[In a recent article, Prof. Janaki Nair (JNU) objects to open days for school students at research institutions like JNU. A guest post by Abhishek Banerjee in response:]
"But what if I don’t find anything?"
"But what if I don’t find anything?"
It was the summer of 2001. For the last quarter of an hour, there were a bunch of us high school students listening intently to a senior scientist explain to us the thrills of innovation and discovery. We will call him the Professor.
But one of us had managed to pop the question that was at the back of our minds. We will call him the Kid.
"Well you try and try and try,'' the Professor replied, with a smile. Perhaps he didn't want to disappoint us right away.
"But, what if we try and try and try and still don't find anything?" The Kid persisted, with the frankness of someone who has nothing to lose. Others around had begun to laugh.
"That's the thrill of science. Ultimately, it is about the unknown" the Professor finally let us have it straight.
The Indian Institute of Science. The Raman Research Institute. The Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow. The Bose Center in Kolkata. They threw their doors open to us. We bugged them, we peppered them with silly questions. We heard about NMR spectroscopy and orbiting telescopes and non-Newtonian fluids. We didn't understand a lot, but we caught the glint in their eye, we saw them thrive on the excitement of working with the unknown.
I was hooked. I still am.
It is therefore with great pain and surprise that I read Prof. Janaki Nair's article in Scroll.in where she speaks thus about school students being invited to campus for one day to see how JNU academics work.
A vice?
Does an open day for school students really turn researchers into "observable lab animals"? Are possible interactions with school kids so degrading that a researcher should feel deprived of her/his humanity and turned into an animal?
I really hope not. I hope that interacting with fresh young minds is an exercise that lifts us all up, instead of cutting us down, let alone to the level of a "lab animal". What's wrong with lab animals anyway? I'd love to be a fly on the wall where ideas are being thrown around.
In a nation where we let untold quantities of human capital go waste, perhaps it would be better if the privileged few who have access to world class research platforms would be willing to share. Just a little. If we could break just a few barriers to higher learning, it will not cause bankruptcy. It will cause this land to run rich with ideas.
With all humility, I think I will make an attempt to answer the question that the Professor was discussing all those years ago.
If we don't know, we can try. If we still don't know, we can try harder. And if we still don't know, we could pass it on. Sometimes in research, it is even hard to know where to start. It could even be hard to know what the good questions are. But we could still pass on the sense of wonder and curiosity.
A privileged research campus is like a flourishing garden of flowers. And we have to let the children in. They do not take away from the life of the campus, they are the life of campus. If there are giants on campus who want to build stone walls so high that the children cannot play here, spring shall not come to us.
