Universities in India.  How else can a patriarchial society control its women?
When I look at the girls, I feel pang of envy for they have so much dress choices.  Things were limited when I was growing up.  Of course the saree had gone out of fashion amongst my peers.  But the choice really was only salwar- kameez and occasional pants.  Very few girls wore pants.  All my friends wore salwar-kameez.
When I was working at Center for Biotechnology, Chennai, in 1990s, a colleague one day told us about her niece taking swimming lessons.  In the end she said, it is good, you know, because she is comfortable wearing the swim suit.  I cannot do it because there are so many inhibitions but she has no such inhibitions. I am so happy for her.
When I see students wearing shorts, I feel the same that there were so many inhibitions that we grew up with that it is so nice to see girls exercising their choice with respect to the clothes.
Of course, the administration might not see it that way.
And finally, of course, our alumnus got the Nobel Prize.  It is very instructive to know that he, along with a group of students, did gherao the VC when he was a student.

A Time Elsewhere- J.P. Das

This year, thanks to my frequent travels, I have been able to read many books.  Some good and some bad.  This one is mediocre and I am not sure whether it is because it has been translated from Oriya and thus, has lost its original flavor or not.
The original title of the book is Desh Kaal Patra and the translation has been done by Jatindra K. Nayak.
The Introduction says that A Time Elsewhere seeks to present the history of modern-day Orissa (the British Occupied the territory in 1803)from the point-of-view of the colonized.
It starts with the death of the king of Puri, Birakeshari, in 1859.  He is childless but before his death he adopts the son of the king of Khemandi, who is, of course, minor  This son, Divyasingh Dev, inherits the throne but Queen Suryamani, wife of Birakeshari, rules on his behalf.   The king of Puri is the head of the Puri Jagannath Temple and administrator of its affairs.  Divyasingh Dev turns out to a be an unsavoury character who culminates his long career with a murder and is banished to the Andamans. His son, Mukund Dev, turns out to be like his father and thus, the affairs of the temple spiral out of control.  Queen Suryamani, who observess the purdah, fights to retain the control of the temple affairs and succeeds with the help of the wily lawyer, Madhusudan Babu.  Interspersed in this story is the 1866 famine of Orissa which the British handled by their inaction leading to death of one-third of the population.
I wish J.P. Das had stuck to this story.
Instead, as he tries to present a sweeping history of the state from 1859 to 1907 in a journal format, the story is lost in the multitude of the happenings.  Topics and people are introduced and abandoned making it very difficult to keep track of what is happening.  The blurb in the back says that in the book history and fiction come together but what I could gather (or probably has been translated) is the history of the state.
Of course, I got to know the leading poets and writers in Oriya and found that my brother does have a book by Fakir Mohan Senapati.  Something to read when I get time.

Lab Girl- Hope Jahren

Hope Jahren is a geochemist and geobiologist. The book is her memoir and is divided into three parts.  The first part traces her childhood to becoming a scientist.  The second part traces her growth as an independent researcher and the third part is where she marries and becomes a mother.  The chapters of her personal quest are interspersed with chapters on plants.
I have mixed feeling about the book.  I purchased the book about 3 years back and found I could not go beyond the first few chapters.  This time I finished the book while traveling between Chennai and Delhi.  Airplanes are good for reading.
The chapters on plants are just fantastic.  I learned a lot.  I learnt about the way trees can communicate, the way they combat infection, the way they grow- there are minor quibbles like when she says DNA is a protein.  But I can live with it for the sheer exuberance she exudes when she talks about plants.  It is so infectious.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about her personal journey.  Half-way through the book, I kept on asking why did she choose to become a geologist?  What motivated her to pick that subject rather than the usual route of botany given her love for plants.

All the figures in her life her shadowy- I did not get any sense of her family or her relationship with them.  Once she leaves home, they are left behind too.  The same happens with her advisor.  The only figures that does stand out is Bill, who is her lab manager and fellow adventurer.

I also do not agree with her that laboratory is your life.  And that one has to spend more than 18 hours in a lab to be successful or to be counted as scientist.  I have a lab and I have a life.  The two are separate.  It is possible to have a lab and do lots of things outside the lab.  One of my students recently asked me whether it was necessary to spend so many hours in the lab and if she did her Ph.D. will she still have to time to read books and do other things.  My answer was an emphatic No, you do not have to spend all your life in the and Yes, you will have time to do all the things you love while doing Ph.D.  It is, infact, essential to have a life outside the lab. It is all a matter of proportion. 

Of course, it is quite true that by not putting in all-nighters  or working for 18 hours a day I have also not had the kind of success that she has or won the kind of awards that she has.  So I guess it evens out.

Why I use Sci-Hub

Journals publishing scientific articles come in two flavours: i) the open access journals where the researcher pays a fee to the journal on acceptance of the article; and ii) the older traditional model where the researcher do not pay the journal any fee but if a person wants to access the article, they have to pay a fee.  Generally, universities pay the journals a fee that makes the articles accessible to their scientists.
The articles published in open access journals are freely available to every one because the author(s) have paid the journal.  There is huge push for scientists to publish in open access journals but it is associated with a hefty fee.  In India, no agency gives us a publication money.  If we want to publish in an open access journal, then the payment comes out of our overhead or our consumable.  In JNU, we have been lucky so far because the University got large grants which could be used for publication fee.
In contrast, the journal that follow the traditional model are not freely available to every one.  Unless the University pays the journal, it is a closed door.  The problem is that the fee charged by the journals to access their content is exorbitantly expensive.  The other problem is that most of the research is actually funded by the taxpayer and yet, it is unavailable to them.
Till last year, we were one of those lucky Universities in India that was able to subscribe to many traditional journals.  That stopped last year. Since last year we have had no access to the traditional journals because the University  does not have money to pay them. 
So what do I do if I want to read an article published in the traditional journal like Journal of Biological Chemistry?
I turn to Sci-Hub, the website that provides all such articles for free.  I do not know how these articles are accessed by the owner of the website but I do know I am grateful for it.  The traditional journal do not like Sci-Hub for obvious reasons and of course, it is a copyright violation.  I know it. I also know that it is not correct but I have no choice. Not unless traditional journals make available their contents to all scientists.Or the University finds money to subscribe to these journals once more.

The emperor of all maladies- Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think this is an appropriate post for World cancer Day.

I purchased the book couple of years back in the Book Fair and it languished in my book shelf (rather on my bed) as I found one excuse after another to read it.  But with my mother not well, I have been going back and forth between Delhi and Chennai and the book was perfect for the airplane.

The emperor of all maladies is of course Cancer and Siddhartha Mukherjee takes us through a journey spanning centuries.  The journey starts with leukemia and the discovery of the first set of chemotherapeutics- a starring role is played by  Yellapragada Subbarow whom I know as the person behind Fiske-Subbarow method for estimating phosphate (I spent my Ph.D. days measuring phosphate released from ATP hydrolysis using this very technique).  Then there was of course Gertrude Elion who synthesized a huge number of drugs for treatment of leukemia and for which she was awarded Nobel Prize.  The landscape shifts to sold tumors, especially breast cancer.  The earliest treatments were radical surgery that eventually gave way to surgery augmented with chemotherapy.  Discovery of X-rays by Roentgen paved the way for radiation treatment to destroy tumors.

What causes cancer?  Carcinogens versus virus theory.   And finally, the discovery of proto-oncogenes or genes present within our genome that help the cell to grow and divide.  When these become rogue due to mutations or changes in sequences, they lead to the transformation of a normal cell into a cancer cell.

But stuck me most as I read through the book was the stellar role played by individuals- doctors, professional fund raisers, activists- in this journey.  They pushed the political establishment (Government) to not only establish/provide funds for cancer research but also pushed for prevention as well as cure.  This is something that we do not see in India.  The nearest example would be polio campaign that successive governments pushed for and we now have been declared polio-free.  But the kind of activism that Mary Lasker and Sidney Farber pushed or the campaign that occurred during AIDS epidemic (something that stuck me when I read And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts) is not something we see in India.  I do not see celebrities, newspapers, television, scientists doing these kinds of campaign in India.  It is not that causes are not taken up- they are taken up and dropped very quickly. There is no sustained campaign.  There is no pushing the government.  Even during the Nipah virus epidemic in Kerala, there was no sustained campaign to ensure that money is given for research in this area.  Ultimately, that hurts the science in India. 

Coromandel- Charles Allen

Last Saturday I visited the book fair and purchased many books.  Coromandel by Charles Allen was one of them and I read it on the flight to Chennai on Tuesday.  I picked up the book because I had read a review/excerpt in Scroll.  It was a delightful read.

Charles Allen prefaces it as a personal history and those who pick up the book to read about the various dynasties- Cholas, Pallavas, Vijayanagara, the Nayak Kings- are going to be disappointed.  The book instead follows on who were the original inhabitants of the South India (Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana, and Kerala).  So to my delight it picked up at Pothigai  or the hill of Agastya that is located in Tirunelveli, our native place. There are many legends involving Agastya- both the North and South claim him to be theirs. 

He then moves on to the origin of written language and how Ashoka helped in the propogation of the written script- Brahmi- which possibly is the originator of both the North and South languages.
If we talk about Ashoka, Buddhism and Jainism cannot be far behind.  So the spread of these two religions in the South India is discussed.  The revival of Hinduism- Shankaracharya- led to the disappearance of both these religions (Hindus, very cleverly, of course said that Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu and adopted many of their practices, including vegetarianism).

A short detour into Orissa- Puri Jagannatha temple- to talk about how the older Buddhist and Jain shrines were appropriated by Hindus  either forcibly or because they were abandoned with the decline of these two religions. I liked this chapter because it made me think a little bit.  Our family deity is Yegnanarayana, a form of Vishnu (never mind that we are not Vaishnavites),  in a small place called Perunkulum.  The  deity is formless.  Only his foot prints are there in the temple.  Now the early Buddhists worshiped aniconic form- Buddha's footprints for example.  It made just me wonder.

The arrival of Islam- not across the Himalayas- but as traders from Yemen and Arabia coming to Malabar coast.  The intermingling was encouraged for two reasons- one because the caste taboos prevented Hindus from carrying out trade across the sea and secondly because they brought with them horses.  I also did not know that the oldest mosque of India exists in Kodungallur, Kerala.

Finally, he ends with the recent spate of rigid Hinduism.  I just want to end the post with the quotation from Ashoka's edict that appears in the book, which I think is needed at the juncture we are as a country:

"Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion and condemns others with the thought 'Let me glorify my religion' only harms his own religion."