I was a part of a one-day series of lectures on Optimisation Techniques for the Industry. The series started with a five-minute inaugural speech and ended with a 20-second thank you note. No invocation, no half-hour inauguration, no thanking everyone from the sweeper to the director; pure simple 6-hour workshop.
The only challenge is to make this a rule rather than an aberration.
Whats with the invocation nonsense prevalent in our country? No event starts without praying to the higher authority. Its a cultural nite, there’s invocation; technical festival, invocation; workshop, invocation again; international conference, damned invocation there too.
And then there will be saraswati puja and ayudha puja and what-not… just another set of excuses for people not to work.
And then there is a 15-day thing where students will come in black dhotis and refuse to work because their deity has promised them research bounty after 15-day sanyaas (followed, of course, by a visit to the temple).
And what’s so holy about termite mounds? The campus adjoins a protected forest; termite mounds come by the dozens. Praying to the termites won’t turn your D-grades to A-grades. Or perhaps you are praying that the termites attack my office and destroy your answer papers before I grade them???
And dear colleague who justifies this under the name of “culture and tradition”:
Lighting a diya is tradition
Aarti and garlands (however much I consider them a waste) could be tradition
But a clearly religious thing: prayer / puja is neither cultural, nor secular and it definitely flies in the face of science.
Guy goes to a bank; guy finds termites have eaten his money and his savings certificates; bank employee points him to a notice that warns customers of the termite problem (link).
Look how our eminent blogger smoothly inserts the term “It was a government bank, of course.” No dude, there is no “of course” there. Yes government banks are often incompetent. My parents were in Dena Bank for 25 years and I know how annoyed my dad would get at the shitty attitude of some of his collegues. I have an account in the campus branch of State Bank of India and I have written about how painful it is to get them to do even the routine things.
However, it isn’t like ICICI bank is much better. If you don’t believe me, go to the Indiranagar branch on CMH road in Bangalore. We have been there thrice; each time we have seen customers fighting with the manager.
My experiences with Wachovia bank and Bank of America — private banks, paragons of virtue — haven’t been much better either.
And which branch would we compliment for great service: SBI, branch on MG Road.
PS: Bear Stearns is a private bank, of course.
This is a touchy subject for a lot of people in academic and even more so in non-academic circuit: how do you address a faculty? The answer is often easier in Indian context: in the first person, you address someone as “sir” or “madam,” or in third person, you address someone as “Lastname sir” or “Lastname madam.”
In general, I do not prefer being called “sir” (and especially not the Tamil version: ”saar”), except in official mails, which start with “Dear Sir”. A large number of faculty at IIT, especially the younger faculty, are not picky about what someone calls them. But some may be. In any case, general rules for addressing your faculty:
In summary, I prefer to be called just ”Niket;” if you must, “Dr. Niket” or “Dr. Kaisare” is also fine; “sir,” I can live with; “Mr. Niket”… not so much.
Brian Leiter tells you why it is important to speak to some of the current graduate students to find out more about the department and the faculty you plan to work with for your graduate school (via Abi). Often, US News ranking is used as a sole criterion by Indian students to decide which grad school they want to attend. I often give students advice that I plagiarized from Abi: “don’t work for famous assholes; it usually isn’t worth it.” I know of a few cases where my friends quit after a few years into their PhDs, not because their work was going nowhere, but because they could no longer take shit from their advisors.
Quoting Leiter on some of the problems that could exist:
The Absent Faculty: Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students?
The Sexual Predator Faculty: […] Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department? Do they ever result in discipline?
The Nasty Faculty: […] I recall the story of one department where a member of the faculty was known to reduce students to tears in seminar.
The Factionalized Faculty: Many faculties are “factionalized,” in the sense that there are sub-groups that rarely see “eye to eye” about departmental issues, from appointments to admissions.