This anthology of essays, now available online,  featuring nearly one hundred Indian women scientists — from the Victorian era to our times — fills a void then. Every chapter is the story of a woman scientist of India. Contemporary women give first-person accounts of what brought them to the field of research and what keeps them going. Amateur writers present the narratives of memorable personalities who are no more. Their stories are compelling even when the writing lacks finesse.

The title is a miniature story in itself. Lilavati was the daughter of the renowned 12th-century mathematician, Bhaskaracharya. In his classical treatise, he addresses problems in algebra, geometry, and discrete mathematics to his playful, doe-eyed daughter. We don’t know if Lilavati became a mathematician herself but the fact that her accomplished father deemed her worthy of solving these complex problems suggests that she must have been brilliant. The women in Lilavati Daughters are all inheritors of her intellectual legacy.

Inspiring example

Nowadays, scores of students go abroad to study science, but imagine the incredible journey of Anandibai Joshi, the first Hindu woman to obtain a medical degree in the United States in 1886. Back then, America was no less distant than the moon. Alone in an alien land, this 19-year-old stuck to her vegetarianism, her saris, and a resolve to qualify herself to serve her female compatriots who would sooner die than allow a male doctor to examine them. But the severe winters took a toll on her health, and like the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, she eventually succumbed to tuberculosis. Her story is presented as a first person narrative.

Readers may know that Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation, challenged the House of Tatas rule of not employing female engineers at their factory. But if shop floors were not considered fit workplaces for women, in an earlier era, laboratories too were deemed inappropriate spaces for them, we learn. One person who resisted the entry of young women researchers into the prestigious Indian Institute of Science was the director Sir C.V. Raman himself. The essay “The Scientist Lady” tells us of the chemist Kamala Sohonie who staged a Gandhi-style protest outside the Nobel laureate’s office in 1933 till she was admitted as a research student at the institute.

Ridiculous convention

More than one person from the post-independence era mentions years of separation from their spouses because of an inability to find appropriate work in the same city. This seems particularly true of couples in science. Unfortunately, the unwritten rule, which states that spouses should not be appointed in the same division, is faithfully followed in research institutes in our country, says Dr. D. Balasubramanian, President, Indian Academy of Sciences. The essay on the gifted chemist Darshan Ranganathan who was not offered a faculty position at IIT, Kanpur because her husband was a professor there, makes us livid at a callous system.

This timely anthology is a long-overdue acknowledgement of the struggles and triumphs of women scientists in our midst. A wider range of career choices are open to bright young people today but scientists are still vital for any knowledge-based economy. Girls who want that life in science will find many role models here. Every school and college library in India should order copies of the book right away. But readers don’t have to be women, scientists, or someone who is keen on science to enjoy the best of these inspiring real-life stories.

Read the article here.

Read the rest of the review here. pdf.

I am an early riser. During the dark winters of New England, I am up even before the sun, and that, you’ll agree, takes some doing. But though I am up, I am, usually, not about. Venturing out before the neighbors have had a chance to shovel the sidewalks is unwise, I’ve discovered, and I don’t bother getting out before 8 AM. In my South Indian hometown, Chennai, getting a head start on the day made practical sense because the sun could turn the outdoors into one giant oven, well before noon. Strangely enough, that land of three seasons – hot, hotter and hottest – once benefited directly from our frigid weather.

Late in the 19th century, ships carrying crystalline ice went from Boston to select tropical ports, including Chennai. The blocks were hewn out of the many frozen ponds that dot our landscape. Frederic Tudor, “Ice King,” had found the perfect insulating material for this precarious cargo: sawdust, a waste product of Maine’s timber mills. Later, he also sent apples with the ice. Sadly, no museum in New England exhibits the paraphernalia of the frozen water trade, ice-harvesting tools, as its centerpiece. Nor will you find prominent plaques by the sources of frozen water – some like the Fresh Pond Lake are reservoirs now – to remind us of the fantastic voyage of packed ice.

Except for a wedding cake of a building in Chennai called the Ice House, there is nothing at the other end either. The structure went up in 1842, when the city was called Madras. The British ruled India back then. The building has, of course, been remodeled extensively, but because of its location, right opposite the Marina Beach, you can easily picture loin-clothed workmen dragging ice across that wide road on wooden rollers. Currently, the building is a publishing office and is named Vivekanada House, after an illustrious Indian thinker. But ask the surliest of autorickshaw drivers to take you to Ice House and he will do it without a fuss. Chances are, he doesn’t speak English, has probably never heard of the frozen-water trade – local textbooks don’t mention it – but he won’t swear at you for giving him a hard-to-find address. That is a minor miracle. Improbably enough, the place name lives on in the city’s collective memory, two centuries later.

Though I like to visit my hometown briefly in the winters, nothing will make me budge from New England during the summers. In those warm months when the sun doesn’t go down till late, I walk around Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. When he stayed in the log cabin as an experiment in simple living, the philosopher must’ve created his own water supply from thawed ice or by melting snow. Of the ice trade, he’d written: The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. To others it may be nothing more than a forgotten bit of commerce, but  the journey of ice does appear extraordinary to me, connecting as it does my two worlds in such an unexpected way.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–

This essay is part of an anthology of essays inspired by New England. The book was published by Paige M. Gutenborg, the book-making robot/espresso book machine, at the Harvard Book Store. More details.

My Review of The Sweetest Mango

You can’t be a non-resident Indian and eat fresh Indian mangoes too. I live in Boston and don’t travel to the home country during the summer months, so I am pretty resigned to this fact. This July, however, I was in for a pleasant surprise when I walked into my neighborhood bookstore in Porter Square. There were no fresh Indian mangoes on sale or any such thing. No, no, no…

Instead, a sumptuously colored book The Sweetest Mango was on display in the children’s section. The book was VERY MUCH from India. That girl on the over could have been me when I was eight years old. I flipped through the pages to read the story of Jyoti, who gorged on the golden fruit, both plain and in cooked dishes, all through that hot season. Even so, she got a little greedy. I could empathize with the little girl’s quandary: keep the humongous  mundappa ripening on the nearby tree as a treat for herself, or  reveal this juicy secret to her best friend? As adults, we go through similar dilemmas when it comes to sharing even with our favorite people. I loved the theme. The coconut-sized mango was a variety I hadn’t heard about before. (I am a banganapalli fan myself.) But someday, I hope to travel to the land of the mundappa mango .

The story is supposed to be set in Udipi. You know this from the text, but you wouldn’t know that from the illustrations. Though lush and vividly colored, these could be scenes from any village in South India. The level of detail and specificity found in other Tulika books was missing. As a birder, I would have been happier to see a specific bird species, local to the area, instead of the generic freckled chick. Again, in most other Tulika books we are supposed to guess the meanings of Indian words from the context, but this one came with a glossary for simple Tulu words.

But these are quibbles of an adult. I was absolutely delighted to see how much R, a 4-year-old, had enjoyed this book. RM is R’s mother, a well-known and well-liked blogger. Sample this delightful exchange between mother and child, and read the rest of the post at your leisure.

R: Amma, mango book, please, please one more time. Last time, okay.

And we read it again. After her quota of 5 books.

R: Amma, please one extra book, please please.

Please amma, main please bol rahi hoon na…please

RM: okay, which one

R: Mango book 

RM: But but….we read it three times already in a span of 1 hour

R: Please amma, mereko bahut acha laga woh book.

The  little one loved the story and the illustrations. That is all that matters.

THE END

Once upon a time, auto rickshaws in Madras had functioning meters, so the legend goes.Asking the auto drivers to turn on that boxy contraption today is like committing a small crime. The unrevised, state-fixed fare is blatantly unfair to these men in khaki. But pay the arbitrary sum they demand and, chances are, it won’t fair to you in the long run. What gives?

A tech-savvy NRI, recently returned to his hometown, wanted to do something about this. Crowd sourcing, a form of distributed problem solving, was his answer. “I figured that the only way to get some parity is if a whole bunch of us decided that we were only going to pay Rs. x and not Rs. y that the drivers demanded,” says Ananthanarayanan K. Subramanian (Anantha,for short). Image Source: A leaf from the Indian-Bred Calendar.

He explains the psychology behind the crowdsourcing tool Meterpodu. “So let’s say a autodriver demands Rs. 50 to go from T.Nagar to Saidapet from 10 consecutive commuters. Each of them refuses and counter-quotes a sum of Rs. 40. The 11th commuter is likely to be quoted a fare of Rs. 40, since the driver doesn’t want to price himself out of the market.”

Anantha teamed up with a friend, Mayur Narasimhan, and designed a system to collect fare data, process the numbers, and provide commuters useful information. If you key in two locations, the system looks up Google Maps and calculates the distance between them. It arrives at the official fare based on the fare chart. The driver may not take the same route, but this a good enough approximation.

What users actually pay on the ground is very different, of course. “Users can contribute these fares for various routes logging in via Twitter, Facebook or Gmail,” says Mayur. Their input goes into a database that computes the average fare. Now, with that number in hand, every user can hope to drive a decent bargain with any autodriver in the city.

How is Meterpodu Faring?

The new tool got good press. “A lot of people began polling the system to find out fares,” says Anantha. “The fare formula the system uses is dated circa 2007, which is when the government last revised fares. So it will quote average fares that are a lot less than what is being demanded on the roads.” The number can only lead to angst that the auto drivers aren’t plying according to the government-set fares, says Mayur.

Meterpodu enjoyed an initial wave of popularity. Nobody likes to be fleeced and the autodriver is a convenient villain in a farce of a transit system. “We don’t have anything against auto drivers,” Anantha hastens to clarify. “Most of them rent the rickshaws they drive and are forced to do what they do because their owners squeeze them.”

The lull that came later is harder to explain. While Meterpodu costs commuters nothing, everyone stands to gain once it reaches its potential. Yet, few contribute fares. Usually, crowdsourcing involves some form of gratification but here the user gets no instant reward.

Still, is that the holdup? “May be it is our mistake that we haven’t stressed it enough, but the whole point is for folks to contribute fares to the system and build up a database of fares,” says a bemused Anantha. So right now, the system is missing a vital piece.

To make Meterpodu an effective tool, the first order of business would be to drive more fare contributions into the system. There are tweaks in the works. Currently, there is a free app for smartphones, but its creators plan to release an SMS-based version for non-smartphone users as well.

Thanks to technology, and individual initiative, we have a handy tool to set fair prices for routes all over the city. Collectively, we may be able to resolve an issue that had us haggling and handwringing in the past.

Keep Meterpodu ticking

• Go to the Meterpodu site.  It has a very straightforward interface.
• Look up fares for your destination.If the government fare comes up, it means no user has contributed a fare for that route yet. Otherwise, you get an average fare as well. And that is your bargaining chip.
• If you are a Facebook user or a Gmail user, Meterpodu lets you submit fares. The credentialing is necessary to prevent random submissions from people or bots.
• You can also query @meterpodu, or contribute to it, via your Twitter account.
• Meterpodu lets you look up fares for free. But if you never contribute fares, there may be precious little to draw from at some point.

Read the article here. html. pdf.

Read the rest of the story. html. pdf.

The poem was written on a sort of impulse. It was triggered by a comment I heard from a friend of mine – quite a culture-vulture himself – about another writer based in Bombay. My friend said that this writer was “so Bombay”, meaning so typically a Bombayite or a Mumbaikar. It got me thinking about how he or others might see me and so this poem got written.

At the core of it, of course, lies my own love for the older version of this metro now called Chennai with all its malls – an older version which is thankfully still alive in certain pockets of the city – in Triplicane or Mylapore or Saidapet, for instance. This older Chennai that is not Chennai at all, but the Madras of my memories.

An interview with writer-academic K.Srilata of IIT, Madras. Read it in the recent issue of Madras Musings. html. pdf.

Very briefly then,I am middle class

and very Madras.

Born and raised in

West Mambalam –

the other side of the railway tracks

where fabled mosquitoes turn

people into elephants.

Went to college in

Khushboo sarees stripped

right off the absurdly voluptuous

mannequins at

Saravana Stores T. Nagar

Chennai 17.

Cradling the spiky fruit in her palms, a patron examines the probables at length while her family looks on. Once she picks the winner, the group withdraws into the darkness of the nearby alley. An assistant takes a machete to the durian and serves them the fruit’s innards. The family doesn’t take leftovers from this feast. Well, there is very little left, to be honest but, more importantly, “The King of Fruits” is not allowed on subways in Singapore. Does the durian have an image problem or what?

Read the rest of the article here. html.

Read the rest of the article here. pdf.

Public libraries in India are not known for their user-friendliness. Book lovers either buy books or visit private lending libraries that function as rental stores for periodicals and paperbacks. Space is costly, and reading rooms are rarely part of the setup. School libraries, where they exist, are a hodgepodge of donated books, the majority of them related to academics. There is a museum-like quality to the best of them: expensive editions of books are on display, but under lock and key.

Read the rest of the article here. html.  PDF