What a lifetime in science is like: some recollections and observations

I wonder what I will say this evening that will make a mark on young minds. I must first and foremost say that I am or hope that I still am the child that I was in those formative years as a child. As Picasso said, as a child I used to paint as a grown-up, and as an adult I have tried all my life to paint like a child. It is a child that is imbued with curiosity about the world, and is filled with a wonder and an urge to know what is what. Every color, every sound, every smell is new and wondrous. To a child every adult is a repository of knowledge, or experience and of learning. In the field in which I work, it turns out that every stage one relives the experience of the child. To me this is the greatest aspect of being in the field of research and science about which I have been charged with the responsibility to speak to you about. In the era of YouTube (the CEO of which Susan Wojicki by the way is the daughter of a particle physicist Stanley) and of TedX talks, what is one more talk? Why one more? Why here? I am not using projection facilities for a reason. I learnt from Patrick Winston a professor from MIT who gave several talks on how to give talks has emphasized, and ever since I first heard him, it became obvious that we have only one language processor. If you are seeing and reading something, you do not hear the speaker, and vice versa. That is why today I decided that if I am to make a mark on you, it is only through the auditory channel. Of course you will watch me and my every gesture and every nuance, and I hope that you will take something away.

A friend of mine who works in the publishing industry in Delhi told me that Indian students like to read even technical books written by Indian authors. This struck me as something unusual, or something that I had not thought of. I think she meant that the way in which the turn of phrase takes place, or the way and example is brought out is also culture dependent. I know for a fact that our students like to have many steps worked out, and also like explicit demonstration. Every culture has its own style. For instance American books have a lot of diagrams and drawings, and different sub-topics in boxes. If this is the case for something that is inanimate like a book, then what about a talk? A motivational speech? It is of course an untested hypothesis, but I would imagine that looking at me and hearing me would be qualitatively different from watching a lecture by a famous American or European scientist talking about his or her experiences about a life in science. A lot is said about role models. In the context of role models for women, it is said that you can only be what you can see. Surely this must also be true for regional, national, cultural categories. It is often the case that role models that are presented or held up are remarkable persons, indeed some extraordinarily singular persons like, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan, or C V Raman or Satyendra Nath Bose, who are persons from another era, and another time. Others include great institution builders like Homi Bhabha or Vikram Sarabhai, but that was from an era when India was a young country. An individual at the cross-roads of history would make a huge difference. That is also the case for legendary persons such as Richard Feynman or Robert Oppenheimer, who were charismatic and also had their destinies tied up with that of the world itself, having been tempered in the crucible of history. What about the normal and the ordinary? My mission therefore is to offer a few words in this direction as to what a career in science and research and teaching, both of which are inextricably tied up together.

I do not need to offer a definition of science here. We all know what science is. It is the human effort to come to terms with the world around us: To find out the relationship between cause and effect, with rigor and reproducibility at the core and heart of it. It is to find a precise language independent of the era or the place, which is universal. Modern science as we know it probably came into being in the last few centuries. Empirical science is as old as civilization itself, the latter founded on the taming of nature, to find out the pattern to the cycles of nature, to put natural forces to the service of human beings. From the rise and fall of the tides to the prediction of rains or to the annual flooding of the Nile, to the making of Wootz steel and Chola Bronzes, art and civilization have gone hand in hand with science. It is on the one hand a great co-operative effort of civilizations themselves, and that of the individual striving on the other. While there is a dance between the needs and impulses and urges of individuals and the harmonizing of the needs of the general vs. that of the individual, history has marched on.

Today, science is an international enterprise. Large science projects from the human genome project to alpha-fold, or the Large Hadron Collider or the LIGO have teams of hundreds if not thousands of scientists. And yet we do know that ideas from individual trailblazers cannot be under emphasized. How is a young person to prepare and train herself or himself for this noble endeavor? It also has to be kept in mind that science is probably like a marathon to be run like a sprint or sprinting a marathon. There are innumerable pressures of competition and rat-race which is a feature of advanced capitalist society. There is little substitute for hard work and concentration, and persistence and perseverance. The rewards are the joy of discovery, that Eureka moment for which one may have to wait a lifetime. The process of scientific work requires a great deal of knowledge, assimilation, analysis and synthesis. Henri Poincare is said to have spoken of his Eureka moment, and so has Albert Einstein. Psychology of creativity has rested on 4 important milestones of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, which clearly have nothing to do with a given individual, culture, era or national or any other kind of category.

My purpose in being here is to talk a little about what makes a voyage possible for someone from India and what are the life-experiences. While it is impossible to be anything but anecdotal, it seems to me that the life-forces that shape us are our birth-families and the cultures of the cities and towns in which we are born, about whether or not there is exposure to a culture of science and knowledge, in addition to abilities of individuals, at e.g., problem solving, and whether or not there is access to life-influences like peer groups, the educational institutions to which go, the kinds of teachers we have, the availability of books and libraries. I cannot understate the importance that these have had on my life. In my being here I offer myself as an example of someone who has had a life in science, albeit of a rather esoteric and technical type, where there is little I can share with a non-specialist except to say that my work has used mathematics, field theory, and physical models to try to improve our basic understanding of sub-nuclear phenomena, from the determination of the analog of the electric charge of the strong interactions, the lifetime of certain unstable particles, the search for patterns among the masses of elementary particles, deploying of tools to improve the knowledge of scattering processes, and finally to solve problems of evaluation of integrals that arise in general settings, but also make an appearance in physical problems. Each day that I work in this field I feel that I have learnt a little bit more. Whereas the human experience is often a little frustrating, it can also be elevating. Like it is in every sphere of human life. Elsewhere I have written about what it takes to become a physicist. The years of work and toil. It is inescapable. I should also comment on the fact that my undergraduate degree is in Chemical Engineering. Strangely I do not feel any separation between disciplines. To date I use the methods and techniques that I learned in my UG days and my Ph. D. studies days.

What I can say is that even today, I feel like a child in the sense that I feel I still don't know anything and like after every class in school I felt I knew a bit more, I feel that way after every little I effort. Of course, the cycle must go on. We educate others, the way we were educated in this great temple of learning and it is once again an honor for me to be here. I hope that every one of you will take away a little bit and I hope that this half-hour will make a difference to your life.

I will now turn to some general observations on communication, which is not part of your curriculum, but will nevertheless be an important part of your life. Whereas writing is probably one of the oldest and best and time tested forms of communication, modern technology has enabled us to communicate in a multitude of ways. Including what we are doing right here. Using electronic communication. This has opened the path to methods of communication that are audio-visual. Talks, seminars, presentations are by now part of human culture. When I began, seminars would feature people with transparancies, with several colours. In many countries shortages meant that a speaker could have only 2 or 3 transparancies. People would use every square mm of the transparency and write, with all kinds of squiggles and arrows and curves. But the times have changed. We all now have softwares to produce beautiful slides, with lots of pictures and moving elements, and emojis and little creatures sitting on them. While the possibilities are mind-boggling, the content is the important issue. There is no substitute to knowledge and being able to convey it properly.

I find that some of my students in the years they have been here have improved their communication skills dramatically. My seniormost student now has excellent communication skills, both written and oral. I am particularly impressed at the way in which my students are writing. It reflects a high level of understanding of the subject, maturity and the ability to communicate their ideas very precisely. So, the question is how do they get to this high level of writing communication? In my opinion, it comes from concentrated reading of other technical literature. To learn by reading and then expressing it through writing. To pay attention to grammar and to be state clearly what one wants to state. It is also important to use short sentences. Break them up. I did not have to explicitly teach my students any of these things. They just pick it up from the air. One of my former students, who sadly is no more, came from Nagaland. His writing English used to be grammatically ok, but the turns of phrase were a bit unusual. Probably he was translating from his mother-tongue. But within a year or two, his written English had changed and he was writing what I would call `normally'. His spoken English was just fine and face to face there was little chance of mis-understanding. The issue with writing is that you may not have a chance to explain.

Professor Patrick Henry Winston is quoted as saying “Most scientific papers are unintelligible because the authors either don’t know what they are doing or hallucinate that they are writing clearly.” Another quote from Patrick Winston “Your careers will be determined largely by how well you speak, by how well you write, and by the quality of your ideas in that order”. Mónica I. Feliú-Mójer writing in Scientific American blog says, ``...science communication broadly, meaning any activity that involves one person transmitting science-related information to another, from peer-reviewed articles to tweets.'' She also says, ``Effective communication means transmitting your message clearly and concisely so that it is understood. It’s about engaging your audience – it’s about the ‘So what?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’ of your message. When scientists communicate more effectively, science thrives. Science is increasingly interdisciplinary and the ability to communicate more effectively across disciplines fosters collaboration and innovation. Being able to communicate the relevance and impact of their ideas and discoveries can enhance scientists’ ability to secure funding or find a job. It allows them to write better and more comprehensible research papers. It also allows them to be better teachers and mentors for next-generation scientists. When scientists are able to communicate effectively beyond their peers to broader, non-scientist audiences, it builds support for science, promotes understanding of its wider relevance to society, and encourages more informed decision-making at all levels, from government to communities to individuals. It can also make science accessible to audiences that traditionally have been excluded from the process of science. It can help make science more diverse and inclusive. Although having more scientists who are effective communicators benefits science and society greatly, there are still relatively few training opportunities for science students and professionals to develop these skills. Fortunately, effective communication skills are no longer perceived as soft skills. Increasingly, they are becoming part of the core professional skills every science student and professional should have.''

Let me end by thanking you for inviting me, and participating in the process of renewal.

My visit to NCBS

I spent a most amazing day yesterday at the nearby National Centre for Biological Sciences which is in the GKVK campus. It was the first time that I had really entered the institution for any length of time, although I had once been there on a social occasion over 2 years ago, and met other delegates at the conference whose social event I had been invited for, and once about 20 years ago, from the outside. It was established by the famous Obadi Siddiqi, about whom I had written in the context of his famous advisor Guido Pontecorvo, brother of the equally famous physicist Bruno, known for his mixing matrix of neutrinos and one who had defected to the Soviet Union after learning physics from Fermi, and the brother of the movie maker Gillo, the maker of the Battle of Algiers. I had also been to the conference centre in Pisa which earlier used to belong to their wealthy family as a factory for garments, if I am not mistaken. Among other highlights of my visit, was a 20 minute visit to the archives that store the papers of Siddiqi and many other important archival material, something so unusual that it merits an award for its own sake. I was invited by the Manager, Academic Collaborations and Events, a young person Vaishnavi Sridhar who make impeccable arrangements, and my host was Varadharajan Sundararaman, an expert on various diseases that he is trying to unravel at the level of cell-biology, and is himself an IISc alumnus. As someone who knows almost no biology it was a sobering experience listening to the expertise of the persons there. At lunch I was joined by my old friend Madan Rao who has been there for decades, indeed as I have been in IISc for decades and Shashi Thutupalli, a physicist who now does biology, and he was telling me about his astonishing interest in how life may have started on earth and his experiments and also his recollections on prior experiments in India and in the world. It was an astonishing set of interactions, and also crowned by a visit to the lab or Ranabir Das, who had been a student in my particle physics class in 2000, who did his Ph. D. in NMR and then learned biology during his post-doc years at the NIH and has just been promoted to professor. NCBS is a piece of heaven, and all this was before my own 70 minute talk on the Joy of Discovery as usual. Thanks to Varadha, I also now realize that Discovery of Joy is equally important. Thank you everyone. Thank you world. Thank you Universe for this.

And so a former Facebook friend, who has now graduated to being a real friend is Dr. Aritra Chatterjee. I met him in Hyderabad on Sunday, when he came down to meet me in Jubilee Hills at the residence of my late parents, and we then went to the Jubilee Hills International Centre to relax and talk in the lounge, over an Americano. Part of the agenda was related to a request from Aritra for a conversation and a meeting to discuss how to navigate his way through academia when we were conversing on FB messenger. So we seized the opportunity to meet and I noted down my precious words of advice, which I thought I should share with the rest of the world, because if there is a meteor strike and I vapourize, my gyaan would not be available to the world, unless Aritra would share it. Broadly speaking I noted down about 15+ points which I will now share with the world, which will be a changed place after this (avant et apres), but I digress. So hold your breath.

1. The importance of working hard cannot be understated (not the Importance of Being Earnest which is a play by Oscar Wilde, I guess but is not relevant, as in the stories of Stephen Leacock, where one begins with it was a cold and stormy night on the west coast of Ireland but it is not relevant since our story takes place on the east coast of Scotland, or something along those lines).

2. The importance of time management.

3. A famous, now retired eminent professor, would say that he would get up at 4 am to work. Not everyone can do that, but the advantage of that would be you get a couple of hours of freshness to yourself and to your work without distraction.

4. Develop good work habits.

5. Keep a diary and note down what you did every single day.

(An office mate in UD, Sean Oughton who used to be around on FB had exemplary word habits, and he would note down at the end of day what he did, and would file away every single paper he had photocopied and give it a tag and make an entry in a file so that when he wrote a paper in latex, he had a bibtex entry ready. An exemplar, but almost impossible to mimic).

6. Never play down your own ideas. No need to think that only others have good ideas and that you don't. And if you have good ideas, work them out to completion. A piece of advice given to me by my own thesis advisor Qaisar Shafi whose significant other Monika Shafi often reads my posts.

7. According to a late professor who talked to me over 30 years ago, when asked what research is, Michael Faraday is supposed to have said, work, finish, publish.

8. IMHO publishing is important because it gives you discipline and forces you to organize your thoughts and your work and also is a `deliverable' and is a good insurance policy against detractors. Of course you run the risk of being called a paper churner, but you have to live with that.

9. Obviously teaching is important. Keep meticulous notes and publish them, because you never know who might find them useful. Also it is something you will find useful if you have to teach the same course again and again.

10. Try to find a good publisher for your books. My friend Swati Meherishi across at Springer told me once that Indian students like books by Indian authors. Never quite understood why, but a publisher knows better than I do.

11. If you are an experimentalist, get your lab going asap, and generate data and organize it and work very hard to get it going.

12. Obviously getting funds for your research is very important. Leave no stone unturned.

13. In whichever city you are in, try and find others in the field and try to discuss and collaborate. Do not become isolated.

14. Organize small workshops and seminars at 0 cost. It has immeasurable value.

15. Involve students in your own teaching and research. Of course they are young, but they will enrich you.

I must also add that very few of these pieces of advice are those that I have applied to myself, because I am not very organized. But that is life. I would also advocate the pommodoro method for good work habits, if you are keen on it.

A very useful resource is You and Your Research by Richard Hamming. I found it very influential when it came to myself. I should not say which part, but it has many parts and different people may find different parts useful.

I guess I should relish my senior citizen status since people come to me for such gyaan and advice. It should be borne in mind that I am not a particularly distinguished nor is my career really exemplary. But I do admit it could have been worse.

`Veena's dreams'

Veena had never seen a krait but she had seen a young cobra, a fully grown Russell viper and plenty of rat snakes. And rats! The city produces plenty of garbage to keep the cycle of life going. She was hurrying `home' a hole in the wall in that City of Dreams, that some called Maximal City. She had seen snakes too, when she was a child. Growing up between emerald fields of paddy, and gently swaying coconut trees of faraway Tamil Nadu. She remembered the days when her father took her on his cycle to `school' in a uniform. She remembered the carefree days or hiding between those trees and playing with her friends. Her grandmother bent over with the weight of life. Mother struggling to keep the family going. They told her you will do well. Get an education. You will go to the great city. A city that has neighbourhoods with names like Versova and Ghatkopar and Saki-Naka, and Mahalakshmi! That was a surprise for her. The name that she liked most was Andheri, which was close to the work `andhera' that she would learn later, which meant darkness, which would envelop her and take her to momentary relief from the cares of the world. It had to happen because there were no jobs for youth in her `native' place and all the young men would set off to the `Gelf' or to Bombay or to Delhi or Hyderabad or Bangalore. Her parents found her this fine young man in Bombay, and they said it will be a match made in heaven. She could not even remember when it was. Here in Bombay she soon learned to use the local trains. Across in far-away Malabar Hill she found a job. Her services as a clean and reliable cook were considered priceless. Her honesty made it particularly useful for her employers who could entrust the house keys to her while they set off on their busy schedules. Today she would catch the local at 7 pm from Churchgate Station, after hurrying past all the vendors and hawkers, past the banyan trees that cast their branches and their dangling roots on the footpaths and the pavements, past Flora Fountain. She looked into the window pane of one of the glitzy shops that had jewellery. And yet she could see her own reflection. She too was pretty once. Her hair too was black once. On her brow were etched fine lines, one for each worry in life, like a finger-print which a divine palmist would have been able to read. The heat and humidity had left their mark. As she hurried along, one of the straps of her `hawai' chappal broke, but have no fear. She found a shoe-repair store and in the 5 minutes he took to replace them, she got a moment to relax. She looked out and said to herself I have worked very hard today. Maybe, just maybe, today I will indulge myself. Do I deserve a treat? Will it be a needless luxury? Can I be so selfish. She broke down and did it! She got herself a coconut water for twenty rupees. It would weigh on her conscience, but she was willing to take the risk. She had great plans for the little ones. The older one finally got a break. He was off to the `Gelf' like so many others. He would be a driver there. He would send back some money. Veena was looking forward to it. She would use some of it to go back home. It would be an amazing train ride. When she would get over 36 hours to do nothing except to sit, and day dream and look at the countryside pass by. And she would look for the snakes from her childhood. But no garbage though. She was done with garbage for this lifetime.

Written transcript of talk given to Class X students at St. Paul's High School, 28th November, 2022

Good morning. I would like to begin by thanking Mazher Ali Ahmed saab and Brother Sudhakar Reddy for giving me this opportunity to be here, a good 44 years after I left the corridors and grounds of this great school. I never thought I would ever be here to thank the school and the teachers for having made me what I am today. While this is a great honor, it is also a great responsibility and I wonder what I will say this morning that will make a mark on young minds. I must first and foremost say that I am still the child that I was in those formative years as a child. As Picasso said, as a child I used to paint as a grown-up, and as an adult I have tried all my life to paint like a child. It is a child that is imbued with curiosity about the world, and is filled with a wonder and an urge to know what is what. Every color, every sound, every smell is new and wondrous. To a child every adult is a repository of knowledge, or experience and of learning. In the field in which I work, it turns out that every stage one relives the experience of the child. To me this is the greatest aspect of being in the field of research and science about which I have been charged with the responsibility to speak to you about. In the era of YouTube (the CEO of which Susan Wojicki by the way is the daughter of a particle physicist Stanley) and of TedX talks, what is one more talk? Why one more? Why here? Mazher Ahmed saab asked me if I would need some projection facilities and declined. I learnt from Patrick Winston a professor from MIT who gave several talks on how to give talks has emphasized, and ever since I first heard him, it became obvious that we have only one language processor. If you are seeing and reading something, you do not hear the speaker, and vice versa. That is why today I decided that if I am to make a mark on you, it is only through the auditory channel. Of course you will watch me and my every gesture and every nuance, and I hope that you will take something away, indeed as I did of my famous teachers in the school and I should name Rasool Sir, Krishnamurthy Sir, Irene teacher, Sakina teacher to name a few. My visual impressions are the strongest, and I can even see my mother talking to Brother Stanislaus about 50 years ago.

A friend of mine who works in the publishing industry in Delhi told me that Indian students like to read even technical books written by Indian authors. This struck me as something unusual, or something that I had not thought of. I think she meant that the way in which the turn of phrase takes place, or the way and example is brought out is also culture dependent. I know for a fact that our students like to have many steps worked out, and also like explicit demonstration. Every culture has its own style. For instance American books have a lot of diagrams and drawings, and different sub-topics in boxes. If this is the case for something that is inanimate like a book, then what about a talk? A motivational speech? It is of course an untested hypothesis, but I would imagine that looking at me and hearing me would be qualitatively different from watching a lecture by a famous American or European scientist talking about his or her experiences about a life in science. A lot is said about role models. In the context of role models for women, it is said that you can only be what you can see. Surely this must also be true for regional, national, cultural categories. It is often the case that role models that are presented or held up are remarkable persons, indeed some extraordinarily singular persons like, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan, or C V Raman or Satyendra Nath Bose, who are persons from another era, and another time. Others include great institution builders like Homi Bhabha or Vikram Sarabhai, but that was from an era when India was a young country. An individual at the cross-roads of history would make a huge difference. That is also the case for legendary persons such as Richard Feynman or Robert Oppenheimer, who were charismatic and also had their destinies tied up with that of the world itself, having been tempered in the crucible of history. What about the normal and the ordinary? My mission therefore is to offer a few words in this direction as to what a career in science and research and teaching, both of which are inextricably tied up together.

I do not need to offer a definition of science here. We all know what science is. Is the human effort to come to terms with the world around us. To find out the relationship between cause and effect, with rigor and reproducibility at the core and heart of it. It is to find a precise language independent of the era or the place, which is universal. Modern science as we know it probably came into being in the last few centuries. Empirical science is as old as civilization itself, the latter founded on the taming of nature, to find out the pattern to the cycles of nature, to put natural forces to the service of human beings. From the rise and fall of the tides to the prediction of rains or to the annual flooding of the Nile, to the making of Wootz steel and Chola Bronzes, art and civilization have gone hand in hand with science. It is on the one hand a great co-operative effort of civilizations themselves, and that of the individual striving on the other. While there is a dance between the needs and impulses and urges of individuals and the harmonizing of the needs of the general vs. that of the individual, history has marched on.

Today, science is an international enterprise. Large science projects from the human genome project to alpha-fold, or the Large Hadron Collider or the LIGO have teams of hundreds if not thousands of scientists. And yet we do know that ideas from individual trailblazers cannot be under emphasized. How is a young person to prepare and train herself or himself for this noble endeavor? It also has to be kept in mind that science is probably like a marathon to be run like a sprint or sprinting a marathon. There are innumerable pressures of competition and rat-race which is a feature of advanced capitalist society. There is little substitute for hard work and concentration, and persistence and perseverance. The rewards are the joy of discovery, that Eureka moment for which one may have to wait a lifetime. The process of scientific work requires a great deal of knowledge, assimilation, analysis and synthesis. Henri Poincare is said to have spoken of his Eureka moment, and so has Albert Einstein. Psychology of creativity has rested on 4 important milestones of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, which clearly have nothing to do with a given individual, culture, era or national or any other kind of category.

My purpose in being here is to talk a little about what makes a voyage possible for someone from India and what are the life-experiences. While it is impossible to be anything but anecdotal, it seems to me that the life-forces that shape us are our birth-families and the cultures of the cities and towns in which we are born, about whether or not there is exposure to a culture of science and knowledge, in addition to abilities of individuals, at e.g., problem solving, and whether or not there is access to life-influences like peer groups, the educational institutions to which go, the kinds of teachers we have, the availability of books and libraries. I cannot understate the importance that these have had on my life. In my being here I offer myself as an example of someone who has had a life in science, albeit of a rather esoteric and technical type, where there is little I can share with a non-specialist except to say that my work has used mathematics, field theory, and physical models to try to improve our basic understanding of sub-nuclear phenomena, from the determination of the analog of the electric charge of the strong interactions, the lifetime of certain unstable particles, the search for patterns among the masses of elementary particles, deploying of tools to improve the knowledge of scattering processes, and finally to solve problems of evaluation of integrals that arise in general settings, but also make an appearance in physical problems. Each day that I work in this field I feel that I have learnt a little bit more. Whereas the human experience is often a little frustrating, it can also be elevating. Like it is in every sphere of human life.

What I can say is that even today, I feel like a child in the sense that I feel I still don't know anything and like after every class in school I felt I knew a bit more, I feel that way after every little I effort. Of course, the cycle must go on. We educate others, the way we were educated in this great temple of learning and it is once again an honor for me to be here. I hope that every one of you will take away a little bit and I hope that this half-hour will make a difference to your life. I thank every one of you.

Open Letter to Amy Wax

Dear Prof. Dr. Amy Wax,

I bring your greetings from a shit-hole country. You seem to have had a run-in with some Indian doctors, especially women and brahmin women to boot, who could not live up to their potential in the shit-hole country of their origin. And as a result they are frustrated and come to your country and complain about it. Your frustration at their behaviour is understandable, especially because you are proud of a country with over-sized achievements. More precisely it is not the country per se, but that of white people who founded the country, because your narrative seems to suggest that others who are also citizens of your country such as blacks and Asians, according to you are jealous of the oversized achievements of whites only, and not that of the country. This is also understandable, since your oversized achievements include a lot of activities such as nuclear weapons, of which two were tried out on civilian populations in Japan, and during the war Americans of Japanese origin were interned. Other oversized achievements clearly include your 101st Airborne and the 7th Fleet and the USS George Bush and thousands of war-heads and thousands of non-nuclear warheads such as daisy cutters and other less potent ones such as tomahawks and hundreds of thousands of mines that can be used in maritime warfare. More recently the outsized achievements also include thousands of drones and hundreds of F-16 fighter-craft with which you maintain Pax Americana, except that it is not Pax but more like micro- and medium-sized wars all over the world. Oversized cities like New York used the labour of indigenous Indians who apparently were not afraid of heights. Other shit-hole residents who were rotting in Africa were brought to your land to work on your plantations and your cities. The legend is that they had to be brought in chains. That is not true. It is those who could not be brought on ships who had to be chained in their countries because they were trying to scramble on to the ships that were leaving Dakar for the Americas. Your anguish is understandable. After all your parents or forefathers and members of your community were harassed, persecuted and many of them were exterminated, and it is only America that gave your refuge, and hence your loyalty to its institutions is natural. Your oversized achievements could include investments in eradication of disease and poverty, and in actually bringing genuine peace to the world and create a more humane order. I believe you live in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, named after William Penn and has a certain wonderful natural air to the name, evoking images of forests and springs and rivers and streams. On the very day you described my country as a shit-hole, a disgruntled gentleman attacked harmless passengers in a subway in the Big Apple, aka New York city with canisters of smoke and high powered assault weapons, and it is a wonder that no one died, although half a dozen were critically injured. In a superior culture and country like yours, with oversized achievements (sorry I should emphasize that these are achievements of white people, because you also said that blacks are jealous and bitter about .their not being able to participate in the bountiful oversized table), it is only natural that people should carry oversized arms with oversized ammunition, which are normally tried out on people of inferior cultures such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, including depleted uranium shells and daisy cutters in the Tora Bora caves, but sometimes these things happen. I understand that this time the person of interest, was a black man, although for reasons unknown most shooters happen to be white. This should represent a paradox for your theory because white people are not bitter and jealous. But I should not question too much. Oversized weapons and smoke canisters are good for business. The NRA has often said guns do not kill people, but people kill people. I agree. I am pleased that an Ivy League University of yore has people such as yourselves on their distinguished faculty. It must fill students of colour and of other ethnicities with great confidence because for the first time they have been told in no unclear terms how lucky they are to have been able to flee from their countries of (shit-hole) origin. It seems that this phrase was already used for African countries by one of your former Presidents. I am glad that my country is now included in this. Together, we from India and they from Africa will now unite and together we will deal with our shittiness. I thank you for educating us and we did not even have to pay for it. And before I stop, I would like to suggest for your bed-time reading an article by late President Fidel Castro entitled `the Brain Drain' which is carried on voltairnet.org . It tells you how your oversized achievements have been underwritten by the sweat and blood of tax-payers from shit-hole countries. The best thing I like about Castro was that he when he retired, his brother Raoul took over as President. This meant that crossword clues "Cuban President" did not have to be changed. But I digress. I wish you well and take care and have a nice Easter break.

Regards, A s-h country resident.

Regarding the Meera Memorial Medal

Part of a letter I wrote to a student who was awarded the Kum. L. A. Meera Medal awarded to the best I. Ph. D. student at IISc, based on the grades in their first few semesters. It was instituted in IISc, where Meera had attended a summer school or two, by the Kum. L. A. Meera Meera Memorial Trust in Palghat, founded by late Shri L. K. Ananthakrishnan, the father of Meera.

``Meera was my friend. Couple of years senior to me. She did a Masters in Computer Science in IITM when I was in B. Tech. After my B. Tech I joined IMSc in Jan. or Feb. 1985 for Ph. D. programme. She also was selected. By June I had decided my background was not good enough to go straight for a Ph. D. and so I accepted the offer from U. Delaware. In the meantime, Meera had an offer from U. Pennsylvania. It turned out that Newark, DE was only about 50 or 60 miles away and I met her in Philadelphia once or twice. She even made a meal for me in her Graduate Towers. After the Thanksgiving break in November I got a call from the police saying that there had been a break-in and that she had been killed in a random crime. They called me because my number was in the telephone bill, and wanted to know who the nearest of kin were. A couple of years later I was called to testify in a lawyer's chamber about the events. Her father had an out of court settlement with U Penn and then with the funds set up a Memorial Trust. Much later I was inducted to the Board of Trustees. I worked for the trust for many years, organizing lectures, schools, etc. But after I became Chair, I could not do it any longer. I imagine their charitable work continues.''

The life and scientific work of Steven Weinberg (a proposed op-ed)

STEVEN WEINBERG (1933-2021) NOBEL LAUREATE (1979) AND PHYSICIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century Steven Weinberg passed in July 23, 2021 in Austin, Texas, where he had been professor of physics and founder of the theoretical physics department at the University of Texas, Austin. Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam for their construction of the unified electro-weak theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. Their work was associated with the correct identification of the mathematical structure of the underlying symmetries governing these interactions, and the incorporation of the Higgs mechanism into their model that would make the force carriers massive, and the mixing between them, which is characterised by the `Weinberg angle’.

Weinberg was born on May 3, 1933 in New York City and studied at the Bronx High School of Science, a school that produced a large number of gifted student of science. Glashow and Weinberg were from the same graduating class. Weinberg obtained his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and spent a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark after which he returned to the USA to pursue his Ph. D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Sam Trieman. He worked at Columbia University, MIT, and Harvard University before moving to the University of Texas. Over the course of his career Weinberg was considered a great teacher of physics, expositor, and also a supervisor for several Ph. D. students.

Weinberg worked in virtually all the important topics in the field of elementary particle physics, namely the phenomenology of the (electro-)weak and strong interactions and quantum field theory, where he has innumerable results which are named after him. In 1967 he wrote a short paper `A Model of Leptons’ which was his Noble Prize winning paper, which is one of the highest cited papers in the field in history. Weinberg was initiated the programme of `phenomenological lagrangians’ which was a framework that required one to use partial knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions at lowenergies even if a full theory that would reveal itself only at higher energies. He pursued the programme of renormalisation vigorously, studied CP violation, implications of phase transitions in the early universe, supersymmetric models to name some examples. After the Veneziano model was proposed, the precursor to string theory, Weinberg co-authored a paper with Gabriel Veneziano to improve its properties. Weinberg actively encouraged the study of string theory by appointing several persons to his group in Texas, thereby illustrating his genuine commitment to the growth of theoretical physics in every possible manner. Weinberg was intimately aware of experimental data and its implications to theory. He was also interested in physical cosmology and followed the subject.

Weinberg is also known for his monumental books on many technical fields, on field theory and particle physics, as well as on gravitation and cosmology. He also wrote popular books, The First Three Minutes, the story of the big bang and its aftermath being a huge best-seller. In his later years, he put forward his views on the evolution of western science.

Not a stranger to controversy, Weinberg was an avowed rationalist and atheist, and a defender of reductionism in science, which made him a proponent of the Superconducting Super Collider, a high energy collider in the US which eventually was cancelled due to the expense. He pioneered the debates around such topics and participated in them, especially regarding collective effects in physics, such as in the phenomenon of superconductivity. A key notion of `spontaneous symmetry breaking’ was proved by him with Jeffrey Goldstone and Salam in relativistic field theory, supporting the hypothesis of Yoichiro Nambu (Nobel Prize 2008), which is a manifestation of collective effects. These debates continue to this day.

Weinberg also did not shy away from his duties as a scientist and citizen. He advised his country’s government whenever called upon, including as a member of Jason, an elite group of scientists. He was a vocal supporter of Zionism by his own admission and protested against what he considered an unfair targeting of Israel for international sanctions.

The life and work of Steven Weinberg stand as a sacrament to all those who are committed to knowledge and science and its application. In the present era, where collaboration and team work is more the order of the day, one can learn the importance of understanding a subject from a very fundamental point of view, which was the hallmark of his style and approach (many of his papers are single-authored and have few references). The legacy of Weinberg will be one which brought simplicity and order to the world of elementary particle physics.

B. Ananthanarayan is Professor and former Chair of the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras (1985) he obtained his Masters (1988) and Ph. D. (1991) from the University of Delaware in physics. He is an author of over a 100 refereed publications in international journals in elementary particle physics and field theory, and held the MSIL Chair of the Div. of Physical and Mathematical Physics, IISc (2015-18) and serves on the board of Springer Publications and was Associate Editor of Current Science. He is also a keen populariser of science and is active on Social Media.

Memories

When I was a kid, for some years, my sister and I would spend a lot of time in the home of my Periamma and Periappa, partly because my maternal grandmother was living with them, and also my mother was like a daughter to the two of them, and also because for a year and a half, my parents were in Agartala and our education in the AP Board could not be interrupted, and another year when my mother was away in the US, we used to stay both with father about 2 km away and with Periamma and Periappa. Their home had a garden, large enough for us to play a lot of cricket very noisily, table tennis and also some card games. My uncle was a judge of the high court and a person with remarkable concentration and could work despite our shrieks and screams. Later on in life he became hard of hearing but not during this years that I am talking about. The house was full of books of all kinds that belonged to his children, our much older cousins, from various bound volumes of magazines of yore, to comics, to very heavy stuff like Goethe's Faust, and also vinyls of Beethoven and Bach and such exotic stuff as Flight of the Bumble Bee and some calypsos. No one would listen to them except for me! Not far were the City Central Library and later the British Library and the Max Mueller Bhavan. And Moghul and RK Libraries about which I wrote. So the experience of actually sitting with physical books remains indelible and I do remember some of the things I read those days. Later when I went to IIT Madras, there was the German Lab with lots of music, and the USIS Library in Nungambakkam, where one entered into a world of splendour, or large halls and spotlessness and a large collection of books and magazines that you would have to read and then leave. I think I had a card that allowed me to borrow one book at a time. They even had movies on some days and I remember seeing some. The experience of getting ready, riding a bicycle in the heat of Madras, catching a bus to see a one hour movie still seemed to be worth the trouble. I think the mind is an amazing thing. If you have to work for something it stays with you longer. With the passage of time, and with the internet, I do read and look at things, but rarely remember things. Of course I am 4-5 decades older...as my mind goes back again and again to Hyderabad and parents and aunts and uncles and grandmother, none of who is here any longer, each of these memories plays itself out, like those gramophone records at 77 rpm...

Remembering mother on International Working Women's Day

My late mother, Saraswathi, was a little over 21 when she was married and went with her newly married husband to Shillong where father was working in the Accountant General's Office, I guess of undivided Assam. She worked there shortly in Lady Keane College, teaching Chemistry. She has asked me couple of times to take me back there, but it was never to happen. In a few years, she had lived in Trivandrum and then in Delhi and Hyderabad, by which time she had two children, and then in Ahmedabad. By the time we were little older, she went back to to Osmania University, first getting a degree in Journalism, and then eventually settled down to a career in education, earning a Bachelors and Masters in Education first from Osmania and then a Masters from SUNY Buffalo working on a short thesis with the renowned Philip Altbach, and then her Ph. D. from Osmania under the supervision of Prof. Ramachandra Reddy of a different department. Her thesis work was published as a book and now I have two copies. In the meantime, she started to work in Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy College of the Vivek Vardhini Society in Putli Bowli and spent a couple of decades there as a teacher, in toto and retired in 1996. A very practical person, who taught her subject of educational philosophy and science methodology with a rare passion, she trained a generation of students many who went back to the hinterland as teachers. Her infectious enthusiasm for science rubbed off on everyone and love for kids. Her other major love was for the language of Telugu from which she translated several stories and the like. Although in essence she stood for the rights of, and emancipation of women, I rarely heard her talking about it. I guess actions are louder than words and to us those stay etched in our minds. Also a tireless fighter against discrimination and caste system, she could speak her mind fearlessly. Even though it is over 13 months since her altogether early departure, I thought it fit to think about her on the day after the International Working Women's Day.

Yukawa Unification -- 30th Anniversary of the Discovery

Going down memory lane, my mind went back 30 years to my last year at the University of Delaware. At this time I was busy with a small project suggested by my thesis advisor Qaisar Shafi , which was to look at the possibility of seeing what happens to the Yukawa couplings of the top-quark, b-quark and tau-lepton in a supersymmetric extension of the standard model.

Recall that the top-quark had not yet been discovered at that time. I had a set of renormalization group equations for these, but the model also had an unknown parameter called tan(beta), the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the u- and down-type Higgs fields that are present in such supersymmetric models.

Using a bit of numerical analysis that I had learnt during my hoary B. Tech days in IIT Madras, I wrote a program (these days we don't call them programs but codes) which I could in Fortran and also because I had a terminal on my desk, having spirited away from from my advisor's office since he was not using it. I used a 4th order Runge-Kutta integrator and then I had complicated do-loops in fortran with the coupling constants input into the program, and a search for these Yukawa couplings.

I remember that the program would keep exiting and then entering the loop again and again, and one day, late in the evening, it found a solution. It pinned down the tan(beta) to a ratio of the masses of the top- and b-quarks at the low-scale, and then the program also evolved the couplings to the unification scale (of the coupling constants) and lo and behold the Yukawa couplings also got unified! The mass of the tau-lepton was an input, and the b-quark mass was taken within its experimental range, and out popped a value for the top-quark mass which was much larger than the experimental limit.

I soon afterwards showed these results to my advisor. I remember that he was planning to set off to a conference in Boston. Anyway, it was also a tough period because I had accumulated over 50 regrets and the thought of being unemployed loomed large on the horizon. When my advisor returned from Boston towards the end of March (I just googled and found that the conference was held at North-Eastern University and proceedings were published by World Scientific edited by Pran Nath and Stephen Reucroft), he told me that he showed these plots to Richard Arnowitt. Arnowitt told him he had not seen anything like this before and that we should write it up.

We did, along with George Lazarides write it up and it was all of 3 pages long and we submitted to Physical Review as a `Brief Report'. This section is now extinct. I saw that the received date on the paper is April 22, 1991. And the rest is history.

Over 300 citations later it stands as an important piece of evidence in support of supersymmetric unification.

Some notes of science communication

This is one of the strangest periods that I have ever experienced. This generalized fear and suspension of disbelief. It is reminiscent of what George Orwell wrote about the Spanish Civil War, where most of the time nothing happens. But one of the things that has happened is that all my Ph. D. students are not in IISc. So, the last 6 months have been a period like none especially as regards communication. In this period, we have been communicating, using every possible device. Telephone, email, whatsapp, googlechat, skype, teams, zoom...no stone has been left unturned. But the difficulties in scientific communication stem from the fact that we have to exchange information long-distance. We have had group meetings where each of us has to state very precisely what we have done, and we intend to do. We need to communicate where we are with a particular problem and what are the techical difficulties. To this extent, each of us has had to sharped and hone our communication skills. We have had the discipline to maintain what we have been calling `balance sheets' where we note down in short paragraphs and bullet points all that the data pertaining to our research projects. And to date we have 14 of them!

While the `original' mandate of my talk was on scientific writing, I have now expanded it to cover scientific communication, partly because of the situation we are in. Whereas writing is probably one of the oldest and best and time tested forms of communication, modern technology has enabled us to communicate in a multitude of ways. Including what we are doing right here. Using electronic communication. This has opened the path to methods of communication that are audio-visual. Talks, seminars, presentations are by now part of human culture. When I began, seminars would feature people with transparancies, with several colours. In many countries shortages meant that a speaker could have only 2 or 3 transparancies. People would use every square mm of the transparency and write, with all kinds of squiggles and arrows and curves. But the times have changed. We all now have softwares to produce beautiful slides, with lots of pictures and moving elements, and emojis and little creatures sitting on them. While the possibilities are mind-boggling, the content is the important issue. There is no substitute to knowledge and being able to convey it properly.

I find that some of my students in the years they have been here have improved their communication skills dramatically. My seniormost student now has excellent communication skills, both written and oral. I am particularly impressed at the way in which my students are writing. It reflects a high level of understanding of the subject, maturity and the ability to communicate their ideas very precisely. So, the question is how do they get to this high level of writing communication? In my opinion, it comes from concentrated reading of other technical literature. To learn by reading and then expressing it through writing. To pay attention to grammar and to be state clearly what one wants to state. It is also important to use short sentences. Break them up. I did not have to explicitly teach my students any of these things. They just pick it up from the air. One of my former students, who sadly is no more, came from Nagaland. His writing English used to be grammatically ok, but the turns of phrase were a bit unusual. Probably he was translating from his mother-tongue. But within a year or two, his written English had changed and he was writing what I would call `normally'. His spoken English was just fine and face to face there was little chance of mis-understanding. The issue with writing is that you may not have a chance to explain.

Our methods of communication can now be frozen in other fora as well. Tedx talks, seminars on youtube, etc.. Each of these would be a permanent contribution. But it does not mean that everyone will have talent for such things.

On-line teaching is the new frontier in challenges in scientific communication. But I do not plan to cover it here.

Professor Patrick Henry Winston is quoted as saying “Most scientific papers are unintelligible because the authors either don’t know what they are doing or hallucinate that they are writing clearly.”

Another quote from Patrick Winston “Your careers will be determined largely by how well you speak, by how well you write, and by the quality of your ideas… in that order”.

Mónica I. Feliú-Mójer writing in Scientific American blog says, ``...science communication broadly, meaning any activity that involves one person transmitting science-related information to another, from peer-reviewed articles to tweets.''

She also says, ``Effective communication means transmitting your message clearly and concisely so that it is understood. It’s about engaging your audience – it’s about the ‘So what?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’ of your message.

When scientists communicate more effectively, science thrives. Science is increasingly interdisciplinary and the ability to communicate more effectively across disciplines fosters collaboration and innovation. Being able to communicate the relevance and impact of their ideas and discoveries can enhance scientists’ ability to secure funding or find a job. It allows them to write better and more comprehensible research papers. It also allows them to be better teachers and mentors for next-generation scientists.

When scientists are able to communicate effectively beyond their peers to broader, non-scientist audiences, it builds support for science, promotes understanding of its wider relevance to society, and encourages more informed decision-making at all levels, from government to communities to individuals. It can also make science accessible to audiences that traditionally have been excluded from the process of science. It can help make science more diverse and inclusive.

Although having more scientists who are effective communicators benefits science and society greatly, there are still relatively few training opportunities for science students and professionals to develop these skills.

Fortunately, effective communication skills are no longer perceived as soft skills. Increasingly, they are becoming part of the core professional skills every science student and professional should have.''

Nearly three months on

It will soon be three months. Three months! Is that already so long ago, or is it only three months? I remember that fateful day in July when I was in IIT Hyderabad when I saw the words `metastatic disease' which are some of the most dreadful words one can see. It came after the the PET scan the previous day. She had gone for the X-ray by herself a few days earlier and Dr Sahay did not like what he saw. She had this bad fever in June. It came and went. But I told myself, only few months earlier we went again and again to the AOI and Dr. Babaiah was satisfied and surprised beyond is imagination. Only three months earlier we had been through this ordeal with Appa and his heart attack and his quadruple surgery. He came out ok, albeit slow and forgetful but surprisingly alright for someone of his age. The next Dr. Sudha told me it was quite bad, maybe a year. I said, a year and started crying in her office. The previous day when Sitanna and I were coming back from IIT Hyderabad and I cried the whole way back. I cried when I saw her in the living room with Appa. She did not know why I was crying. But I am sure she guessed. She was too clever by half. But did not let on. After meeting Sudhar, Umax and I were coming back and I was telling her she will be with us only for a few months. And yet I was not believing it. Then we got opinions from Hochstin. He said to start on trastu and the other immuno-therapy. I was optimistic. This cannot be happening to us us. We are in the best hands possible. The odds are in our favour. She went every Saturday without complaining. Getting her own cat bag and other bag ready with her clothes, change of clothes, curd rice. I was happy I was there every 3 weeks. We will win. We will get a year or two, I told myself. Uma told me Sudha had told her may be 5 months or 6 months. I did not want to believe it. How prescient of Uma to have cancelled her trip to Tirupati for the key-note speech. I said to myself, why is she doing this. Chitti will be ok. She was ok. I see her still, walking in her nightie in Jubilee Hills opening her cupboards, and looking for this or that. With her whatsapp. How cruelly she has been taken away from us. The light of our lives. What can I say? That it is good she went without more pain and suffering? Without more hospitals and tubes and ventilators? I want to look for the bright side. Sadly I am yet to see it. I see her still, talking willy-nilly to everyone. Walking in her garden. Talking to the passers-by, talking to Bheemesh, to Radha. I remember going with her to the pension office on the way to JH in November. She was so pretty even if without hair. I am sure she knew. But she would not tell us...no, this cannot have happened to us...I will not accept it...death be not proud.

Memorial Address for V. Venkataraman

This is an extended and updated version of an email sent to Mrs. and Miss Venkat

Thank you very much for giving me your email address. I am sorry we have not been able to visit you and Priya personally and would like to do so as soon as possible when it is convenient for you. The day we got the news, I had to leave for Hyderabad as my mother was in the ICU. Sadly we lost her on the 29th. Considering how painful the loss of a mother who had reached the comfortable age of 82 has been for us, it is hard for us to imagine how you must feel at the loss of a life partner and a father respectively at the age of 52. I remember Venkat's birthday distinctly, since July 28 is that of my late beloved periamma who has a special place for all of us.

How can I start, and where shall I start? First of all it is ironical to have to write about someone who is younger than oneself. But I will try.

I think I first met Venkat at Princeton when I was visiting Prabhu probably around 1989 or so from Delaware. Venkat was also a friend of my old friend Kothandaraman who had also passed through Princeton, while he was working there. I believe they had common interests in semi-conductors and the like. I believe that we had a year or two overlap in IIT Madras but I don't think I knew him then.

Our acquaintance took place after I came to IISc in 1996 December and I remember seeing more of him in Tunga as we would drop by to visit the Prabhu's. I also remember seeing the two of you, although Priya must have been about 2 feet high at that time. I must congratulate both you and Venkat for her having grown into a fine young woman, responsible and sincere and the hope of the future for you and for our country. She has a particularly difficult task in coping and if there is any way we can help, please let us know.

I got to know Venkat better over the years professionally since he was in charge of so many things, like courses, I. Ph. D. programme etc. Our real serious interactions took place every summer for several years when we would jointly compose the I. Ph. D. entrance exam paper, in the old CTS building. It was a great pleasure to be with him and many others, including Tarun and Justin who were regulars. Over Adiga's dosais and thair vadais we would work out each problem and think about all possible ambiguities, type them up, make the keys and what not. It was a lot of work, but it gave us a chance to bond which I cherish. After we finished bonding, together we decided to get rid of the exam, and made a proposal to enter the Joint Admission Test of the IITs. Venkat saw this through to the end and that was the end of the exam as it was too much to conduct one more exam when there was already a national exam in place. I should note the extreme precision of Venkat and his sharpness and quickness and attention to detail during these interactions. Later on, we both served concurrently on the Board of Editors of Current Science and would often cross-referee manuscripts that the Chief Editor would send to us.

Our most serious interactions were when Venkat became Chair of Physics and I was already Chair of CHEP for some years. As I would often say, I went from being a younger brother of Chandan and Krish to becoming an elder brother of Venkat, as I would be to an even younger Prabal for a month and a half in 2018. I would refer to Venkat as Thambi for no particular reason, except for warmth and friendship that I felt for him which he reciprocated in his own quiet way. I understand from Mrs. Venkat that he would at times refer to me as Anna or ChepAnna! Thank you Venkat for that. I would also talk to him in Tamil for no particular reason except for the reasons above, and probably because we had a shared idiom. For instance, he was Venkatakrishnan Venkataraman the son of Venkataraman Venkatakrishnan, indeed as I am Balasubramanian Ananthanarayan, son of Ananthanarayan Balasubramanian. And also our shared idiom of service and a sense of duty towards our employer, although I must admit he was far more selfless than I. This shared idiom and warmth also enabled us to have some private jokes between us, which I will now enumerate to the best of my recollection.

It was quite a challenge to run the two departments but I think we had an outstanding rapport. I cannot remember a single time when I felt I was not satisfied with the outcome of a discussion, or vice verse. We had a delicate balance between requirements of each department and the need to have an equitable solution that would probably satisfy or not satisfy anyone. Many of the things that you would see in the physical sciences building was the product of our joint efforts, often initiatives coming from me, because we would have some funds left towards the end of the financial year and the need to have a creative solution for their use. Venkat would always support any initiative. Some of the notable examples are the large improved balcony on the first floor, the large patio in the western part of the building which serve as spaces for common use. There were also challenges when the new wing was constructed. For instance, we were walking together one day and one of the persons from the Estate Office or whatever it is called, perhaps PMG asked how to name the new floors and office. Within 5 minutes we gave a solution: call them E, F wings and we gave the formula for numbering them. And so on. Together we planned what you may all have taken for granted: the eaves on the corridors, poring over floor plans, making proposals for additional wings which are yet to be constructed. We used to have a private joke that the two proposed wings on the 2nd floor abutting CHEP and JAP should be named the Venkataraman and Ananthanarayan Memorial Wings. I should also add that all the above did not mean that Venkat was a pushover. He could stick to his guns and argue out his positions, but basically he had a sympathetic approach and an approach of fairness and objectivity.

In terms of academic initiatives, I thought that it should be good to invite Applied Physics and Instrumentation to join the I. Ph. D. programme and Venkat gave his unqualified support. And it was supported by all others and it happened. As time goes by, I think the successes of our academic programmes rests on the tireless work of those that were in positions of responsibility and they will become part of the firmament as stars which light the night sky, but will remain unnamed.

Let me turn now to what I meant when I said Venkat was selfless. Looking at his outstanding scholastic record of IIT M, and doubtless a topper, his Ph. D. from Princeton, any normal human being would have used it for self-promotion, including also his academic position in IISc. But he was not normal. He was saintly and shall I say trans-human. Our private joke when we would talk about recognition was that he would say `samblam kudta porun'. But he ensured that his younger colleagues got all the recognition by supporting them. Show me one other person who would have done something like this! And yet, his Institute colloquium was a brilliant tour de force peppered with immense amounts of information where he displayed his breadth of knowledge and also his sense of humor. For instance, it was here that he mentioned while introducing a well-known figure in his field that according to his wikipedia page, he was a mathematician and an entrepreneur. Venkat made a quiet remark that this seems like a contradiction in terms, which I think members of the audience took a second to understand! It may also be an opportune moment to note that Venkat was taken away at the beginning of the prime of his career with a peak awaiting him in the coming years, since he already had his administrative duties behind him and also because of his own entrepreneurial foray during his sabbatical year. He did tell me once in a rare moment of tiredness during the heydays of his Chairmanship that one of the reasons he came right back after his Ph. D. at Princeton was that he wanted to leave a quiet life -- he never thought his life would become so hectic!

At a personal level, I think Venkat had never taken a sick day in his tenure before June 2019. I had noticed that over the years he had got slimmer, probably decided to watch his sugar levels and BP, indeed as all of us south-Asians should. He would also ride his bicycle for his fitness regime, I suppose. I would also tease him once in a way about his thinning hair line, or his vazikh mottai, but would point out that even amongst apes, baldness was a sign of higher social standing and wisdom. And carry an austere lunch except for lunch at times at the Faculty Club. I would rarely see him at teas and coffees, probably for the same reason. Mrs Venkat tells me that at times he would ask for a double serving of grapes for his lunch because he was aware that I would gatecrash into his office and demand to share the grapes! It is therefore doubly ironic that he should have been taken away so early.

In fact, I had noticed in May when we went for the Animesh grihapravesham that he was not driving very well on the way back when you dropped me off. I attributed it to our talking while he was driving. Later I saw him in the building sort of looking down and walking, probably some problem with his vision.

During his year on sabbatical, he would come once in a way and I would tease him saying that I am looking forward to the IPO of his company so that I could invest wisely. My possibly last conversation with him was when he was coming back from sabbatical, was to pull his leg that now the Institute will make him the next Divisional Chair. Who would have imagined that things would have come to this pass? I understand that his reputation as a phenomenal teacher has been recognized by the announcement of the Jaya Jayant teaching award. It is probably the award that would have meant the most to him.

I could go on and on, but I think I will stop here. While we all must rationalize everything, we can only hope that he has gone to a better place. Let us also remember that Whom the Gods Love die young. I hope that you will be able to find some solace in the fact that you could share so many years with such a gem. His honesty and sincerity will be a touchstone for all of us. To an extent he is more like persons for past generations who put society and others before themselves. Let us all be thankful that our lives were touched by his brief one.

I will miss his immaculately dressed self, with a little tilt of the head and a hand in the pocket and his unhurried walk.

Talk on the Occasion to Mark Change of Chairmanship of CHEP -- 28 September, 2018

I am thankful to the members of CHEP and the new Chair, Justin for having organized this event to mark the change in Chairmanship of the Centre.

I would like to recall an occasion take took place at the end of the Lattice 2000 workshop, an international conference that was organized by Apoorva Patel in IISc. When it came to the time of the workshop's closing event, Apoorva had to make the valedictory speech. He began by saying that he came from a small place and was not taught how to make speeches. Instead, he narrated a folk tale from his place, where a not so well-off person was asked to organize a party. He organized it in a courtyard and the revellers were asked to take off their footwear and jackets and leave them outside and were all given handheld fans as it was a hot day. The rest of the evening was with the revellers talking to one another and they had a great time. There is an ending to this story that I will not mention now, but only at the end of my speech. The main moral of this anecdote is that the party is what the revellers made it, and all that the organizer provided was the space and the handheld fan. The other moral is that it is not always necessary to make speeches! In the course of the 3520 days that began on January 27, 2009 and ended on September 17, 2018, I have made numerous speeches and so I cannot claim that I was never learnt to make speeches! But I have learnt that the fate of most speeches is that they essentially fall on deaf ears. I have also made numerous sermons in writing and unless you have deleted them, you will have them in your email accounts. Jokes apart, in most of the speeches and sermons I have tried to emphasize that we have a special responsibility as members of an important department of the country's most reputed Institution. This will be a statement that is invariant under who is the Chair and who is not.

The job of the Chair is not an enviable one. He or she has to constantly keep in mind that general good and works under tremendous constraints, coming from financial as well as physical constraints. If the guiding principle is of the general good, and that one has to optimize the use of scarce resources, and that one is within the ambit of the law and convention, and common sense then most decisions are the natural ones. It is also a fact that not everyone will be happy, and being the Chair is not the surest way of winning a popularity poll. That said, it is the part of our Service Rules that duties can be assigned by Authority from time to time and the employee is bound to serve by them. Thus, popularity or not, one has to discharge one's duties irrespective of the nature of these, should the Authority vest such responsibility in us. It is with this view that I served these 3520 days. What has been achieved or not, time and history will tell, and the past is now firmly behind us. At this point, I need to thank Directors Balaram and Anurag Kumar and Divisional Chair Rahul Pandit for having vested the responsibility in me. To their eternal credit and I thank them for this, I have never had a decision overturned. All the above, also begs the question as to why I conveyed my desire to step down on August 3, 2018 by email to Rahul. The reasons are many-fold. Primarily, I feel that we had reached a stage when the Centre needed new leadership. Any organization reaches a stage when the management runs out of steam. Also, by staying on I would have denied the opportunity to the members of CHEP to benefit from new ideas and new directions. While I will continue to be a member of the department would be happy to offer any help, it was really necessary for the department to get a second wind after the period of growth and consolidation.

I also thank all the members of CHEP, past and present, since there was never an instance when there was complaint against one member against another. I think this is a remarkable achievement and I commend all of you on this and I hope that Justin will also have smooth sailing in this regard. I thank all of you who have helped me one way or another, psychologically or physically, through your participation in discussions and counselling me, serving on committees and in general being good colleagues. The only person I wish to thank by name is Mr. Keshava, because without him I could not have done a day's work. During these 3520 days, I do not recall a single occasion on which he let me down.

With these words, I take the opportunity to once again thank all of you for having been the revellers.

P. S.: the ending to the story is that when the revellers decided to wind down and go home, they found their footwear and jackets had been sold off by the organizer!

Transcript of the written version of my talk on Communication to IISc freshers, August 19, 2018

I am thankful to the Students' Council for inviting me to present this talk. The invitation letter I received on August 15, stated the following: `` Communication skills are essential for any scientist or researcher in order to be able to convey his/her ideas to the rest of the community. Writing research papers is also not an easy task and one needs to acquire the necessary skills to be able to write papers of an internationally acceptable standard. These two skills are often areas in which many scientists are found wanting, which makes a formal training in these aspects necessary.''

I promptly accepted the invitation by email, although I did not know how they even knew about me, and why they thought that I was the correct person to give this talk. The reasons could be that I recently gave a small presentation at the Memorial Meeting they organized for Stephen Hawking, and also because I am quite active on Facebook. Of course, I have been a teacher in IISc for over 21 years and do mix with students. By mentioning all these almost obvious things, I would like to draw your attention to the multiple aspects of communication that are already involved here. We live in an era of multiple modes of communication, personal as well electronic on a scale never known before. While 15 minutes is not a whole lot of time, I will not spend time on the general aspects of communication and of technical writing, but would rather concentrate on the specific problems that face us as people of India in these spheres, and how we can find solutions, and also in the setting of IISc.

Many of the problems that I will talk about are quite general but if you were to develop a sense of self-appraisal and self-awareness, you can solve them without too much difficulty. The first hit on google for the word communication gives the meaning `the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.' One of the points that I would like to specifically draw your attention to is that communication is an Input-Output process. In technical parlance, there is a sender and a receiver for every message. It is important to put yourself in the shoes of the receiver and to ask critically whether your message has been received uncorrupted, or with the correct connotation, and that the connotation has not changed because of lack of clarity or due to ambiguity, or due plain and simple mistakes of transcription or enunciation. Furthermore, I would like to mention that communication skills includes both trying to understand what others are conveying, and to convey information in the most precise of terms.

Keeping in mind that we are a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic society, we must understand that idioms and nuances that one may be accustomed to in one's own milieu may not translate into the same in another's. It is important to have an open mind and to communicate in as simple and as universal terms as possible, especially since we in the Indian Institute of Science. For many of you, this may be the first instance of your leaving home and a protected environment, and you are facing the big bad world for the first time. Thus, you are facing multiple challenges and communicating under these circumstances can be quite a challenge.

Communication in a complex setting like in a laboratory or in a classroom, or in a hostel or in a gymkhana setting, includes not just verbal communication but also of body language, and other forms of non-verbal communication. Young people must learn to receive multiple signals and develop a sensitivity to the diversity of expression. The above said, communication between teacher and student, between supervisor and scholar are of special significance, indeed as are communications between fellow students, as well as with other members of faculty and the community. These can be quite different, and can be challenging. It is best to exercise caution in communication in such scenarii and it is also best to keep in mind that discretion is the better part of valour.

For purposes of scientific communication, one cannot overemphasize the importance of the English language. It is important to master oral as well as written English. A strong command of grammar and vocabulary are an integral part of communication. Let us note that communication is both auditory as well as visual. In terms of talks and presentations, there are now enormous resources for word processing, with all kinds of aids such as embedded movies, simulations, pictures, figures, histograms, pie-charts and so on. You could also communicate your work by posters, or on the internet via a blog or facebooks posts or on twitter or instagram. There are plenty of online guides on how to make presentations effective. In this context, you must keep in mind your audience and tune your message suitably. The level and complexity of ideas and presentation must be tuned keeping in mind the parameters of the technical ability of your audience and the training of the audience itself. You must learn to give talks first within your own groups and listen to one another critically and help one another.

In terms of oral communication, please do note that listeners will not always be patient with strong accents that they are not accustomed to. While there is no human being will not have an accent, each of us must make an attempt to have oneself understood. The purpose of language is be understood and to understand. It is a matter of training to achieve these goals and it is better to start early.

The crucial aspects of presentation skills are precision and economy. You must point out the state of the art of a particular research problem, and describe the novelty of your own work, and present the breakthroughs in your research. Practice makes perfect, and indeed you will not be able to give a good presentation or talk unless you are on top of your subject. In order to be top of the subject, one must go after it with great energy and dedication and commitment. Veterans in the subject can immediately figure out when a speaker knows what he or she is talking about, and are rarely fooled by fluff. It is the subject matter that will capture the moment, which must be the core of any presentation or talk or poster, but supplemented with excellent language skills. Note that future employers, as well as examiners are always impressed by sincerity and clarity. One aspect that I will emphasize here is that in science, it is best to be as honest and upfront as possible. To say `I do not know the answer' to a question is better than to hazard an unreasonable guess, or give an answer that the veteran listener would immediately know to be untrue.

Many of the principles enunciated above can also be translated effectively into technical writing. It is important to be concise and crisp, and to the point. You could imitate the style of Ernest Hemmingway who was the master of this. Let me again emphasize that in scientific writing, you are not competing in an essay writing competition. But rather you are writing in such a way that the reader and other members of the community are struck by the importance of your scientific work. Most papers today are organized along the lines of an abstract, introduction, formalism and state of knowledge, the new technique or equipment, results coming out of the new technique or instrumental measurements, modelling the data and interpretation, and validation in terms of a model or support to a new model or furthering a new model, followed by discussion and conclusions. Clarity and simplicity, along with precision and excellent language skills, without unnecessary verbiage will make a paper acceptable even to the most critical referee and reviewer. It is a good idea to never hide details, and be as upfront as possible with all the assumptions that have gone into your work. Being secretive and telling half-truths brings out the worst in reviewers and referees. Note that you will often be at the mercy of editors and referees and it is best to win them over to your side. Paying attention to detail and meticulousness will also assist in you getting your papers accepted.

Of great importance are Acknowledgements,where you honestly and truthfully acknowledge all those who have helped you. Of equal equal importance are the bibliography and references. This latter also requires a lot of devotion, in order to accredit to one's academic predecessors their due contributions. One of the things that I have observed in IISc in the generations of students that I am acquainted with is that they do not pay enough attention to the authors, whose papers they use and cite. It is not easy to remember names of those from other cultures and other countries, but it is an integral part of our work to cite the literature properly.

It is also worth developing good work habits, keeping an online diary or journal that you update every day, or couple of times a week, keeping track of your bibliography and making detailed notes on your work, be it laboratory work or your calculations, electronically or otherwise. When you want to actually put together all your work, this would come in handy. Also, developing a resource base of this type, would make your eventual thesis writing so much simpler. In order to meet the objectives laid out earlier, a lot of ground work and constant hardwork will come in handy, and will lead to a good use of your time.

Please note that DST has also advertised a scheme recently that encourages scholars to write about their work and popularize it. I quote from the blurb on the recently launched AWSAR programme: `` If you are a PhD scholar or a post-doc, you surely want to relate your work to the larger context of Science and Society and convey it to the people in a way that enhances their understanding, appreciation and excitement for science while giving you an opportunity (AWSAR) to maybe even win some cool prizes!''

With these words, I wish you all a great stay in IISc, lots of learning and lots of results, which I would like to see written up and talked about!

Some resources: See talk by Dani Or on `Introduction to Scientific Communication', and Caltech site that has a manual on principles of scientific writing.

nanopolitan: Editorials by Colleagues

nanopolitan: Editorials by Colleagues: These days, Current Science features only guest editorials by invited contributors, and it's great to see my IISc colleagues being feat...

The Higgs Boson Grand Jete | Shougat Dasgupta | Dec 07,2015

The Higgs Boson Grand Jete | Shougat Dasgupta | Dec 07,2015

My former student I. Sentitemsu Imsong

As you all know from mails and from my facebook posts, I am bereft of one of my earliest students. Imsong had just accepted a position in IIT Guwahati and while transiting through Bangalore, was taken seriously ill and in septic shock from which he never came out. His publications can be found on INSPIRE. A recent tribute to him is here. I have never seen such an outpouring of grief, solidarity and wishes as I have seen from responses to the facebook post, emails, phone calls to me and to my other students and his well-wishers. It is best to honour him by emulating his sincerity, simplicity and honesty. The tragedy is that in all honesty, Imsong had real child-like simplicity. I repeat below words from our close collaborator Dr. Irinel Caprini: ``I can't belive that Imsong is no longer in this world... It's a pity that such a good, kind, honest and clever boy died so soon and in such tragic circumstances. '' I can hardly put it better myself.

Dr. B. Ananthanarayan: Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research - 2014

Dr. B. Ananthanarayan: Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research - 2014

Dr. B. Ananthanarayan: Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research - 2014

by  Chetana Deshpande

May 11, 2015

Balasubramanian Ananthanarayan, a Professor at the Indian Institute of Science and Chairman of the Centre for High Energy Physics, is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of elementary particle physics and field theory. He is currently working on improving the predictions of low energy and developing an effective theory of the standard model, and also on searches for physics beyond the standard model.

“Curiosity about the integrity of the theories we have and to test them at the extremes of precision and logical consistency, is the main motivation in this exciting field,” says Dr. Ananthanarayan. The beauty and simplicity of ideas and the possibility of transcending man-made phenomena is what attracted him to this field. For years, among other topics, he has been involved in developing the theory of unitarity bounds to obtain precise information on form factors (which are the basic observables in the forces and confinement of particles in Physics), which is a crucial test of the theory of strong interactions. He has collaborated with Dr. Irinel Caprini from Bucharest on this subject along with co-workers at IISc. He has also been working extensively on collider physics in the recent years. Recall that the Higgs boson and its properties are sought after by most physicists all over the world. This is because it was the missing key in standard physics which can explain all the fundamental particles and forces. The project of collider physics is basically for the intense research on this particle, besides trying to discover new particles.

Dr. Ananthanarayan completed his bachelor's degree in  Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985. After this, he decided to change tracks and went on to pursue a Master of Science in Physics at the University of Delaware, Newark, USA. Then he completed his PhD in Physics in the same university in 1991, under the supervision of Prof. Qaisar Shafi.

Dr. Ananthanarayan recollects the interesting experiences he had  changing his subject of study to physics. “Undoubtedly a very risky decision to have taken, I did set about it quite methodically. I registered for 3 courses of the M.Sc. in Physics program and went through the course work meticulously,” says Dr. Ananthanarayan. There was no internet those days, so he had to write to some US universities for their course booklets. “I basically drew mental Venn diagrams and isolated those courses which defined a basic minimum. Many long hours were spent in the IIT Madras library looking up textbooks spelt out in those course booklets and simply sitting down and working out missing steps and learning the basics. I must also emphasize that one great skill I did learn from the B. Tech. at IIT Madras was problem solving, a skill that is useful whether one goes in physics, managements, finance, computer science, IAS or what have you,” adds Dr. Ananthanarayan.

He believes that anyone can identify their weaknesses and work on them by putting themselves in a structured routine and emerge as a better student, if not as an expert. He presents his story as an example to all those who are thinking twice about taking a risk in their careers and says, “The moral of this story is that if this worked for me, it will work for anyone. Such professional physicists, for that matter scientists and engineers, are the need of the hour for the country.”

Dr. Ananthanarayan has worked as a post-doctoral fellow at three institutions, namely, Physical Reseach Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India; University of Lausanne, Switzerland and University of Bern, Switzerland. After this, he joined IISc as an Assistant Professor. He was awarded the Fellowship of the Homi Bhabha Fellowships Council in November 2009 - 2011. He has now received the prestigious “Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research for the year 2014” from the IISc Court. On receiving the award, he modestly says, “The recognition of academic excellence by my employer, the leading institution in the country, and recognition of this by the Institute Management and senior colleagues  is the main value of this award.”

Dr. Ananthanarayan wishes to dedicate his achievements to all his elders who have acted as a strong support system in his life. “Acknowledgements are also due, to the kind advice, help and encouragement of my teachers , Profs. V. Balakrishnan, G. Rangarajan and the late Prof. S. Swaminathan. Prof. M. S. Ananth -- who was to later become director of IIT Madras -- was also very encouraging of my decision and was great to talk to,” he says Prof. Alladi Sitaram, a retired mathematician from the Indian Statistical Institute is another of Dr Ananthanarayan’s  role models.

Dr. Ananthanarayan has published a number of papers on his work over the years, as well as general-interest science articles. IISc conducts a training program, called 'Outreach' project, every summer for promising students from India and abroad, selected through a rigorous competitive process. Dr. Ananthanarayan used to work with students over the summer break as a part of this project. To aspiring students, he wishes to give this piece of advice: “We must work very hard, think hard and also learn a lot of lateral skills. Computer skills are a must today irrespective of what one may want to do, along with mathematics.”

Contact Information:

B. Ananthanarayan

Chairman & Professor, Centre for High Energy Physics

Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560 012, India

email: anant@cts.iisc.ernet.in, bananthanarayan@gmail.com