Conversations with my brother

My brother is here! He came here for just three weeks. Before you know it, his trip is coming to an end and he is going back to India.

The best part of his trip was that I got to talk to him for 40 mins in the morning and forty minutes in the evening while driving to work and back (he became my carpool buddy, as his client was just 0.5 miles from my office!). Have not had a chance to talk to him this long in the last ten years where during our India trips, there would always be a lot of background noise, interruptions and just plain lack of opportunity for us to talk. After I got married and he got married and started families, it was pretty much impossible to talk.

There are only two guys who have that kind of rapport with me. The kind where you can finish the other persons sentence. My brother and Dr. Durga (who is currently absconding).

My brother does not read my blog. He thinks it is an abomination that should be stopped. "How can a person put such personal thoughts into free space?" he asks me. The only answer I give him is "Because, I can!". He nods his head in disbelief.

We have had our share of jokes. So here are some things that lightened my day.

Apparently they are opening a new saravana stores in Adyar which has the potential to clog the entire area. His fear was that it would take him 40 minutes to get from the steet to his house via Saravana Stores. When I asked him what this is all about his response "Do you know you can get anything, anything in Saravana stores? Their jingo should be "komanaththilirundhu Koorai pudavai mudhal anaiththum kidaikkum". ( கொமணத்தில் இருந்து கூரை புடவை முதல் அனைத்தும் கிடைக்கும்!) ie., We sell everything from a loin cloth to a wedding sari . That cracked me up.

When I picked him up outside his office, he kept waiting. A car was also waiting. Finally he crossed the road. I asked him why it took him so long to cross the road and he said "I was waiting Indian style for the car to go. He was waiting American style for the pedestrian to go! I still cannot get over the fact that people in cars wait for pedestrians here! It is just unbelievable." I just smiled.

Then we had a long long continued discussion over my being the only Ph.D. in the family( maternal) or the only one who is not in the IT field! He had an interesting concept that definitely did not strike me, till he put it that way. We did an analysis of the professions of our parents, uncles and aunts, and our professions and our cousins. In effect they are all doing the same jobs. Here is my excel spreadsheet summary..

If you notice one thing on my parents generation, everyone gravitated towards a Government Job! (My mother, her brother and four sisters all work(ed) for the government!)

My grandfather was a finance clerk and my grandma was a homemaker. They had six kids! They grew up in very difficult circumstances. They studied, and tried to get placed in the one job that guaranteed stability and financial security, a government job! When I graduated and wanted to come to the US to do my Ph.D., my uncle gave me a long lecture which started with

"Sundaram.. akkadannu oru bank exama ezhudinoma, sivanennu oru bank udhyogaththa paathundomannu irukkama ennaththukku da inda America Gimerica ellam? Avan chandra mandalaththukku aal anupparanam. Inge jananga sOthtukke vazhi illama thavikkaradhu! PaNatha vachchundu enna pannaradhunnu theriyaadha alayaraanunga, ange poi nee enna da panna pore! etc. etc." and the entire family pretty much pitched in with a "thatasathu" (which is along the lines of an Amen or Insallah or "so be it"!).

For those of you Tamizhs and non-Tamizhs here is the verbage and its english translation..

சுந்தரம், அக்கடானு ஒரு பேங்க் எக்ஸாம் எழுதினோமா, சிவனேன்னு ஒரு பேங்க் உத்யோகத்த பாத்துண்டோமானு இருக்காம என்னத்துக்குடா இந்த அமெரிக்கா கிமேரிக்கா எல்லாம்? அவன் சந்திர மண்டலத்துக்கு ஆள் அனுப்பரானாம்! இங்கே ஜனங்க சோத்துக்கே வழி இல்லாம தவிக்கறது! பணத்த வச்சுண்டு என்ன பண்ணறதுன்னு தெரியாத அலையறாங்க, அங்கே பொய் நீ என்ன டா பண்ண போறே ? ......

Sundaram, instead of simply writing a bank exam and settling down in a bank job, why do you need all this America Gimerica stuff? Americans are sending people to the moon, while people are dying of starvation here! They have a lot of money and don't know what to do with it. What are you going to do in a country like that? .....

It would always drive me nuts when people hold the ability to blend in with the crowd and being average, as some kind of virtue! As it so happened, I did not write a bank exam four years after getting through the IIT entrance and graduating with a B.Tech in Metallurgy, although it would have made the entire family proud. Thank god for small favors!

Lets come back to my brothers observation, which has to do with the N+2 generation. We were all raised in a lower middle class background where at least one or both parents were government servants, but the paychecks were not big, the houses were rented and anything that you did not need absolutely, you just did not get! We were trained to understand the financial circumstances of the family and were taught that if we wanted to at least have the standard of living that our parents had, we better start loving that big fat Bank exam book that our uncle and aunts used to use as pillows!

The funny thing was that there were people around us who were way more well to do than anyone in our family. They would never be used as role models or examples simply because they were in "risky" professions, were "probably" not earning an honest living simply by the amount of money they made, or branded as people who had "no respect for the right combination of money and values"!

Save for me, the rest of the siblings and cousins all got nice degrees in everything from BITS Pilani, REC Trichy, Venkateswara college, Crescent, Meenakshi, St. Josephs, etc. and they all write code for a living!

The bro's point being, given a choice my uncles and aunts would pass on their hard earned government jobs to their kids, were it not for the fact that most or all of their jobs are being replaced by Computers! In effect the N+2 has taken the job of the N+1. The bank tellers son is now writing the Log In screen for Citibank and the Auditors son is writing code for some International Auditing firm! Today's version of a teller job is an IT job! (this is strictly in context of the examples in this post. I am not generalizing all IT jobs as the logical evolution of the Clerical job from the previous generation).

If you think about it, it does make sense. In India's current job market, a job with Infosys, TCS, CTS, Wipro or HCL gives you the same sense of stability and financial security as the government jobs of State Bank, Indian Bank, Canera Bank, Syndicate Bank, Dena Bank of yore! In those days a "government job" meant a better mate in the arranged marriage system. Today the "IT" job has the same effect!

As for a Ph.D in Materials, it still sticks out like a sore thumb! The conversation now veers to "See, we can get jobs anywhere in the world. But can you have a semiconductor fab in India? Maybe in another 20 years. Maybe never! What is the use of doing all this work, if you cannot come back to India?" and I respond with "I am very happy with what I do here and have no plans to come back as of now! We will cross that bridge if we ever come to it."

It almost appears as though, yours truly doesn't speak the same "language" as the rest of the family!

If only I could converse with them in C++, assembly language or Java?!

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A pyramid of questions.

More questions on the doctorate, courtesy The Visitor.

Visitor : You said, having a doctorate helped you do things differently, as a result of the training that one gets while dong research. I presume that generalization is also one of the skills that grad students acquire along with their degree (a generalization?); so you could generalize about factors that entice students to go abroad for their studies?

Me : No. That is a skill I was born with! I have gotten in trouble so many times in the past for generalizing things. Every person has their reason. (Only reason that my logic sounds like generalization is because of poor use of statistics. The three Indian students who joined grad school at the beginning of the fall quarter were all Iyer boys from Madras! So the perception of the non-Indian grad students that year was generalized based on the three of us. The FOB Chinese grad student's idea of a desi dude was a Madrasi with thayir saadham in his lunch box. It is a bad idea to generalize, except for evoking humor.

Are the opportunities for a Ph.D from the West more than for a person with a Ph.D from India?

Me: It used to be. In the mid nineties, there was talks of a bill that would restrict hiring foreign grad students. It was probably more difficult for grad students from India to get jobs here. Don't know about things now. We will have to survey todays graduating class!

If getting a Professorship is more difficult in India than in the US, does it mean that the Indian professors are the best?

Me: Don't want to start a flame war in this blog, but now who is doing the generalization? Who said getting a Professorship in the US is easy? The politics here is as bad or worse than the politics in Indian Universities. You had to be a post doc for a few years, get another Ph.D on Suckuptology and eventually could become a professor, do the publish or perish thing and dream of that magical six letter word "tenure"! Changed my mind after seeing some old friends have fun in R&D labs, without worrying about "tenure".

A related observation/opinion (mine)-the IITs, IISc and BHU (you could also include the IIMs) are 'good' because of the quality of students and is not necessarily related to the quality of the faculty. Of course the faculty in these institutes may be the best in India.

Me: It is the faculty and the students. The faculty are good at motivating the kids at a time when they are easily influenced. Most of these kids have the same drive when it comes to competition!

Now a hypothetical question: Had you done your Ph.D from India, what would you be doing now? (multiple perceived endpoints are allowed).

Me: I am tempted to say something along the lines of "The verger at St. Peters!". I will refrain from a smartass answer. I would have probably ended up working for the government in some research facility. Would not have lasted as a chai driking post-doc for four five years!

Now a bonus question for anyone who would answer!

I know how difficult it is these days to hire an Indian grad student who has just finished a Ph.D, what with the H1 quota, DHS rules etc.

What does the employment scene for Ph.D's from Indian Universities look like today?

I cannot wait to post pics and videos of the little ones tomorrow. Enough talk about the past!

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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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