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From school I went to the University in 1958.
Unfortunately, unlike biology, physics attracted very few ladies either as teachers or students those days. We had but one lady teacher and we used to refer to her as Madam Curie:
Not that there was any dour resemblance but because Marie Curie was the only Nobel name we heard of women in our physics books...we had to mug up the intricate definition of what a 'curie' was in our radioactivity which was full of half-lives which didn't mean half of full lives which happen to be infinite.
I have no clue how she was treated as a woman in her workplace by her male colleagues...my suspicion is that she was never treated at all. I myself treated her with due respect and bunked all her classes...she didn't seem to mind...apparently, like me, she was happier when her classes were smaller in number.
We had but two lady classmates. And, during those years, segregation of sexes in AP was complete...any boy seen moving beside a girl on the road or sitting by her side in a bus raised several eyebrows...it was taken for granted that they were in love. Indeed there were separate university buses for ladies. In our class rooms ladies sat in the front row and boys in the rows behind, or away from them.
For the first four years we had no partners in our labs and in the final year the two ladies partnered, and between them they exploded quite a few fuses in the electronics lab...the fault was of the fuses entirely. We didn't hear of any positive or negative discrimination towards them from our teachers...there were no sessional marks in the pockets of our teachers.
Things changed a bit when we graduated as research scholars in the brahmin labs. I was working with a lady classmate of ours on the same hated subject. As it happens, I ran away without completing my Ph D while she was more defiant.
Those days there was this practice of attracting US post-docs as Pool Officers by the Indian universities in the hope that they would elevate our standards to those of Harvard and Caltech. But the thing seems to have quietly fizzled out. There were two such Pool Officers who were rumored to join our lab. And that one of them was an attractive lady. The other, unfortunately, happened to be her husband...it was a package deal...'take me - take my spouse'. The two sat down facing each other on opposite sides of their table in a tiny single room for a few months before they fled I know not where. There were jokes aplenty about their unremitting partnership but we didn't get to see her alone, much less talk to her.
My lady classmate who, I told you, joined our lab was working under a different brahimn guide (very much male). This gentleman had just then returned from a sabbatical in the US and showed it off by the way he shrugged and spoke American English, and the tight jeans he wore which were then a novelty. He would, for instance, say,
"Excuse me"
all the time before he joined us in the lab. Joke was that we were supposed to mutter:
"Excused!"
within us before standing up before his eminence. He would also say:
"Could you please come to my room for a minute for discussion if you are not frightfully busy?"
to my lady colleague. She never complained and so it must have been all cordial and white as driven snow.
He was least interested in teaching since he was busy installing imported gadgets or wiring others up in his lab. He once called me to his room, without that 'frightfully busy' stuff, and passed on his hand-written lecture notes of yore and asked me to go and teach in his place to the final year M Sc class. I was flabbergasted but couldn't say 'no'. There were a couple of hours left for my preparation and I found it was all about microwave cavities and waveguides of which I knew nothing...he had introduced this subject anew. I couldn't make head or tail of all those partial differential equations and Bessel functions and was scared. I went back to his room after half an hour, mortally scared, and murmured that I didn't understand anything at all about the topic, and before he could say anything, I kept his notes on his table and ran away to the canteen. And then there was apparently a call to my lady colleague and it turned out she took the class without any hesitation...all of one hour...i.e. SIXTY minutes.
I asked her after she returned to the lab if she followed what was there in those lecture notes. She smiled and replied that her boss simply said:
"Just go there and copy the equations on the blackboard...that is what I always do"
I don't know if this episode comes under workplace discrimination according to present laws...I hope not.
There is more about our partnership under this jeans-clad-chain-smoking prof for tomorrow...
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...Women and Child Welfare Minister Krishna Tirath said: "So far, women were afraid of men. Seems that is changing."
...Yahoo News
From school I went to the University in 1958.
Unfortunately, unlike biology, physics attracted very few ladies either as teachers or students those days. We had but one lady teacher and we used to refer to her as Madam Curie:
Not that there was any dour resemblance but because Marie Curie was the only Nobel name we heard of women in our physics books...we had to mug up the intricate definition of what a 'curie' was in our radioactivity which was full of half-lives which didn't mean half of full lives which happen to be infinite.
I have no clue how she was treated as a woman in her workplace by her male colleagues...my suspicion is that she was never treated at all. I myself treated her with due respect and bunked all her classes...she didn't seem to mind...apparently, like me, she was happier when her classes were smaller in number.
We had but two lady classmates. And, during those years, segregation of sexes in AP was complete...any boy seen moving beside a girl on the road or sitting by her side in a bus raised several eyebrows...it was taken for granted that they were in love. Indeed there were separate university buses for ladies. In our class rooms ladies sat in the front row and boys in the rows behind, or away from them.
For the first four years we had no partners in our labs and in the final year the two ladies partnered, and between them they exploded quite a few fuses in the electronics lab...the fault was of the fuses entirely. We didn't hear of any positive or negative discrimination towards them from our teachers...there were no sessional marks in the pockets of our teachers.
Things changed a bit when we graduated as research scholars in the brahmin labs. I was working with a lady classmate of ours on the same hated subject. As it happens, I ran away without completing my Ph D while she was more defiant.
Those days there was this practice of attracting US post-docs as Pool Officers by the Indian universities in the hope that they would elevate our standards to those of Harvard and Caltech. But the thing seems to have quietly fizzled out. There were two such Pool Officers who were rumored to join our lab. And that one of them was an attractive lady. The other, unfortunately, happened to be her husband...it was a package deal...'take me - take my spouse'. The two sat down facing each other on opposite sides of their table in a tiny single room for a few months before they fled I know not where. There were jokes aplenty about their unremitting partnership but we didn't get to see her alone, much less talk to her.
My lady classmate who, I told you, joined our lab was working under a different brahimn guide (very much male). This gentleman had just then returned from a sabbatical in the US and showed it off by the way he shrugged and spoke American English, and the tight jeans he wore which were then a novelty. He would, for instance, say,
"Excuse me"
all the time before he joined us in the lab. Joke was that we were supposed to mutter:
"Excused!"
within us before standing up before his eminence. He would also say:
"Could you please come to my room for a minute for discussion if you are not frightfully busy?"
to my lady colleague. She never complained and so it must have been all cordial and white as driven snow.
He was least interested in teaching since he was busy installing imported gadgets or wiring others up in his lab. He once called me to his room, without that 'frightfully busy' stuff, and passed on his hand-written lecture notes of yore and asked me to go and teach in his place to the final year M Sc class. I was flabbergasted but couldn't say 'no'. There were a couple of hours left for my preparation and I found it was all about microwave cavities and waveguides of which I knew nothing...he had introduced this subject anew. I couldn't make head or tail of all those partial differential equations and Bessel functions and was scared. I went back to his room after half an hour, mortally scared, and murmured that I didn't understand anything at all about the topic, and before he could say anything, I kept his notes on his table and ran away to the canteen. And then there was apparently a call to my lady colleague and it turned out she took the class without any hesitation...all of one hour...i.e. SIXTY minutes.
I asked her after she returned to the lab if she followed what was there in those lecture notes. She smiled and replied that her boss simply said:
"Just go there and copy the equations on the blackboard...that is what I always do"
I don't know if this episode comes under workplace discrimination according to present laws...I hope not.
There is more about our partnership under this jeans-clad-chain-smoking prof for tomorrow...
**********************************************************************************************************
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