Diffusion of Knowledge within the Tata firms in 1970s and 1980s

Over at FiftyTwo, Chinmay Tumbe has a fantastic article titled Kamla, revisiting the history of IIM-Ahmedabad and correcting it to reflect Kamla Chowdhry's pivotal role in its founding. As the subhead puts it, "She was shunted out of the history of India’s most prestigious business school. On her birth centenary, a researcher redresses the record."

In the section on her post-IIMA life, we find this passage:

Her crusade for gender parity in academia and industry continued outside the walls of the campus. In the June 2013 edition of the alumni newsletter, Savita Mahajan, who graduated from IIMA in 1981, recounted how a recruitment poster appeared on campus that stated that “women need not apply.” This advertisement was for positions in the prestigious Tata Administrative Service management trainee programme. Chowdhry took up the matter directly with JRD Tata, and the rule was overturned the following year.

* * *

This reminded me of another similar episode at another Tata firm; it has Sudha Murthy (Chair of the Infosys Foundation) at its centre; and, it too involves a letter to J.R.D. Tata, the same man that Chowdhry "took up the matter directly with".

Here it is in Murthy's own words (and the link is to the Tata Archives):

It was probably the April of 1974. Bangalore was getting warm and red gulmohars were blooming at the IISc campus. I was the only girl in my postgraduate department and was staying at the ladies hostel. Other girls were pursuing research in different departments of science. I was looking forward to going abroad to complete a doctorate in computer science. I had been offered scholarships from universities in US. I had not thought of taking up a job in India.

One day, while on the way to my hostel from our lecture-hall complex, I saw an advertisement on the notice board. It was a standard job-requirement notice from the famous automobile company Telco [now Tata Motors]. It stated that the company required young, bright engineers, hardworking and with an excellent academic background, etc.

At the bottom was a small line: "Lady candidates need not apply." I read it and was very upset. For the first time in my life I was up against gender discrimination.

Though I was not keen on taking up a job, I saw this as a challenge. I had done extremely well in academics, better than most of my male peers. Little did I know then that in real life academic excellence is not enough to be successful.

After reading the notice I went fuming to my room. I decided to inform the topmost person in Telco's management about the injustice the company was perpetrating. I got a postcard and started to write, but there was a problem: I did not know who headed Telco. I thought it must be one of the Tatas. I knew JRD Tata was the head of the Tata Group; I had seen his pictures in newspapers (actually, Sumant Moolgaokar was the company's chairman then).

I took the card, addressed it to JRD and started writing. To this day I remember clearly what I wrote. "The great Tatas have always been pioneers. They are the people who started the basic infrastructure industries in India, such as iron and steel, chemicals, textiles and locomotives. They have cared for higher education in India since 1900 and they were responsible for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science. Fortunately, I study there. But I am surprised how a company such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender."

I posted the letter and forgot about it. Less than 10 days later, I received a telegram stating that I had to appear for an interview at Telco's Pune facility at the company's expense.

* * *

Recap: The Sudha Murthy episode is from 1974, and the job in question is that of a shop floor engineer at Telco. The Kamla Chowdhry episode is from 1981/82, and it was about a management trainee program at the Tata Administrative Service. Both are entities within the Tata empire led by J.R.D. Tata.

GNR

Vijaysree Venkatraman has a nice article on Prof. G.N.Ramachandran's work at the University of Madras in the fifties and the sixties: How a Madras scientist won the global race in the ’50s to crack the structure of collagen. An excerpt:

First, he needed to find a source of collagen. The shark fin collagen from the biochemistry department on campus didn’t yield great images. Good quality pictures were essential to cracking the collagen puzzle, he knew. Leather, it occurred to GNR, was largely collagen.

Not far from the university campus was a new institute – the Central Leather Research Institute. GNR decided to pay his neighbours a visit. As he made his way there, the leather choices in GNR’s mind were Kangaroo Tail Tendon or Beef Achilles Tendon. The deputy director of CLRI turned out to be a kindred soul, happy to help a fellow scientist. The beef sample was easy to obtain locally. But if kangaroo collagen was going to yield the best diffraction images – as the scientific literature said – the deputy director promised to get GNR samples from Australia.

Thus, GNR found himself some purified marsupial collagen to work with.

The only information available on the fibrous protein collagen was this: one-third of its total amino acid content was glycine. Using this fact, looking at the pictures he had taken, GNR made an intuitive leap. [...]

When Sir C.V. Raman wanted to learn Russian …

… he turned to Mr. K. Narayan, a graduate from our Department at IISc waiting to join the Bhilai Steel Plant that was being created [the story is from 1958]. Nayantara Narayanan recounts an interesting episode, which plays out over a period of perhaps several months, in which the Nobel Laureate learns Russian to become fluent enough to give his Lenin Peace Prize lecture in that language.

When a 27-year-old metallurgist taught Nobel laureate CV Raman how to speak Russian:

Raman asked Narayan to come to his house every morning before starting work. The house, a bungalow named Panchavati surrounded by a sprawling mango grove in the heart of Malleswaram, was walking distance from where Narayan himself lived. And so the lessons began. Narayan used [the Russian language primer by Nina Potapova] to teach Raman basic Russian.

“He evinced a very keen interest, like a Gurukul student of old. Every day he would do his homework and repeat his lessons back to me,” said Narayan. Even though Raman was 60 years old and Narayan only 27, the older man liked to maintain the teacher-student relationship. As payment for the lessons, Narayan would get to sit down with Raman and his wife for a breakfast of hot coffee and idlis.

* * *

[Cross-posted from our department's website]

Akshat Rathi on History of Indian Science

Over at Mint On Sunday, Rathi has a great article with a brilliant title -- Separating Fact from Ancient Indian Science Fiction -- exploring the question: "Why is the public’s knowledge of the history of Indian science so poor?"

The sad part is that, despite an ongoing history of science programme, which has been running for more than 50 years, very little of that has filtered in to public knowledge. I asked Subbarayappa why.

“That is a question I have often asked myself,” he said laughing. The commission nudges on with what it has been doing for the past 50 years. Regular articles appear in the Indian Journal of History of Science, but there is little conversation between the few academics working on the history of Indian science and those working on setting the science curriculum.

Janaki Ammal

Scroll.in has a great article entitled Remembering Dr Janaki Ammal, pioneering botanist, cytogeneticist and passionate Gandhian by Geetha Doctor on the life and works of Janaki Ammal, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences right from its first year.

Links

1. Barbara Oakley in Nautilus: How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math. "Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need."

2. William Kremer in BBC: The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain. A truly bizarre story.

3. Steven Shapin in WSJ: Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History. A review of Steven Weinberg's book To Explain the World. The following excerpt gets to the main problem with an enterprise like Weinberg's:

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

Links

1. Prem Panicker at Smoke Signals: RIP Jayakanthan.

2. Sriram V. at Madras Heritage and Carnatic Music: A Chola Gift to Chennai.

What Indian Mathematicians Knew in Calculus

Biman Nath, a professor of astrophysics at Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, has a great article in Frontline about the development of proto-calculus ideas by ancient Indian mathematicians -- specifically, Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II (all in Sanskrit over 1000 years ago), and Madhava (in Malaalam, some 600 years ago).

Along the way, he makes a good point about the state of the 'debate' in the public sphere on history of Indian scientific ideas:

... [M]ost of us are not historians, and such discussions become pointless after a while. One has come across the names Aryabhata or Varahamihira in school textbooks, but one would be hard pressed to name any specific achievement of these ancient Indian scientists. School students are taught about the discovery of the zero but they never learn what it means to have “discovered” it.

How does one suddenly invoke a number and bring it down to the realm of reality? We teach our children that our ancestors must have had a remarkable knowledge of metallurgy and give the example of the iron pillar in Delhi, but we never spell out what exactly they knew.

This superficiality in our collective knowledge often leads to meaningless, rhetorical debates on the achievements of ancient Indian scientists. [...]

Nath peppers his article with snippets that give us a richer picture of how these mathematicians presented their results. For example, here's Aryabhatta:

... Aryabhata’s sine table was considered the most accurate ... He had tabulated the sines of 24 angles, equally spaced between zero and 90 degrees (with a difference of 3.75° between them). The table was in the form of a verse, and he had come up with an ingenious way of coding the table in the words of the poem. The introduction to his book Aryabhatia explained the code. [...]

And, Brahmagupta and Madhava:

It is not clear how Brahmagupta derived the formula—he never explained it anywhere—but historians think he used geometry.

[...]

Like his predecessor Brahmagupta, Madhava never explained how he came up with the formula. Historians of mathematics again suspect that he obtained it through geometrical methods.

Finally, all this leads to question of what happened after Madhava's work, and why it did not blossom into calculus as we know it today? I look forward to a follow-up article by Nath.

Links

1. Relevant to the goings on at Science Congress: H.S. Mukunda et al (1974): A critical study of the work “Vymanika Shastra”. [Hat tip to V. Vinay on Twitter]

   A study of the work “Vymanika Shastra” is presented. First, the historical aspects and authenticity of the work are discussed. Subsequently, the work is critically reviewed in respect of its technical content. It appears that his work cannot be dated earlier than 1904 and contains details which, on the basis of our present knowledge, force us to conclude the non feasibility of heavier‐than craft of earlier times. Some peripheral questions concerning dimensions have also been touched upon. [Bold emphasis added]

2. Also relevant: an engaging BBC Radio 4 podcast on Indian mathematics (45 minutes, mp3, via Sidin Vadukut). See also this review of Mathermatics in India and Square Roots in the Sulbasutra by Cornell mathematician David Henderson. [Hat tip to Siddharth Varadarajan]

3. Dalmeet Singh Chawla in Science Insider: India’s major science funders join open-access push

4. My colleage Prof. E. Arunan has started blogging. Here are the first three posts:

   • Indian Science: Catch up with India, then worry about China.

   • The more zeroes you have to your name, the better scientist you are!

   • Is there a leadership crisis in Indian science?

Batmobile: The Origin

For the Annals of Pop Culture: The Batmobile: The Concept Car That Became a Star by Michael Beschloss.

[In] 1965, ABC television greenlighted a new series called “Batman,” and its producers needed a Batmobile — fast. Within three weeks, using blowtorches and saws, the automobile customizer George Barris transformed the Futura’s deteriorating concept car — which he had bought from Ford for a dollar — into a rakish roadster suitable for TV’s new Batman and Robin ... [Bold emphasis added]

Einstein's Grade Card

We saw Ramanujan's grade card last week. It's Einstein's turn this week.

Links

1. On this the World Elephant Day, you should enjoy this cute overload video shared by Sanjeeta in our Institute's Ecological Students Society blog. Institute.

2. Andy Thomason in CHE: How Did the Federal Government Rate Your College a Century Ago?

3. Another bit of historical curiosity: Did Srinivasa Ramanujan fail in math? A. Venkatachalapathy clarifies with some documentary evidence.

4. Amir Alexander in SciAm: The Glory of Math Is to Matter.

   ... [M]ost fields of higher mathematics remain as they were conceived, with no practical application in sight. So is higher mathematics just an intellectual game played by exquisitely trained professionals for no purpose? And if so, why should we care about it?

Links

1. Heidi Ledford in Nature News: We dislike being alone with our thoughts. "Many people would rather endure physical pain than suffer their own wandering cogitations."

   Here's my cynical take: A fun study makes bold claims in psychology, and gets published in Science. How long will it survive before it gets retracted?

2. Patricia Fara in Nature: Women in science: A temporary liberation:

   The First World War ushered women into laboratories and factories. In Britain, it may have won them the vote, argues Patricia Fara, but not the battle for equality.

3. Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun in Nature: A Test that Fails.

   Universities in the United States rely too heavily on the graduate record examinations (GRE) — a standardized test introduced in 1949 that is an admissions requirement for most US graduate schools. This practice is poor at selecting the most capable students and severely restricts the flow of women and minorities into the sciences.

   We are not the only ones to reach this conclusion. [...]

40th Birthday of Barcode Technology

From the Wired story 40 Years on, the Barcode Has Turned Everything Into Information by Marcus Wohlsen:

... [Putting] barcodes on chocolate bars and instant oatmeal did more than revolutionize the economy, or the size of grocery stores. Thanks to bar codes, stuff was no longer just stuff. After a thing gets a barcode, that thing is no longer just itself. That thing now comes wrapped in a layer of information hovering just beyond sight in the digital ether. The thing becomes itself plus its data points, not just a physical object unto itself but tagged as a node in a global network of things. Barcodes serve up the augmented reality of the everyday, where everything can be cross-referenced with everything else, and everything has a number.

Haberman himself knew barcodes meant more than just a better way to manage supermarket inventory. He saw linguistics. He saw metaphysics. He also understood that those deeper abstract meanings held the key to barcodes’ radical practicality. “Go back to Genesis and read about the Creation,” Haberman once told The Boston Globe. “God says, ‘I will call the night “night”; I will call the heavens “heaven.”‘ Naming was important. Then the Tower of Babel came along and messed everything up. In effect, the U.P.C. has put everything back into one language, a kind of Esperanto, that works for everyone.”

Recommending Albert Einstein

Over at Letters of Note, Shaun Usher featured recently two letters of recommendation for Einstein written by Henri Poincaré and Marie Curie for a professorship in theoretical physics at ETH-Zurich. Einstein was 32 when the letters were written (1911), some six years after his Annus Mirabilis ("the extraordinary year") that saw the publication of his landmark papers on photoelectricity, Brownian motion and special relativity; his other major paper on general relativity would arrive some five years later.

The letters themselves are awesome little gems. Poincaré gets straight to the point with these opening lines:

Mr Einstein is one of the most original thinkers I have ever met. In spite of his youth, he has already achieved a very honourable place among the leading savants of his age. [...]

Curie, too, is quite effusive in her praise:

I have often admired the papers published by Mr. Einstein on issues dealing with modern theoretical physics. Moreover, I believe that theoretical physicists agree that these papers are of the highest order. In Brussels, where I participated in a scientific conference in which Mr. Einstein also took part, I was able to appreciate the clarity of his mind, the extent of his documentation and the depth of his knowledge. If we consider that Mr. Einstein is still very young, we are right to have great hope in him, and to see him as one of the leading theoreticians of the future. [...]

But both of them end their letter by highlighting the benefits to the institution:

Poincaré:

The future will show more and more the worth of Mr Einstein, and the university intelligent enough to attract this young master is certain to reap great honour.

Curie:

I think that the scientific institution willing to give Mr. Einstein the work he desires, either by appointing him an existing chair or by creating for him the chair in the conditions he deserves, could be greatly honored by such a decision and would certainly be providing a great service to science.

Joseph Stromberg on the Polywater Fiasco

Slate has a wonderful contribution to narrative history of a key episode in "pathological science" (a term used by Denis Rousseau in his paper; Rousseau himself was involved the work that led to the quick death of the polywater myth) -- The Curious Case of Polywater: In the 1960s, scientists discovered a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?. It's filled with insights into hidden biases in research, bandwagon effect, and competitive international politics. Towards the end, it makes the right connections to similar episodes, including cold fusion. Great stuff!

Here's an excerpt on some of the sociological and political factors that fed the polywater frenzy:

Just before the team submitted a draft of their analysis for publication, Uncle Bob told me, he coined a catchier term for the chemical everyone had been calling anomalous water. “That just didn’t seem right as a name to me, so I wanted to think of something better,” he said, handing me the original June 27, 1969, issue of Science, which he’d held onto for all these years. “The properties,” his team wrote in the paper, “are no longer anomalous, but rather, those of a newly found substance—polymeric water or polywater.”

The response was beyond anything they could have imagined. The new findings, catchy name, and prestige of the journal Science led the press to take notice of polywater for the first time. Within days, my great-uncle’s team was interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Saturday Evening Post, and dozens of other outlets, as I saw from the yellowed clippings he’d kept in a gray folder. Some articles speculated that the work—both his team’s and the Soviets’—might one day lead to a Nobel Prize.

Over the next few months, polywater—and its uncanny resemblance to the world of science fiction—struck a nerve with the public. “It really caught on, because of the fact that it was water,” Uncle Bob told me. “If it had been an unusual structure of something else, nobody would have cared. But everybody uses water—your life depends on it.” Soon, he was fielding calls from industry reps inquiring about polywater’s commercial potential, perhaps as an industrial lubricant or a means of desalinating seawater. The government, fearful that a polywater research gap had developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, took an interest too: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (which later became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) awarded a grant of $75,000 to Tycho Labs of Boston to mass-produce it. Once, after Deryagin stayed at my great-uncle’s house in Silver Spring while visiting the United States, CIA agents came calling afterward to debrief Uncle Bob about what had occurred.

C.V. Raman's Speech ... in Russian!

The story behind this curious event is recounted by Mr. S. Narayan, the man who wrote that speech for him. It appeared in The New Indian Express today which happens to be Prof. Raman's 125th birth anniversary:

One bright morning, Dr. Raman told me with a beaming smile that he had been invited to visit USSR as a State Guest to receive the prestigious award. He added that he would very much like to address the Soviet Academy of Sciences at Moscow in the Russian language during his visit. The Russian Language which I had taught him in those few weeks was too rudimentary to undertake such a mammoth exercise.

Nothing is impossible for a great scientist like him. He immediately hatched a plan and suggested that I should give him a scripted text of the speech which he would practice to deliver. A couple of days later, Lady Raman told me during a repartee that her husband used to practise the speech delivery by heart like a school boy, something she could not decipher. On hearing his wife's jibe, Dr. Raman told me he was ready to deliver the speech. At the rehearsal session, he waxed eloquence over his heavily Tamil-accented Russian speech. Both lady Raman and myself had a hearty laugh. While appreciating his sincere effort, I told him that nobody would understand him if he spoke with that accent. I then gave him a cassette with the speech delivered in my voice. With the help of this cassette Dr. Raman fine- tuned his speech.

* * *

Two asides: (a) Today's Google-doodle celebrates Prof. Raman's 125th birthday. (b) The author of the TNIE piece was a lecturer in our department at IISc for a brief period in the 1950s.

Links

1. Megan Garber in The Atlantic: Computing Power Used to Be Measured in 'Kilo-Girls'. "The earliest computers were human. And, more often than not, female."

2. Nick Rowe: What will really old, stupid and uneducated people do?

3. East Meets West: An Infographic Portrait. Brain Pickings channels a set of infographics from a Chinese-German artist. All are stereotypes, but some are funny.

4. Beautiful science, Zen art, or both? [hat tip to FYFD]

Links

1. Pankaj Jalote has excerpts from his convocation address to the first batch of graduates of IIIT-Delhi: Role of Alumni for an Institute.

2. Kaneenika Sinha at The Academic Garden: A sexist, bully or both (or none)?

3. T.T. Ram Mohan at The Big Picture: How IIM came to Ahmedabad

4. Finally, something from PhD Comics: Zeno's Paradoc.

Shivam Vij on Class XII History Text from NCERT

In What I learned about Partition in The Tribune, he writes:

I had to wait till college to satiate my curiosity about Partition because the history textbooks in school told me so little about it, such as that Jinnah was the villain of the event and so on. I was thus surprised that India’s new history textbooks for Class 12 (last year in school) that were made in 2005, spend 29 pages on Partition.

So, what is the new narrative? The chapter begins not with politics but three short oral testimonies written by an unnamed Indian historian doing research in Lahore in 1992. [...]

He has posted the pdf of this chapter at Kafila, and adds:

I wrote recently about the surprising political maturity with which NCERT textbooks teach Indian students about the Partition. These textbooks were prepared under the National Curriculum Framework of 2005. This is of course not limited to the Partition chapter or indeed just the history textbooks. But I was particularly moved to see the Partition chapter. As you read it you realise what school textbooks can do in shaping how future generations see themselves, their own history and identity. I think a lot of people in both India and Pakistan would like to read it.

* * *

I share Shivam's appreciation of NCERT textbooks, all of which are available online for free. Back in April 2008, I had a chance to look at what these textbooks had to say about the reservation policy, and I came away quite impressed. [The direct links to the specific chapters in that post don't work, though].