The MANDA Lab Odyssey

On many previous occasions, I have spoken about how happy I am to be able to work with research-naive undergrads and other students and see them develop into good researchers. Now, let me talk about something that faculty in places like India whisper to each other about. We train people and just when they are ready to do high-quality research, they... leave. While we are proud of our students' achievements, there is still a bit of FOMO attached to it. We train people, investing a lot more time and energy than a typical mentor in the West needs to since they get well-prepared and experienced students—grad school admissions in the US for example, are so competitive now that many people already have a publication by the time they start their PhD. So, there is a bit of FOMO when these folks go to labs in other countries where our colleagues there reap the benefits. Combined with the already low-resource environment we work in, it is hard for Indian labs to stay competitive in the globa...

... but life gets better when we shift our attention to the positives in our life. This may sound   clichéd, but  the sheer number of people (including myself sometimes) who suffer due to focusing on "what could have been" is astounding. For most of us, if we could take a moment to think of all the very plausible ways in which life could have been much worse than it is right now, we would be much happier!  For me, so many things could have gone wrong, right from college when, in the initial two years, I was NOT doing well at academics. Soon, I had a mentor who agreed to guide me on physics research. I complained about his unavailability; there was even an entire year when he was gone and didn't respond to emails, but in hindsight, the fact that back in 2006-7, I even got to do research as a clueless undergrad in India was not something a lot of others had access to and I should have been thankful to that adviser whose courses actually taught me quite a bit about nonlinear...