Ten years ago, this time of the year, it was not uncommon to see green rickety tempos pulling into the gates of the Mathura Road campus. There would often be one or two scientist-looking people bracing themselves at the back, as if by their sheer will they will hold up the weight of their precious cargo – state-of-the art instruments, freezers with years of clones frozen in them or cardboard boxes with lab notebooks and Eppendorf racks and ferocious acids and even litres of milli-Q water (for who knows when we will have the machine up and running again!). The labs were moving to the new campus! In the last couple of years, we have had some of those same tempo-daredevils coming back to visit IGIB, now running their own team of researchers. I am sure they have poured out all the lessons they learned here into setting up their new labs (you might have read some of their stories in the Life-post-PhD section of Pulse).
As I stand and look at the campus, now green with monsoon showers, flowers turning their faces to the sun, students walking around the campus deep in conversation, I remember the dreams and grand plans we all had when we made the move. So much talk of how to the new environs will stimulate scientific interactions, how the Spine will buzz with voices of discussion and arguments, how the auditorium will be packed and we will accommodate the spill-over in the two adjacent workshops with glass walls, how the small but beautiful campus will provide a sanctuary for the low moments of ‘doing’ science. And as I look back on the ten (X) years we have spent here, all of these dreams have come true and many more. But as the people who were involved in the planning, design and building of the campus will tell you, when they look around, they also see the imperfections; the design that didn’t really come together, the broken sign, the leaking ceilings, the messy sidewalk, the water-logged basement….none of which the newcomers and outsiders even register.
When I think about it, this journey is so very similar to the one embarked upon by so many who enter this campus every year for the first time. New PhD students and project assistants and post-docs and scientists, all come in, eyes starry, dreams filling their vision, a sense of adventure. On the way, signages break, trees fall, glass doors shatter, experiments fail, hypotheses crash, ideas get scooped, funds run out, anger, irritation, sorrow and misery make their frequent visits. Somehow, we tumble through it all, grapple with our own demons, grasp at straws of explanation, mend that broken window with tape, turn the chipped flower pot to show the unblemished side and finish our stories, the research project that doesn’t look very much like what we started out to do. We put it out there, publish and present for all to see, admire and bask in the glow of success as we walk out of the campus. As we turn back for a second look, only we can see the imperfections, the broken pieces, the chipped edges and the faded colours, and that is our own secret.
Let us turn our faces forward, and look ahead at the new adventures the next 10 years are going to bring. The new faces, new hands and new minds that are going to do so much that could not even be imagined when we started off. Let us celebrate the spirit of science and camaraderie that keeps us going, seeking new stories to tell, new ideas to forge, new minds to mould.
Chetana Sachidanandan is a scientist-writer with a fascination for a striped fish that’s too small to eat and just too beautiful to describe.