Higher Ed links

Hemali Chhapia has a report in which Prof. Damodar Acharya, Director, IIT-Kharagpur, is quoted as saying that JEE is a 'flawed system' of selecting students, and that it "hurts the high school system".

The start of Techfest's 2009 edition was not all fun and games. The controversial issue of scrapping the IIT-JEE came under the spotlight when IIT-Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya pointed out the "flawed system'' of selecting students with an objective type entrance examination. ...

He told TOI, after the discussion, that JEE in a way was hurting the high school system as IIT aspirants focused only on JEE. "I am against JEE and feel it should be eliminated. Why can't we take students on the basis of Std XII marks? Anyway, we take in less than 1% of our top science students after 10+2 and these are very bright children."

In expressing these views, he joins Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-M.

* * *

Shafi Rahman has short piece in India Today about how the National Knowledge Commission, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the University Grants Commission have been fighting over the autonomy levels at the new Central Universities. since this government is in a hurry to set the ball rolling, and since the next session of the Parliament may be too late (the General Elections may be announced anytime soon, and the government may not be able to announce any new policies), it has gone with the ordinance route. This bit in an otherwise bleak report is genuinely good

As a first step, the ministry has decided to do away with the tag of World Class University, an idea which has won it the NKC’s applause . The Act will now be termed the National Universities System Act instead of the World Class University System Act. “We can’t name a child ‘genius’, who is at risk of growing up clueless,” says a ministry official.

Padma Awards

Here's the list for this year. And here are the winners in Science and Engineering:

Padma Vibhushan:

1. Anil Kakodkar (Atomic Energy)
2. Madhavan Nair (Space)

Padma Bhushan:

1. Bhakta B. Rath (Materials Science)
2. Conjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri (Mathematics)
3. Gurdip Singh Randhawa (Horticulture)
4. Sam Pitroda (Telecom)
5. Sarvagya Singh Katiyar (Chemistry)
6. Thomas Kailath (Electrical Engineering)

Padma Shri:

1. Pramod Tandon (Biotechnology)
2. Syed Iqbal Hasnain (Geology)
3. Goriparthi Narasimha Raju Yadav (Agriculture)

The list of award winners includes academics such as Iravatham Mahadevan (Padma Shri), C.K. Prahlad, Ramachandra Guha, Isher Judge Ahluwalia (Padma Bhushan) and D.P. Chattopadhyaya (Padma Vibhushan).

* * *

Previous Republic Day Award posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Now available online: All the essays in Lilavati's Daughters

This time, it's *not* a false alert. I have checked it myself. This page has the links to all the essays; each link first takes you to a short profile of the scientist's career, and clicking on the title gives you access to her essay -- in pdf.

Now I can link directly to the essay by Prof. Rama Govindarajan and that about Dr. Anandibai Joshi by Pooja Thakar.

I thank Prof. Rohini Godbole, a colleague and one of the editors of Lilavati's Daughters, for getting these essays online, giving them a wider reach that they deserve. Here's her own contribution: It has been an interesting journey.

Now available online: Videos of the IISc Centenary Conference

Go straight to the Conference Program, and they are all there.

[Update: Oops! The page has this statement:

These videos can be downloaded and watched within the campus LAN only. Access from outside campus will be made available ... after the [copyrights] are put in...."

Sorry for the false alert. Will post the links -- again -- when the videos are *really* available to the world outside. In the meantime, the following links work only within the campus.

And thanks to the anonymous commenter for pointing out this problem.]

Two strong recommendations from me:

1. Prof. Subra Suresh's keynote (hi-res version if you are on our campus). After a longish introduction, Suresh's talk starts at about 8 minutes; he spends the first part on what engineering is about, and how its mission is getting redefined, and hence, how engineering education must be re-oriented. Bottomline: an awareness of and a concern for the environmental and cultural effects of all that they engineer, and therefore, an interdisciplinary focus that includes not just the physical sciences, but life sciences, social sciences and humanities as well.

   He illustrates these trends with a couple of examples. This part relies quite heavily on slides (animations, videos, etc); since the video, sadly, missed the slides, this part does not come out all that well. Just so you know.

2. Prof. Sidney Brenner's keynote (hi-res). You can safely skip the long introduction and go straight to the 20th minute -- yes, the intro was *that* long!

   Before he gets to his main theme -- how to read the genome -- Brenner does two things: he starts with a great story that takes a dig at the lengthy intro, and he trashes a couple of sub-fields: systems biology and synthetic biology. It's not just that he points out the major limitations of these enterprises, but just plain trashes them -- for example, he calls them "low input, high throughput, no output" sciences. Ouch!

   If you enjoy strong views that are backed up by strong arguments and a willingness to wage verbal war -- and if you are not a systems or synthetic biologist -- you'll greatly enjoy this part of the talk.

   The other part is very good too. It's an excellent illustration of a great public lecture: presenting some of the key ideas of a field to an audience that includes a lot of 'outsiders'. Don't miss it!

   Here's a great quote from the talk:

   Someone said that sequencing the human genome is like sending a man to the moon. They were absolutely right. [pause] Because sending a man to the moon is easy; [it is] getting him back which is the problem.

Is there anything that Obama can't do?

Yet another interesting finding, but it will still have to be verified and replicated:

... [R]esearchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

Yes, it is true: academics are *not* hot ...

... but some are more not-hot than the others. Henry Farrell has the graphic, and the weighty, emotion-laden conclusions that flow from it.

Not surprisingly, Chemistry is the most not-hot, followed by Computer Science (I knew it!) and Engineering (Ouch!).

An analysis of the hotness ratings of professors in 36 fields reveals that every field has a negative score. In case you are wondering, languages, at -0.062, have the least negative score, followed by law (hmmm...) and religion (yikes!).

Lilavati's Daughters: 2. Dr. Anandibai Joshi

Dr. Anandibai Joshi was the first Indian woman to get a medical degree -- in 1887, and from Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania (which is now the Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia). In Lilavati's Daughters, Joshi's life story, possibly the most amazing and moving story in the book, is recounted by Pooja Thakar in a first person narrative. I'm giving below an extended extract from Pooja Thakar's essay. I have added a few links at the end of this post.

* * *

Anandi Gopal

by Pooja Thakar

I was born on 31st March, 1865 as Yamuna Joshi in Kalyan, a small town near Mumbai. My family used to be the landlords in the town, but had lost their riches. When I was 9 years old, I was married and my name was changed to Anandi.

Before my marriage, I could barely read Marathi. Education of girls was not common then. But my husband, Gopalrao, was an ardent supporter of widow remarriage and women's education. After our marriage, he started teaching me. This was very difficult. In those days, a husband didn't even speak directly to his wife in front of others. In the beginning, my husband tried to enroll me in the missionary schools. But that did not work out. We had to move from Kalyan to Alibaug to Kolhapur and finally to Calcutta where he was left free to teach me.

I didn't have much of a choice whether I liked to learn or not. He was my husband and I had to listen to what he said. I was terrified of him and the scoldings I would receive from him. But once I started learning, I was soon also able to read Sanskrit and als read and speak English.

After my rapid progress, my husband was insistent that I should acquire higher education. We were confused about what I should study. But then I realized that female doctors were a nonexistent facility to any woman in our country. Many women, ashamed or reluctant to approach a male doctor, would suffer a lot as a result. I myself lost my infant son when I was 14. So I decided that I would like to be a doctor. Even the subject I picked for my thesis later was 'Obstetrics among Aryan Hindoos.'

My husband tried very hard to get me admission to some university in America. He even tried to pretend becoming a missionary to that end but it invited only ridicule. However, a Mrs. Carpenter of Roselle, New Jersey, by chance came to know the story and was moved by the correspondence and wrote me a letter. She offered to host me in the USA. Since Gopalrao wasn't able to get a job there we decided that I should leave for America alone. We had to face a lot of opposition and criticism, to the extent of people throwing stones and cow dung at us. Finally, after many trials and tribulations, in June 1883, I reached America and was met by my Carpenter mavashi (aunt).

[... snip ...]

... [T]he room that was provided to me at the college didn't have a proper fireplace. The fireplace emitted a lot of smoke when lit. So it was a choice between smoke and cold! I tried to get another place, but that was not possible as no one was ready to rent a place to a brown, Hindu girl trying to be a doctor. After 1.5-2 years in that place, I had started having a constant temperature and cough.

Well, being in an alien culture, weather was always going to be difficult and I was ready to face it. What was most taxing was my husband's behaviour. After the first few letters, his letters had taken a strange turn. They had grown highly unpredictable, sometimes full of love and support and most of the times chiding and taunting me. Even in his nicer letters, there would be one nasty comment that would sour everything. He kept on taunting me that I was a free bird in a foreign land and that I had probably forgotten my 'poor', 'uncivilized' and 'incapable' husband who wasn't as 'great' as me. On seeing an innocent photograph I had sent him, he made a remark that I appeared to have forgotten my tradition and culture as my pallu was askew. I had no idea what the cause for his nastiness was. I was doing exactly what he had told me to and was only fulfilling his dream. But I had always found it difficult to figure out my husband. Sometimes I used to feel that he was way below me and pictured him at the bottom of a ladder while I was at the top. But then the next minute I reminded myself that he was the one who had given me access to the ladder in the first place. He was my husband and my teacher.

My health was severely affected by my stay there. After around two years in the USA, I had sudden spells when I used to feel very faint and get a high temperature. The cough never left me. By the end of the three years, my condition had worsened. I somehow scraped through the final exams. At the convocation where my husband was present and so was Pandita Ramabai, it was announced that I was the first woman from doctor of India and got a standing ovation for that! It was one of the most rewarding moments of my life.

Day by day I grew worse, and nothing was working. My husband then admitted me to the Women's hospital in Philadelphia. I was then diagnosed as having Tuberculosis but the disease hadn't yet reached my lungs. The doctors advised me to go back to India.

[... First person narrative ends here]

From the rest of Thakar's article we learn the following: Anandibai died on 26 February 26 1887, not long after her arrival in India and just a month shy of her 22nd birthday. She never managed to practice medicine in India.

* * *

Wikipedia has a good entry on Dr. Anandibai Joshi. This opinion piece talks about the different ways in which Joshi's biographers have recounted her life. Here's a key quote: "Different Anandis fashioned by different authors — so much so that Kosambi muses candidly, 'has the *real* Anandibai Joshee eluded us?' "

* * *

The first biography of Anandibai Joshi was penned by Caroline Healey Dall in 1888, just a year after Joshi's death. This book is available online, and Joshi's image, above, is from its cover. Right at the beginning of this book, Dall reproduces an entry from an album of Mrs. Carpenter, Joshi's host in the US; in it, Joshi answers a series of questions (you can view them here: page 1, page 2). Let me highlight three of them:

20. What epoch would you prefer to live in? The Present.

26. If not yourself, whom would you like to be? No one.

36. What is your aim? To be useful.

Last professor?

Quite a few people have recommended Stanley Fish's post, The Last Professor, whose grim thesis is that humanities in US universities are about to become extinct. There is some empirical evidence for this thesis, and Fish cites statistics about the decline in the number of full time faculty members, and a rise in adjuncts. What is even more grim is Fish's characterization of the enterprise of humanities: "determined inutility."

Let me just say that I found Mark Liberman's response to be much better:

Determined inutility is one thing — Prof. Fish is free to choose that path if he wants to — but determined ignorance of history is something else again.

It's odd for a scholar to throw around phrases like "today's educational landscape" as if contemporary economic and cultural forces were laying siege to institutions that were founded and managed as ivory towers committed to impractical scholarship. But the truth is that American higher education has always explicitly aimed to mix practical training with pure intellectual and moral formation, and to pursue research with practical consequences as well as understanding abstracted from applications.

[... snip ...]

He quotes Michael Oakeshott: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.” This is true enough — and the distinction between skills and principles is important — but Fish goes on to equate "understanding and explaining" with with "the absence of a direct and designed relationship" to "measurable activities in the world". This is logically false and historically preposterous.

Researchers in the natural sciences and mathematics have always been motivated to a significant extent by the desire to affect as well as to understand "measurable activities in the world". This has also been true, traditionally, of social scientists, historians, and even philosophers. And in the humanities, many of the most famous and influential scholars of earlier centuries and decades have applied their scholarship to practical ends, and have thereby gained knowledge and skills that made their "pure" research better. Indeed, the whole point of Edward Said's Orientalism thesis, flawed as it was conceptually and factually, was that the humanities scholars of past centuries, whatever their ideology, were useful servants of empire.

Obligatory post on The Inauguration

I'm yet to watch / read Obama's Inauguration speech. But I have seen Asif Mandvi's pre-Inauguration report that Obama's speech will 'make sweet, sweet love to the English language, and ... expose Shakespeare as an untalented hack." Enjoy:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Obama Inauguration

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

* * *

Okay, one more link. This Onion piece about another inauguration deserves to be read just for its prescience [Thanks to Apurva for sharing the link on Google Reader].

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”

[...]

Lilavati's Daughters: 1. Prof. Rama Govindarajan

Published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Lilavati's Daughters is a collection of biographical and autobiographical essays in which 100 Indian women scientists talk about "what brought them to science, what kept their interests alive, and what has helped them achieve some measure of distinction in their careers." Since it's modeled after One Hundred Reasons To Be A Scientist (pdf, published by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy), we may expect Lilavati's Daughters to become available online.

In the meantime, I'm reproducing here one of the essays with the author's permission.

The author is Prof. Rama Govindarajan -- IIT-D alumna, faculty member in the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNC), and winner of a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (btw, she's also the author of this letter to the PanIIT organizers protesting against their infamous 'spouses' program!).

Here's her essay:

* * *

Dream Your Own Dream

by Rama Govindarajan

The stars shone down on 47 weeping girls, while a gentle sea breeze tried to soothe them. On this evening of drama, the prosaic words “housewife”, “graduate”and “bank employee”, were being scrawled in autograph books under “Your ambition is to become a ...”. And no, the overweight, under-confident specimen occupying the schoolyard for the last time did not scribble “research scientist”!

Not even years later did I understand what the term meant. What does it feel like to be one today? My website talks about the science I do, so I’ll only say here that I completely love it. However, I did not know this when I started out. All I wanted to become was a “regular guy”, which to me and my peers meant having enough money for a gracious life-style and being in charge of a group of people, preferably large. First big mistake: borrowed objectives.

Dear reader, if you are young, please dream your own dream. Also, please, please dream big. My grandmother, Alamelu, did. For me. She also set an example by fighting tooth-and-nail for what she believed was right, and by never obeying a rule of which she was not convinced. As a young bride, circa 1920, she risked ostracism by her community to cook and eat meen kozhambu with a Dalit family in their hut. My other early influence was my mother, Shakuntala, practically a single, working, parent, who made light of an extremely tough life to create a home where poetry and laughter ably substituted for luxury. My only regret is that my achievements fall far short of her sacrifice.

Doing a B.Tech. at I.I.T., Delhi was a simply superb experience. I was given the opportunity to study rather than memorise, and had the fun of discussing science with peers. Like many other girls in I.I.T., I emerged near the top of my class, picking up self-assurance, a “can do anything” attitude, and many close friendships. It would be good if within the next few years, half of every IIT class would be girls – it would be a change from when I was one of 54 in the chemical engineering class!

My Ph.D. advisor Professor Roddam Narasimha, has been the biggest influence on my scientific career. Apart from fluid mechanics, he taught me to do science the right way, which for him includes a thorough and critical understanding of the literature, extreme care in methods, and zero exaggeration in making claims. I also like his conviction that the youngest student in a group may be right in a scientific discussion.

I am also blessed with a home completely free of gender bias and its manifestations. So, what can go wrong when one has the best education and heavy-duty determination, and is surrounded by good people? Read on.

I am an engineer first, and fluid dynamics has always been a favorite, but my career in research began almost by accident. When I graduated, I wanted and got a plush job, in Mumbai. Every morning I became part of the compacted mass of humanity in the ladies compartment of the 6:57 fast train to Andheri. Soon the mass revealed itself as having faces, lives, and stories. The one common theme in the stories was the incredible hard work and determination involved. These women — executives, secretaries, fisherwomen, new mothers, very-soon-to-be-mothers, many malnourished, some from home-lives too terrible to describe, running top-speed across the overbridge at Grant Road at 6:56 a.m. — are my role-models and I think back to them every time I imagine I am having a hard time. An important ingredient for success is the willingness to push yourself to work really, really hard.

It took me two months on the job to realise that something a lot less plush and a lot more mentally demanding would suit me better. I then did a Masters in the U.S., which did not launch me into the planned orbit in industrial R&D, maybe because I soon tied myself by marriage to one city. A guest at my wedding remarked that Bangalore (as it was then) was not at all the place for a chemical engineer, and how right he proved to be!

In my efforts to leave no stone unturned, I went to dozens of interviews within the next couple of months, looking for unsuitable jobs. I finally took one of them just to put my share of rice on the table. The really big mistake: not realising that the world offers myriad choices for a young couple in search of two good careers. Just don’t be scared to experiment, to spend a few years as a nomad. Don’t feel guilty if your spouse has to make some temporary sacrifice as well. It would be best if you can postpone marriage to the post-nomadic stage!

It dawned on me that to succeed in Bangalore, I must redefine myself. The software industry was in its infancy, but I decided, maybe stupidly in some people’s opinion, that I would not be part of the big boom which I didn’t know then was coming. I went into the defence-related aerospace industry instead. Here, I wanted my experience with process control and computing skills, to be put to use to avoid importing control algorithms. The set-up of the industry made this wish impossible to fulfil.

So, four years after my B.Tech., I finally turned towards research in fluid mechanics, and have never in the nineteen years since then wished to do anything else. For ten of these years I worked in a national lab, during which I also completed my Ph.D. and post-doc. The last nine years in academia have finally been the “real thing”, this was an extremely lucky break, since the place I work, the J.N.C., came into existence at the right time for me! In my experience, independence and constant exposure to other researchers is crucial for doing basic research, and for these, an academic institution is unbeatable. A typical national lab has other main objectives to fulfil, and cannot be expected to focus on basic research in the same way.

If you are the type who likes every day to be different, scientific research is the career for you. If you like working with young people with bright ideas, who keep you on your toes, and if you like teaching yourself new concepts, this is the career for you. If you are prepared to toil long and desperately for the dazzling discovery you are not sure you’ll make, this is the life to choose! Even on a bad referee-report day, I am happy I do science!

The burden of starting an institution without adequate planning

I excerpt below a couple of e-mails that highlight how the burden of starting new IITs without adequate planning falls disproportionately on a small number of faculty. These e-mails give me the sense that (a) quite a few of the faculty carrying this extra burden are at the junior level, and (b) they don't get much appreciation from their administration. They show how a problem imposed by Delhi (and other state capitals) is made worse by the local powers -- Directors and Deans at the mentor IITs.

In these excerpts, the IIT locations have been rendered generic; I don't want my friends to get into trouble! Here's the first:

I have some idea of what is going on at [IIT-X] (that's being mentored by [IIT-Y]) -- there are no buildings, no labs, no faculty, and classes have already started! One of my friends, who is on deputation there for a semester, told me that he has been given a really crappy place to stay in, and to get any food, he has to go to campus, which is around 2.5 km away. Also, he was somewhat coerced into doing this because no senior faculty was ready to do this.

And, here's the second:

The IITs have been started in a hurry. There were no hostel or classrooms or labs when [IIT-Z] started. Its housed in [a factory].... Faculty have hardly been recruited.

Two colleagues ... were teaching first year students. They have to teach a class of 570 students here on Mon/Tue; fly to [Z City] on Wed; teach a class of 120 on Thu/Fri and return on Sat. And guess what, the Institute DOES NOT give them credit for the extra work [at IIT-Z] (in form of releasing from teaching duties next semester). One of them is a rather new assistant professor, whose lab is still being set up [...].

Let me hasten to add that I received these mails over the last month, but well before the post on Prof. C.N.R. Rao's recent outbursts.

Planning a new university: Contrast between the US and India

Here's an excerpt from an e-mail from my friend Vishnu l highlighting the contrast in the way new institutions are created in the US (specifically, UC-Merced) and India (specifically, lots of IITs, IIITs, Central universities, etc):

It's really funny when you see the govt. planning to set up 14 world class universities. Why 14? Why not 30 (let the other central univs also be "world class")?

[snip]

I just read about how UC Merced, the latest UC campus, was set up. The planning started in 1988, and the first undergrad students came to campus in 2005. Here, the MHRD decides to set up 7 new IITs, and they start taking students from the next year onwards, without caring about whether there are enough facilities! Sadly, some people will say with pride that we were extremely efficient in setting up these new IITs.

I can give another data point from a century ago: the Indian Institute of Science. It took over 13 years (1896-1909) for Jamsetji Tata's vision to be realized, and two more years before the first students started trooping in (a part of this tortuous prehistory is summarized in an earlier post).

Shobo Bhattacharya: India’s Education Experiment in Basic Sciences...

... The IISER solution:

The establishment of the IISERs is noteworthy because it attempts to correct a key misguided policy of post-independence India that separated teaching from research. Under that policy, excluding a few exceptions, Indian undergraduate education took place in colleges, post-graduate education in universities, and research in institutes. Moreover, driven by a desire to push the country quickly to the frontier of science, India’s government allocated resources disproportionately to the institutes at the expense of the colleges and universities. The result, not surprisingly, was dismal. Teaching without the excitement of original research created dull and disheartening intellectual environments in colleges and universities, thereby discouraging all but the most dedicated from pursuing careers in science. Research without teaching deprived researchers in institutes of daily interaction with the bright young minds that keep creative instincts active. In that environment, research became largely imitative and sterile. Today, India’s universities – after taking into account those who pursue research abroad – do not graduate enough motivated students for the research institutes in the country. Similarly, the institutes almost exclusively offer doctoral programs and produce fewer scientists who can teach in colleges and universities and create a vibrant culture of research.

From one economics Nobel winner to another ...

I really don’t know why this is so hard to understand.

Ouch! That's Paul Krugman dishing it out to Gary Becker.

Vijaysree Venkatraman reviews "Lilavati's Daughters"

The review appears in Chemical and Engineering News, so do catch it before it vanishes behind a paywall. Here's an extended extract from her review:

[...] In India, a developing nation with few quality child care centers, reliable help comes from considerate grandparents, but this happens only when they don’t need care themselves. In the chapter “Why and How I Became a Scientist,” biochemist Maharani Chakravorty recalls taking her infant along to her workplace. “The poor child used to sit on the rubber sheet spread on the floor of the laboratory playing with test tube stands, right there in front of my working bench,” she writes. Some contributors to the book proudly mention in their essays the fact that their children have become researchers themselves. Sulochana Gadgil, a Harvard University-trained meteorologist, writes in the chapter “My Tryst with the Monsoon” that her mathematician son made critical contributions to two of her recent papers.

Without enlightened policies in the workplace, women scientists can find it hard to realize their potential. In this book, more than one woman mentions years of separation from her spouse because it was too difficult to get appropriate work in the same Indian city. In the chapter “She Was a Star,” the woes and achievements of Darshan Ranganathan, an organic chemist who was also married to one, are recounted by her husband. He writes that she languished as a research associate when he was a professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK), because an unwritten rule forbids spouses from simultaneously holding faculty positions in the same department. “I am left with the wistful feeling that Darshan would have flowered more, much earlier, had she been offered a faculty position at IITK,” writes D. Balasubramanian, director of the L. V. Prasad Eye Research Institute, in a moving tribute to Ranganathan, who died of cancer in 2001 (Curr. Sci. 2001, 81, 217). The Indian National Academy of Science has instituted a biennial lecture in her memory.

Thanks to this book, aspiring women scientists in India can find role models closer to home. Readers with no connection to the subcontinent may enjoy many of the essays because few stories are more heartwarming than that of an underdog who wins against the odds. Clearly, many of these women were by no means favorites. One chapter is about a mathematician who, as a little girl, sported a turban and disguised herself as a boy to attend school. Her uncle, a village headman, thought that educating her was pointless and said so. A city school principal requested female students who had done well in the qualifying exams to give up their spot in science to boys because lab space was scarce. His reasoning was that women only have to work in the kitchen; a science education would be wasted on them.

Given this milieu, what these women have accomplished in the rarefied field of research is nothing short of amazing. The book acknowledges their lonely struggles. Although this anthology has no manifesto, nearly every essay hints at the fact that the establishment can do more to accommodate highly qualified women who want a career in pure science. Open-minded policymakers in India looking for ways to retain talent in research institutes can certainly find some answers here. And despite cultural differences, readers from elsewhere are likely to find unexpected resonances in these narratives on and by women scientists. That is, in part, a testimony to the universality of a life in science. Sadly, it also reveals the ubiquity of the bias faced by women pursuing this demanding vocation.