NV Joshi - Session 03, 2020-01-09

(00:00:20) Structure and process of PhD and Joshi’s supervisor Joshi talks about his time pursuing a PhD degree at the MBU at IISc and what it entailed, highlighting the absence of present-day structured arrangements like seminars and regular meetings. He details the defence and examination process as well. He describes his interactions with his PhD supervisor, what his inputs were and speaks about his gentle and friendly nature and commitment towards his students.

(00:07:47) Examinations In the examination that followed the coursework, it was generally known the kind of questions that would be asked. Joshi goes on to share about the comprehensive examination- the examiners and questions asked- and the informal groups to which presentations were given.

(00:12:04) Roommates and life at IISc campus He credits Raghavendra Gadagkar, his roommate at one point, as being the “greatest influence” on him. Joshi also shares that along with most others who pursued a PhD in molecular biophysics, he too had a physics background and was unfamiliar with biology. He speaks of another roommate, recollecting that they did not take things as seriously as they should have. He mentions going on long walks outside the campus. Joshi talks about sports that were popular on campus and mentions that there was a literary society. Though subsequently it was not the case, perhaps because of an inability to handle multiple things simultaneously, with time on his hands in the first year, Joshi was involved with the Nu Biophysical Society and the Ganesh mandal. Later, as work took up more of his time, he frequently interacted with a smaller group of people.

(00:18:47) Joining the Centre for Theoretical Studies (CTS), encountering ecology for the first time and visits back to Bombay Joshi also joined Gadagkar’s discussions with Madhav Gadgil, and as a result, learnt about the work being done at CTS. The work really appealed to him. Joshi shares details about all the factors that played a role in his applying for the position of a mathematical programmer at CTS when an opening came up. Some of these were interactions with V Nanjundiah, people at CTS finding his inputs to be very valuable and the biological relevance of work there in contrast to what he was doing for his PhD degree. He goes on to talk about his first encounter with behaviour and ecology, before coming back to detailing the process whereby he joined CTS as a mathematical programmer. He describes his interactions with others in the department, advantages he had while applying for the position and motivations that led him to wanting to take up the job. He talks about the frequency of his visits back to Bombay while pursuing his PhD and says that it subsequently came down.

(00:30:08) Location of places he stayed and worked at within the IISc Campus; founding years of CTS Joshi mentions the blocks he stayed in while on campus and the physical location of certain places within the IISc campus, such as CTS. He goes on to share a bit about the history of the founding of CTS in 1972 and the professors associated with it in the early days.

(00:34:20) Joshi’s role and work when he joined CTS Joshi was expected to assist visitors to CTS who were PhD students and professors. He interacted with people who came to Madhav Gadgil and needed assistance with quantitative analysis. He learnt statistical analysis and was able to help Sulochana Gadgil with analysing rainfall patterns using principal component analysis (PCA)- something that helped in his work with Gadagkar later on.

(00:39:26) Daily routine; learning various statistical techniques

Sharing that he was “treated as a collaborator by everybody”, Joshi recalls what his daily routine would entail, while also giving examples of topics he would engage on with others. For Joshi, learning different statistical techniques involved reading about them, having taken no statistics course as such post the first year of pre-university course (PUC). Consulting Anil Gore (a statistics professor collaborating with Madhav Gadgil), going through standard subroutines on the IBM computer and lists of programmes and descriptions left by his predecessor- R Sundar- were other ways by which he picked up required techniques.

(00:43:44) Learning statistics and explaining it to others He continues to share details about how he picked up statistics. Nanjundiah offered a course in statistics, but Joshi found it too advanced. Having himself failed in mathematics while pursuing his MSc degree, he was rather sensitive to people’s inability to understand mathematics. He often had to explain techniques to others who would use them and this led him to put them across in a manner such that someone with no mathematics background could understand.

(00:45:47) Publications, work on sex ratios and population genetics and PCA He discusses publications with others as well as ones he has of his own. He speaks in some detail about how he got around to working on sex ratios and population genetics. He delves into his preference for the simplest formulation of a problem. He also speaks about work he was involved in with others to do with Drosophila. Joshi credits his background of working on the conformation of sugar molecules and the Ramachandran plot as what made him comfortable subsequently with using PCA.

(00:54:45) Lack of interest in the subject matter and collaborations and interactions with other researchers Although he says that he could do his work just fine despite not being familiar with the subject matter, he acknowledges that it would have been helpful had he been more familiar with it. He states that he simply was not interested. Even though he could have visited any bird sanctuary, he was not attracted by the idea. Joshi speaks about his collaboration with Lalitha Vijayan and shares an anecdote about Sálim Ali and her to do with referring to drongos as “Birds A and B”. He emphasises that to him, the most important thing was to focus on what the question in the research trying to ask. He refers to researchers he interacted and collaborated with, such as NLNS Prasad.

(01:00:34) Authorship on papers Regarding authorship on papers, Joshi divulges that he did not feel comfortable lending his name to a paper if he did not feel it had an intellectual component that could be attributed to him. He narrates some discussions he had with co-authors about this, Sulochana Gadgil amongst others.

(01:05:48) Computers used, promotion to Scientific Officer and not having to deal with any transitions as such Joshi talks about the computers he used while at CTS and CES. He shares about being promoted to a Scientific Officer and how the post compared to that of a Lecturer. Joshi feels lucky that he did not feel any significant transition as such when going from MBU to CTS and later on from CTS to CES. [Archivist’s note: interviewee talks about the ‘Central Instrumentation and Service Laboratory (CISL), IISc’, but the index term uses the authority record name ‘Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics, IISc’]