Perhaps, I’ll Retire in This Calm

Well, let’s start with what these last couple of weeks have been.

It is a wonder when you have advanced so busily in your career, and it is almost a coincidence when both your alma maters (IIT Madras and University of Pennsylvania) plan gatherings in the span of one week! So I thought, just like how singers plan their multi-city tours, let me time mine by weaving together work, friends, family, and two alma maters.

I ended up planning a multi-city tour across India, starting from Vijayawada, to Delhi, then Bangalore, and the final leg in Chennai before back home in Vijayawada, completing my own little Golden Quadrilateral. The Delhi leg was for the University of Pennsylvania gathering and the vibrant Penn Clubs popping up in Indian cities. I’ll probably write more about that next month when I visit the US. But for now, I want to talk about Chennai and IIT Madras.  

I was back on campus after eight full years! So much has remained the same, yet so much has changed. I myself was a guest on the campus. But I also had my own guests aka friends from both in and out of IITM. 

It was nostalgic sitting on those random benches on the 620 acre campus. What struck me immediately was the calm. People were no longer running. It was very interesting because, in the real world out there, people are always running in life. There is always a deadline, a meeting, or a crisis. Just looking at these kids, my mind was at ease. There was some sort of a calm that was out there on the campus. It was very meditative, and it helped me declutter.

One of the professors remarked that she had been living on campus for nearly fifteen years, and this was the first time she was seeing so many deer and blackbucks comfortably walking along the roads. The new 20 kmph speed limit has made the campus much quieter and safer. It was a lovely reminder that this is ultimately their forest, and we are the ones living in their space.

One of my friends, who’s also from IITM, became very nostalgic as we went to the Centre for Innovation to see Raftar, the race car club of IIT Madras. We went around looking at the nose cones where their signatures from eight or nine years ago were still displayed. I had very good friends in Raftar, so they were always there. I used to get tip-offs about the 2 a.m. test drives around Gajendra Circle. It was a pure rush in blood listening to the race car revving to life! The cars were always built from scratch. We used to raise funds from alumni. Sometimes we would joke that they could sponsor even a single tyre.

One of the current students of Raftar club walked in, working on the electrical subsystem. He had a quick chat about what electrical systems were used back in our time. It did make us feel old. 

New blocks have come up on campus. Fancy fountains and air-conditioned rooms when back in our time, we toiled in the Chennai heat. There were staff members who remembered me. It’s been eight full years since I left this place, but they fondly came over, hugged me, and asked me how I was doing. Wow. I knew I was an extrovert, but the fact that they remembered me after all these years reminded me that I belong very much to this campus.

I also chatted with professors. It was almost like us grabbing a coffee and picking up conversations where we left off. Though it’s been such a long gap, it did not feel like I’ve moved worlds or they’ve moved worlds because we were debating everything under the sun, every policy, every move, every international relation that was out there.

Later that evening, I found myself flipping through a coffee table book documenting the institution’s journey from 1959 to today. Somewhere, IIT Madras’ motto, “Siddhir Bhavati Karmaja”, fruits be upon those who labour, felt very visible across the campus. You could almost see decades of patient work reflected in every new building, every laboratory, every student project, and every conversation.

In college, we had this attitude that anything and everything is possible. Somehow, that pure rush disappears. We’re no longer building things from scratch. At least in government, we become implementers of policy and, eventually, policymakers. Important work, certainly. But something is different. That feeling of “anything is possible” becomes harder to find.

Let me give the example of the Brain Centre, one of the new things in IIT Madras that has attracted a lot of international interest because of the pioneering nature of the research. Simply put, it images the human brain when people abroad are still working on rat brains. We had Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), but we never had pure imaging of the entire brain. The brain has a survival window of only about six to seven hours after a patient passes away. Brain Centre obtains fresh brains, freezes them, and cuts them with a precision of about 20 microns, almost 20,000 layers for each brain. They would then dye them and image them. This way, you can make a full, complex reconstruction of the entire brain.

What is this for?

We still don’t fully understand why conditions like schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and Alzheimer’s happen because we have never studied the brain to this level of granularity. It almost reminded me of this one startup on Shark Tank, where someone came up with a technology to slice bananas into much thinner slices to make banana chips. It became successful because conventional banana slicers make thicker chips, and people generally don’t enjoy eating thick banana chips as much.

It wasn’t rocket science. But when you eat those thinner banana chips, you’re like, “Oh, banana chips could also be this good.”

It was as simple as that. It’s just that nobody had figured it out before. I was talking to this professor after our visit to the Brain Centre, and I asked him, “Why? This looks so bloody simple. Just cutting the brain and imaging. Why are we only doing this now?“

Because, to me, it looked deceptively simple.

His answer was, “Well… somebody had to sit down and conceptualize this.” 

That sentence stayed with me. 

It got me thinking. People in industry are in a hurry. People in governance are in a hurry. Everyone is trying to solve the problem immediately in front of them. Academia is one of the few places where people have the calm to sit, look at the world from a different perspective, and conceptualize things. 

The audacity to think. 

The luxury to think.

Academia gives people the time to imagine what the rest of us are too busy to imagine. Because, what science is today is what technology will become twenty years later. Today we are looking at e-governance, digital systems, and using technology for last-mile delivery. But the science that made these things possible often existed decades ago, nurtured quietly in laboratories and academic departments. The world perceives technology, not the science behind it.  And what they’re doing in the Brain Centre is exactly that science. It is conceptualization.

Universities are not merely places we graduate from, they are farms of ideas. Places where impossible ideas are allowed to sit long enough to become possible. People have the time and space to think deeply, to conceptualize solutions to the problems that practitioners often encounter in the field. While those of us in public service are busy implementing and responding to realities on the ground, there are minds in academia constantly questioning, researching, and imagining what could be done better. The relationship between the two should perhaps be stronger than it is!

This is just one example of how campuses like IITM can become hubs for such beautiful innovation. Now that we’ve graduated, and are on the other side, we have to fulfil our duty in the roles that we have chosen. We have to do our public service. Yet, every now and then, perhaps we need to pause and look back at the farm of ideas.

Maybe, in the long run, I could be back in academia. I’ll pick up some teaching, or research, or spend a chapter of my life here. Perhaps, I’ll retire in this calm and continue contributing to the nation.