The Mathematician's ward

It was very heartening this morning to see the IIT-JEE results and achiever stories splashed all over the newspapers. IIT JEE is certainly one of the toughest exams to be clearing when one is 17 to get themselves in the country's premier institutions for engineering and sciences. I have been quite closely following the results data almost every year and more specifically look out for a specific piece of data for the past few years. About 5 Lakh students appeared for Joint Entrance Test (IIT-JEE) this year and competed for approximately 9000 seats in the 16 IITs (yes, even they are growing) indicating an admission rate of 2%, the most competitive in the world. It is said that major universities across the world have around 9% admission rate. This itself makes the IITs so much tougher and only 10,000 or so manage to crack the test every year. And about 30 of them are special and come from Anand Kumar's Ramanujam School of Mathematics in Patna,Bihar. The data that i am curious to see in the newspaper this morning is how Anand Kumar's wards have fared this year. As in the past, there is not much surprise as 24 of the chosen 30 managed to clear. The past two years saw all the 30 making to the elite institutions. The focused and now famous IIT grooming programme is called the Super30. For the past 7 years, Anand Kumar has relentlessly groomed hundreds of kids from the economically poor sections of our society. Every year as art of his Super 30 programme, Anand hand picks 30 brilliant and meritorious students through a qualifying test (which of late has thousands of aspirants) and takes care of their lodging, boarding and other expenses or just simply create a conducive environment for about a year. The students, on their part just need to be focused and perform to the best of their potential without having to worry about any financial constraints of their families. Much has been written about Anand and the success his innovative Super30 idea in the media. Anand has been a recipient of many a award. Anand believes in spotting the right talent and providing an environment suitable for the talent to bloom. He is now trying a newer experiment where he wants to set up such incubation schools and identify and enrol top talent from the poorer sections earlier rather than the crop of class IX. He intends to set up such schools and try innovative teaching methodologies that can shape up children to be ready for the premier institutions. It has been proven many a time now that when children develop inquisitiveness; they grow up to be better individuals.

I will certainly be following Anand train his energies and resources towards grooming smarter kids in the coming years. Hats off Anand! You are truly a change maker that this country is proud of..

Digital dilemma

My obsession with e-books began when our decently large book shelves at home began overflowing with paperbacks and hard covers accumulated over years of not very glorious academic pursuits and the struggles en route couple with a passion to buy and read different genre of books and periodicals. On a recent business trip to the US, I bought myself  the inevitable - The Amazon Kindle, at a black Friday door buster  Target sale at Waterbury,CT at 5AM braving unusually unapologetic crowds wanting to lay hands on anything that was on sale. This was a paradigm shift in the way Ranjini and I read our books or rather stored them and the thought of not having to sell prized paperbacks to the recycler by weight was only too comforting.  During my growing years, I have borrowed books from the lending library, photocopied sections for reference, pooled money with friends and my brother to buy a comic or a novel. Piracy and copyrights were unknown then. We are now, again and almost back to those days with the Kindle and other book readers offering digital copies of literally every book for a trivial amount or sometimes even free. Do the publishers and authors care about protecting the digital rights or, are they just contented that more readers are reading their books now. Amazon has never bothered (at least, so far) to stop a registered Kindle user from passing their account credentials and have multiple copies delivered to any number of devices. Digital rights management experts disagree that this is a miss from the copyright owners despite knowing that there are thousands of pirated copies firmly residing on Kindles around the world. At least to me it seems that both the print brand and the online brand are thriving-at least on Amazon. The entire business of books is undergoing a transformation where some forms of books are better served digitally say maps, newspapers and magazines. Talking of maps, I never got a chance to drive in a new country or city having your co-passenger reading out instructions from a paper map. By the time, i got a chance to drive on the American interstates or the British motorways, the GPS and the SatNav systems had come in making it even easier to navigate. Of course the added benefit being the ability to find the nearest restaurant or a fuel outlet when you needed them most and the even fancier 'alternate routes' . Recently when i was given a complimentary copy of the AAA British road map by the car rental agency from where I hired a car to drive through the Welsh countryside, I could hardly differentiate it from a school atlas!

So not only the change in format helps in this case, but also the form. Meanwhile more and more publishing houses are going digital silently with a belief and faith that buyers of the print version will continue to buy while those who could not afford to get a copy might still get a chance to read them. And sooner the publishing fraternity understands that only people who pay generally would pay anyways. The key to the survival of wonderful stores like Borders and B&N could well be here...

Maybe, the printed book can survive too.