I was invited to two different conferences this week at Ahmedabad. The first was at SAC on OCEANSAT 2 applications. I sat through two days of lectures by Indian and Australian remote-sensing scientists. I couldn’t help noticing that we Indians have quite a difficulty in speaking English. A Kerala woman (as Soma would have put it) alluding to her discussions with the famous Trevor Platt, FRS, mentioned emphatically, with accent and all, that she ‘had discussed with Platt itself”. Another UP guy (likely winner of PRL award 2010) pronounced ‘effluents’ as “affluence”. Flatulence! One beer-bellied guy from Mangalore (I assure you this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, you got to see him to believe me) walked in half an hour before his scheduled talk. His student (male) was always moving around with him and as he started his talk sitting on a chair, the student sat next to him and operated the up-down arrows in the computer, as he read out from the computer screen! Apparently they have been measuring suspended matter in the coast and after the 2004/5(?) Tsunami, it seems to have increased! Hogwash!
Expectations were high when we were invited to the conference dinner in a far-flung place called Kathwada village. With hardly any traffic on the road the bus ride took fifty minutes to our destination. We travelled in the Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway up to the Nirma University and took a right turn, drove till eternity. Some of us hopefuls thought as this was a remote place there was a fair chance of aperitif! But what a disappointment, we were instead asked to go around a ground filled with old model American cars, from the 1930s. Soon I lost interest and came to look at the Rajasthani multi-pot dance (reminded me of S’s multi-proxy approach to Paleoclimate); this place was a poor apology for Vishala and Rajwadu! I regretted having accepted the invitation for this dinner. Food was typical Gujju, and it was 1130 pm by the time I reached home. Lal would have shot them for wasting so much of our collective time!
The second place was Gujarat University, where they conducted Gujarat Science Academy’s (GSA) meeting. Chamyal made me and Ray as judges for evaluating the talks and selecting the best teacher and student performances. Though I like to sleep on Sunday afternoons, I had to agree because of my long standing association with Chamyal. They were to start the Geology parallel (more a tangential) session from 1400 Hrs, but only at 14.30 the group of people around the dais realized that the cable from the laptop was connected to the ‘output’ rather than the ‘input’ port of the projector. This shows that Gujarati scientists, in spite of their lack of English skills, are fairly intelligent. JRT, in charge of GSA, is usually a good organizer, but we were left without water etc. for long in that hall, with no AC and outside temperatures soaring above 40 C. We are better in Gujarat than in Lucknow or Chennai, because we had fans working at least. I had miserably failed to anticipate this and to carry my own bottle of water, as usual. I ended up emptying Ray’s water bottle. Some kindly soul from Baroda had arranged for some drinking water after an hour or so. Most presentations were so so. This may be typical of many state ‘Academies’! We ended up selecting two women scientists for their scientific presentations. Science Day was going on at PRL on the same day (21 March). Someone asked me why it was not celebrated on 28th Feb., which is the correct date. I told them that at PRL, our former director was introduced to someone as our late Director.
PN Shukla’s third daughter is getting married on 3rd April. He came to invite me. Sad news of three deaths came simultaneously last week. One was from Delhi, Mrs. Tandon had expired. There was no one at home and next morning she was found dead, Devesh informed me. I remember meeting Tandon at Kashmir in 1980, and he had asked me to send a telegram to his wife on the occasion of his first (?) marriage anniversary. Second, Satyaprakash, my former student, now at INCOIS, Hyderabad, lost his father, 82. He was brought from his home in Darbhanga to Hyderabad by both his sons, in the hope of getting him treated for his brain cancer. My condolences to the bereaved. Third, SP Gupta told me about the death of a scientist called “Oxford”. He said that he had worked with Oxford for six months in the nineties. In the meanwhile I have more invitations from Delhi, Kolkata, and Tirupati…. Life goes on!
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