Apostles of Culture

Like olden days, reading a book under a tree or by the lake has become a distant dream today for most of us. In today’s world where everyone is hankering after money, hobbies come as refuge to many plodding souls and reading is been considered a serious and passionate hobby since time immemorial. The history of library dates back to as early as 2000 BC and have constantly glorious to withstand its long journey unlike everything else and serves as a testament to man's thirst for knowledge.
The bibliotheque, the library or the “puthibhoral” represents a civilization’s diary. Why libraries exist? They exist to facilitate communication between two person in the present, or from someone in the past to someone in the present or from someone in the present to someone in future. Traditionally, public libraries are seen as being civilizing agencies within a society. All famous kings and philosophers gave a lot of importance in building and improving public libraries to encourage education in their kingdom. Underlying reason of the existence of a library is the faith accepted by our society that reading is a good thing, that it leads to desirable ends, and that it has the power to alter people for the better. The duty of Public library can be summarized as to “ provide the printed and non-printed materials to meet the individual and group needs of its constituency for information, education, self realization, recreation and cultural growth and for assistance in carrying out their duties as citizens and members of the community”.  

Another purpose of the library in a democratic society might be called the civic aim. The public library offers citizens of a democratic society the means by which they may become informed and intelligent citizens. Its not library’s aim to tell people what opinions to hold on current issues but to rather provide the range of views on this issues, so that people may makeup their own minds about where they stand on the issue. However one can argue that the results of this may not be measurable or seen in a specific period of time but it would be wrong to disregard the importance of its presence in the society if it functions in a desired way.


Today library should be considered as an establishment which requires an equally good  marketing team like any other institution. While the existing patrons and the library staff take pride in the library’s collection, it requires promotion to grow and thrive. Showing that library can be fun place is important specially for those community who don’t use the library and harbor unflattering images of library and librarians gathered from movies or peers. Contrary to popular perception, promotional activities are not always about convincing people to buy the latest and the greatest, it also includes changing the attitude and behavior for the benefit of individual and society.  
Making the public aware of the opportunities they can avail will draw people from all walks of life. The aim of the library staff is to kindle their interests, assist in their research, send them back enthusiastic of what they have found and encourage them to return again. The library programs should be such that it enables the new generation to spend time differently!
Involvement of the community, maintaining good relations with the alumni of prestigious schools and universities of the city, an outreach team to develop relations with NGOs working with children, senior citizens; various women empowerment and labor organizations, having provisions for adopting the library and become life members will attract more readers like never before.Summer activities for students and regular exhibitions and book releases in the library will keep the public engaged and help bond with the library. Literary initiatives like organizing reading marathons or writing contest for kids and adults will benefit the patrons as well as the library.   In addition to hosting community wide activities and events, hosting special programs at the library to highlight art, history or literature can bring in new patrons and show that the library is a central place for lifelong learning. Assamese history so rich and enthralling is dying in the closed books of history section of the library. The role of library has a bigger role to play today than any other period of time - to revive the good old days when reading was fun for the kids than watching Tv or playing video games. The influence of the library programs should be such that the new generation is willing to spend their holidays amidst the kings, queens, battlefields, beautiful courtyards or into the deep ocean and outer space. The programs should be a blend of history, new scientific discussions, art and poetry sessions depending on the interest of the patrons. A time to time statistical survey from the readers  should be conducted for the library to understand its user’s needs and interests.
In today’s world, when everything is weighed on its presence in the digital world, the city libraries are still faceless in this world and hence having a hard time surviving. Change is inevitable and growing with new age technologies is the only wise thing to do to keep in touch with society. Presence of technology in the library has all the advantages - starting from online catalog of books, circulation and also training in use of computers will attract many more readerships. Library is a place where people should be comfortable coming and spending their time, get their questions answered and find motivation to carry on with their quest of knowledge. Public libraries should have the best specialist for customer assistance in their research. Libraries can be the most dynamic and exciting place to work for an individual who wants variety. Public libraries  assist the most heterogeneous population of any type of library.
Again it is a wrong notion that library is only for educational purposes. Recreation should be also given utmost importance. There is no bigger aim than to entertain people. “Leisure” reading that does nothing more than delight the souls is always been deemed less worthy than that which raises lofty questions for discussions. Media libraries, sound recordings, collection of old assamese, bengali and bollywood movies also are wonderful ways for people to keep a continuous interest in their community libraries.
It is very exciting to see quite a few organizations and library associations, however their website gives limited information about ongoing events if any ? Some of them have never been updated from the date they have been created.
Library can be an important link between government and its citizens. Its is about time that library services have digital documentation of all government gazettes and reports to fulfill the demands of right to information. Public libraries should be archival repository of government documents as well as maintain an up to date database of all recent official publications.  A government document is defined as "informational matter which is published as an individual document at government expense, or as required by law". They can be the different types of documents published by government organizations such as administrative reports, gazettes, governmental notification, statistical reports, budget documents,committee and commission reports,research reports, bills, law reports, digest and parliamentary debates or reports of various parliamentary committees.. However the debate still continues as to what should be available to the public and to what extent. Measures have been taken by the Central secretariat library to digitize all government documents up till date, a project which started in 2002, however no regular updates on the progress of e-governance has been reported. India has made tremendous progress in the field of IT and has a prominent face in the global  IT senario, but it is sad that the public libraries in this country still follow the old convention of book keeping.
To evaluate the success of government programs, to be able to assert their rights, to debate the issues of the day, citizens must have access to current and historic sources of information generated by government.

Furthermore, adequate measures should be taken for the establishment and maintenance  public libraries in the villages and small towns of Assam and india.  India is the biggest nation of villages in the world. Development of india is incomplete without giving equal importance to improvisation of living standards of rural masses and fostering intellectual growth of the 70% population of india dwelling in villages. The condition of most village libraries is appalling. Due to lack of funds, or inefficiency of fund allocation, most of the libraries donot have the money to purchase daily newspapers. New books or monthly periodicals is a distant dream. The guidelines of the Planning commission suggest that there should be one village library for a population of 1000. But recent statistics (*study conducted in bihar) reveal that one village library is serving a population of 90,000 and more than 3,000 libraries have been shut down due to lack of funds in the past two decades. At this time of financial instability and lack of funds, there are more creative ways to keep the village libraries from closing their doors. The city public libraries should should adopt few neighbouring village libraries and initiate inter library loans, that is facilitating circulation of  books and periodicals within the library system. Organizing special educational programs in the village libraries will boost the reading culture in the kids and adults amid bringing many other good effects in the society.

Libraries are humbling places, because they remind us of the vast store of knowledge which we can approach but never really control. They are humanizing places because we are brought into contact with so many lives lived in the past as well as in the present. They are symbols of continuity of learning. They stand for such basic principles as freedom of expression and to recognize and respect diversity of views. Preserving the library culture and fueling its growth and expansion should be given utmost importance for a more well informed democratic society and a fast pace development of our country.   

Academic relationship

My graduation is round the corner and all I think about is my dissertation(Master thesis) and the glorious Grad walk ceremony after 2 years of struggle to survive through the course work. And what after that? Don't know. Blank. Not certain is what my answers are. Well a natural progression after Masters is PhD. Interestingly, it just occurred to me that master's is beginning a relationship with your subject of interest and commitment to it is PhD. You can be in "n" no of relationships but you always have to give a deep thought before you commit and be married to it. As of now , I like my work but commitment. Hmm! Not like I don't want to do PhD. Everyone wants to get married eventually (totally talking in the academic sense) but have to decide the right partner you want to devote your life to. Right now I am just concerned about getting the dissertation done and working for a while in a few research areas to find the right match!I hope you guys have found your match or in the process of finding one. Good luck and wishing a happy married life to my friends who are already committed! :)

System's biology

One day I come back home happy with the fact that I have learned a new term – System’s biology!  In broader terms it’s a new field biologists have borrowed from the electrical’s field to understand the cell mechanisms in a whole new way with fewer assumptions and simple lovely equations(courtesy: Occam’s Razor) , after all mathematics rules the world and apparently mother nature has also used a calculator to design her system ! I never took an electrical class in my undergrad and was not familiar with the terms like feedback loop, feed forward loop, negative/positive auto regulation and was amazed by the fact that these technical terms can also be used to describe cell interactions or protein production in biology.
But on second thoughts, it occurred to me that these loops are used in electrical engineering to control electrons which are also a part of nature and all natural things have the same basic way of regulation! And then during my cognitive sessions with myself, I realized these loops are part of our mundane life.
For instance, talking of time response and auto-regulation.A negative reaction or a doing something bad takes a faster action time from the people or spreads faster. Whereas a good piece of work always takes ample amount of time to reach its steady state, sometimes appreciated posthumously! Again different network motifs determine the on and off state of an emotion in an individual and also the AND and OR gate channels.
For example if we discuss the coherent type 1 Feed forward loop (FFL). X motivates your friend Y and you, but after some threshold time your friend Y might just get bored with work and starts complaining about it.Now if you choose an AND gate, you would also stop working and start complaining about work and life just like your friend without paying any heed to X’s incessant motivation. However if you choose OR gate, you will continue to work with dedication because you have X’s support even if Y has left.Now you would be thinking OR is a better Gate. Well both these systems have delay time and it is for us to decide which one is best for us in a particular situation.In nature all these interactions are co-ordinated in a timely manner and any mutation or delay in one off the network leads to deleterious circumstances which is also the same in humans and their network of social relations.It is not very difficult to see science in everyday life – the positive auto-regulation of the water cycle or the negative auto regulation of pollution by global warming ! It is indeed fascinating when you realize the power of nature and how it regulates its cornucopia of networks(including human emotional network) by these simple loops!

Live Inspired !

Each one of us have a philosopher inside them can give an opinion about life and its manifestations from their personal experiences. And I will also be not writing any different. Just that a small lesson I learnt a few years back . This goes to all my friends and specifically to my fellow research mates who has a dream like me to win the Nobel prize some day ! Then the PI, whom I give all the credit for the scarcely detectable trait of researcher people see in me if they see at all - used to motivate the lab members saying “a negative result is also a result” . I never understood the importance of it until I started with my own Master thesis . Now I know what one goes through when what u think and what results u get in the lab are like poles apart and you wonder how did you think that your hypothesis would work ! You suddenly feel so stupid and think all the answer was right in front of you and how did you not see it. It happens all the time in a research lab and I know I am speaking all my friend’s minds ! Now here I talk about effective “Google search”! We research on things about which we don't know and most importantly nobody knows ! Because if you realize after 2 years of hard work, some other great person from some other university of a beautiful country has already published the data and how did you miss that damn paper ? Now that is stupidity(or at-least what people will think of you even after giving countless days into the research)! SO the first step of any research is to make sure nobody is working on it or at-least not published anything on it ! The next big question is , is there anything left to be discovered  ??? Human minds so curious in nature and has touched every possible corner of this world , every single iota presented by the mighty nature and still digging ! Is there any topic our seniors have left for us !However, I finally settled on a topic on which i am almost confident that nobody has touched this subject yet.But this again brings doubt like if nobody has worked on it ,does that mean its not worth looking into ? I am still in this quandary  but I decided to go ahead with my idea.And well well the bad news comes faster than the good news.My first two experiments failed and I was almost sure this is not going to work. Going back to what my teacher said “a negative result is also a result”and my findings will guide someone in future to not go this way if he happens to be thinking of the same idea as me.Everyday in the lab is an exciting day,because you don't know what you may hit onto by the end of the day.U may have eureka days (which is comes like leap years) ,a good day ( this is when by the end of the day you get what you expected) and then comes the bad days (when...well you know what happens !!) and their frequency is very good!With due respect to all my researcher friends and Phd students, I now understand what it takes to be in the research world ! I hope results good or bad inspires you and me as we work for the same goal..Understanding SCIENCE !