Training day

When I said, Jr. is going to be trained "Jason Bourne style", I was not kidding!

What deserves mention is that daddy fails in this game 50%. Jr. fails 15-20% !

I might actually fail Kindergarten today!

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The under age kid

History has a tendency to repeat itself, over and over and over again. I guess that is one reason why it is still taught to people, so they would learn from the past and move towards a better future.

This is also counteracted by the ability of human beings to forget things quickly and get on with life.. the same life that people got on with a few decades ago and by extrapolation a few centuries ago..

It is true that todays Cyclotrons are a lot more complicated that the proverbial "wheel" invented a long time ago, but have we really come that far in learning from history?

People still kill each other, go take things forcefully from others if they lack a certain resource (it used to be gum arabic, silk, spices, gold, diamonds, now it is oil!) and continue to ignore the past.

All that, was the cynic in me talking. This post is more about something happening in our life right now. Jr. who is a November child, just like her daddy, is having attention issues in school. She is an extremely smart and intelligent kid and is easily distracted, just like her daddy and she does tend to walk into the occasional wall, just like her grandma!

We had a meeting with her teacher who gave us a detailed report card for the Kindergardener and said "she has trouble following my instruction. She keeps looking at what the other kids are doing and cannot focus". She went on to explain how she is the youngest in her class and how it is going to pose problems for her because some of her classmates are 14 months older.

San promptly cut in and said "hubby here was in 2nd grade at Jr.'s age". Being the sincere daddy, I went on to explain to the teacher that I had the same problems. I never went to kindergarten and was directly thrown into first grade at age 4 and finished school at 16 and college at 20 and was in gradschool before I could legally drink in the US. I also told her that my social life wasnt exactly stellar because "having no moustache when graduating high school" was an issue, but I never had any problems with academics.

At this point, the teacher must have seen very clearly why Jr. is distracted (talking to her daddy for 5 minutes would explain that) and asked me "so do you have any suggestions to improve Jr.'s focus?".

Daddy said "Eureka! I know exactly what they did when I was in first and second grade". They moved me to the first row so all I saw was the teacher and the blackboard. Nothing to distract me.

The teacher said, well.. in the US, we used to do that only to kids who were troublemakers. In any case we do not have rows in the classroom till 3rd or 4th grade. We have them sit around circular desks in groups of 4 or 5 so they can learn the value of teamwork!

Where do you sit then, and where is the blackboard ? I asked.

Apparently there is no thing like a blackboard and the teacher moves around the classroom as she gives instructions to kids.

Hmm.. let's see here. You are trying to focus on a certain voice trying to give you an instruction and you have to execute on it. This might also involve looking at a piece of paper or an object that is in the teachers hand and you have to do something on your desk based on that. What would be easier. A fixed location for the teacher directly in front of the student or a moving teacher who could sometimes be talking from your right, left, or even behind you..

Bah!!!! I said and walked out.

Really love the teachers, their enthusiasm and their passion.. but I know myself and based on history and some genetic extrapolation, my kid, and there are no surprises on why she cannot focus. First we need to learn focus on stationary targets before we can focus on the moving targets!

Bah!!! Bah!!! Bah!!!

Now I am going to train Jr. Jason Bourne style on how to follow instructions from a moving daddy..

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The doctoral West

It was the late eighties. A bunch of mostly Brahmin kids from middle class families attending a Central Board English medium school, in the heart of Madras (Chennai). The school, which has come a long way today, could be termed an "agraharam school" in those days. As part of the school chores was "pooja duty", where kids who had been initiated with their Upanayanam ceremony would perform the priestly duties for the Ganesha Temple, on campus. Let us just say that yours truly, a.k.a. "Sandhana Pottu Sundaram", could not have been more at home in any other school environs, considering his family background and upbringing!

In what way does this relate to the title of this post? Everything and nothing!

Nothing, because that innocent kid in me, did not know much about doctoral degrees, save for the fact that one of his older cousins was in the USA doing a doctorate. In fact I used to think that this cousin of mine was becoming a doctor (like in all Tamizh movies they say MBBS, FRCS, London .. etc.).

Everything because, in a turn of events that were unusual by my internal standards, but usual for similar middle class kids at that time, did end up doing a PhD in a western country.

Now before we proceed further, another note. This post is the serious response to this article. I am not going to generalize the attaction for the western education. This is my personal take on the "doctoral" quest.

Out of my 26 high school mates, I do not know how many actually went on to finish their Ph.D's. I am sure there are at least 3 and one of them is a professor. Of the 28 people who changed my life during my Undergraduate degree in IT-BHU, only two of us went for a doctoral degree. I went on to do R&D in a semiconductor company and my Chai partner has been trying to study the impact of colliding Kryptons with Leprechauns to see if we get super dwarfs, at Fermi Lab for 15 years now (D., I could not resist the joke. I do believe that what you do is fantastic!). Now that those stats are out of the way, I should address the two important questions: Why do a PhD, in the first place? and Why do it in a Western country when it could be done in India?

The doctorate was a means to an end. An ever changing end that did not need the means! I have failed miserably in my attempts to explain this to my mother over the last 15 years. So, I start writing, with lowered expectations.

I cried and threw tantrums just to join IIT coaching classes in high school! My mom did not like the thought of her darling son riding a bicycle from Mandaveli to Mambalam, what with the high instance of PTC(public transport) buses knocking down kids in those days! Grandpa convinced her otherwise. I joined simply because my other classmates used to show off their cyclostyled Balu class homework sheets during lunch breaks! All those neat arrowmarks, greek symbols and force diagrams did me in!

After I went to BHU, I was not interested in going abroad. My uncle was convincing me to start a small scale industry using my metallurgy B.Tech. Once again, it was those damn "word power made easy", Wilfred Funk and this other word book (I don't know the exact title but one of the authors was a Rosenthal or Rosenblum?) that did me in this time. Every Tom, Dick and Harry would be carrying copies of these books to Bihari's chai shop! There were two types of second year students, ones with the word power books in one hand and chai in the other and the others holding their chai glass with both their hands. You tell me, what would a boy in my position do? Naturally, I finished that word power book in one week after borrowing it from a buddy, and actually loved it.

By third year, I decided that these word power books were boring and went on to memorize the CED. I had gotten to page 81 in a month and finished the letter A, when I realized that the dictionary could wait, but the B.Tech. degree would not! At this point, the professors who influenced me the most (the mostly nostalgic idealists who lived in the past and told me stories of how in the absence of photocopiers in the good old days, a group of 8 students copied an entire book from a US visitor overnight in the dorm room.... you get the picture!), convinced me that I should stay in India and do something for the country by either starting a small plant or do my PhD in India and become a professor in the very same department. Yet again, peer pressure and the fear of the unknown forced me to go on and write the GRE.

By my final year, I had written every entrance exam there was to write. It was like a wave and you just got carried with it. Once you jump in, the momemtum of the crowd just carries you though, just like how San describes getting in and out of Bombay trains. You declare your intent to apply for higher studies in the US, and before you know it, you are in meetings where your relative test scores and grades are compared with your classmates and they are discussing clashes when it comes to applying to US universities. I had added oil to a well oiled piece of machinery.

While the deciding factor for most, to tick "YES" on the "Ph.D ?" box, was that it meant assured funding compared to applying for a Masters degree, I ticked this in hopes of actually doing a PhD. This had to do with many chai sessions with junior faculty, who were PhD's and had post doctoral work from BHU, IISc, Oxford (some of these dudes went on to become professors and HOD's). Thanks to their bitching sessions over a friendly cup of tea, I figured out that the waiting list to become a professor in our own department was long and many had become frustrated and gone back to the West or to the Industry after giving up their teaching/research dreams! They also hinted that the wait would be a little shorter if I had a PhD from abroad (32.5 years vs. 44.7 years and I liked the data at the time).

So the offer to do a MS at IIT Madras and the two local job offers were dropped in favor of a PhD program in the USA! It was actually a tough choice financially and emotionally. It was not seen as an easy way out from a doing the PhD perspective. It was only seen as an easy way out for becoming a professor, in India! At that time, I seriously thought that doing a Ph.D. in India would be easier than doing it in the US! Hindsight tells me that it would have been a lot more difficult, just going by the number of pages of printouts I took during my grad school years. Also, text searches on online library catalogs here in the US were much faster than the manual cross referencing we did for our undergraduate project! Just the literature search alone would have taken me an extra year in India. (Now the internet has leveled this difference! but remember, there was no www when I started my degree).

And now to finally answer my mom's question. "Sari, PhD pannarennu ponE. Professor aaga porennu sonne. Professor aaga ishtam illena, mootaiya kattindu thirumbi inge vara vendiyadhu dhane? Inge eththanaiyo college thirakkara. Evanaavadhu oru velai kudukka maattaana enna? Onnum illena Balu Sir aatum IIT coaching class nadaththu!"

(okay, you went to do a PhD to become a professor. Now that you are not one, why not pack your bags and come back to India? They are opening a lot of colleges here. Won't someone here give you a job? worse case, you can start teaching IIT coaching classes like Balu Sir!")

Life just takes you through a lot of paths, that you were not planning on going through! At least, it has been true for me. I like what I do for a living and actually enjoy it.

Would I have ended up doing this without a PhD ? Maybe not, it was part of my first job requirement!

Do I do things differently at work because I did a PhD ? Definitely. I have a different way of approaching problems (perspective, timeframe, complexity, documentation!) simply because of my experiences while doing the doctoral research and more importantly, writing a thesis. (Would actually recommend Master's students who have a thesis option, to take that option!)

Could I not come and teach coaching classes in Chennai? Sure I could, but do not know if I will be happy doing that!

In summary, I can point to lots of things, but it is mostly a middle class dude's aspiration to compete and show that he is capable of doing what is considered the best thing to do(at that time and place) that put me where I was over all those years! Just my take...

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Knowledge is power ?

Has been a busy week, with more work, a conference in San Francisco and the usual happenings at home. I have been attending this conference almost every year for the last 13 years! This conference is usually a week long event. I get to attend it for two or three days every year. Ever since I started working, even those two days are marred by frequent phone calls and beeps on my pager. In spite of the interruptions, I feel so alive at this conference. I get to listen to the latest and greatest breakthroughs in my field of research, meet people who have similar interests, and get to overload my brain with all the information.

The hour long drive to and from San Francisco also helps clear my head and give me time to process the information. Yesterday I met an old friend and the conversation steered towards education. On the way back from the conference, my thought process was wandering around

education
why I did not become a professor
India
Brahmins
Importance to Knowledge
Aaavani Avittam
BHU
Mandal commission
reservations
affirmative action
research
white LED's
Nakamura
% success in Research projects
funding
policy
role of policy in education

and after going through a full circle I just realized I was just tired and the little hamster insdie my head needed some sleep!

But a couple of thoughts were stuck there for some time.

What Aavani Avittam ceremony is supposed to do for me and fails, this conference does! All Brahmin boys, renew their commitment to the learning process once every year at this ceremony. I do that ceremony mechanically because I am not well versed in Sanskrit or study Vedas and Upanishads for a living. I do love learning though! This week has been an extended Aavani Avittam for me! I get to meet the high priests of materials engineering, chat and debate with fellow researchers and realize the value of what I do for a living!

A second train of thought was that somehow in the back of my mind, I do always feel that the caste systems successful survival and stubborness to be eradicated in India has to do with how it makes people believe that they are special. More specifically Brahmins are proud of their commitment to learning or their belief of "knowledge is power". I am not discriminatory by nature and I am definitely not elitist or snobish because I am a brahmin. However, I have made statements in the past of how proud I am to believe that "knowledge is power" and that is somehow a very Brahmin thing to believe! I also realized that every caste tries to one up the others by making their speciality a secret. If brahmins believed that Knowledge is power, the right thing to do would have been to spread knowledge and empower everyone. Yet we know only a handful of people like Sankara, Ramanuja went along those lines. The vast majority decided to keep education to themselves and their clan and made the rest of the population dependent on them to even read and write! I could say similar things about all other castes except the poorest and lowest castes who by default got the shaft from everyone else.

I also keep thinking about how researchers are confronting politicians in faith vs science debates today, similar to the power struggle dynamics between Brahmins and the Kshatriyas.

It would have been great if everyone knew how to read and write, everyone was well versed in martial arts or had self defense skills, everyone knew how to trade and do business and of course everyone knew how to wash their own clothes, clean their own toilets or cut their own hair!! or at the least have a mutual respect for every other profession and professional!!

The hamster is on overdrive and needs to rest! Enough rambling....

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