| Writing |
A Student I am always looking for interesting new ideas and
consider myself a student of humanity and nature (I use this
Enlightenment dichotomy with some trepidation). I used to study
the brain for a living but my interests have gradually
shifted towards politics and social justice. I now spend
more time thinking about what it means for civilizations to "progress"
and "develop". I consider the modern, industrial-consumerist lifestyle
violent and unsustainable and would like to try and live more simply.
My childhood and teen years were earned in Bombay’s suburbs, first Borivali (until the age of ten) and then Andheri. I played cricket in the gullies (stumps drawn with red brick on the wall, money contributed for shattered glass windows, irate aunties refusing to hand the ball back and suchlike), visited my maternal grandparents in Nagpur during the long, hot summer vacations, celebrated Happy Birthdays with cake and wafers (a.k.a potato chips for those who have left their Indian childhood for American freeways) and read Hardy Boys, the Panchatantra, the S.Chand series of abridged European classics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in translation and later the potboiler biographies of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein along with the popular science of Stephen Hawking and John Gribbin. Apart from the school syllabus I read in no other language but English, a fact that I rue and remedy today. My first step in the larger world, so to speak, was when I finished my Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and by a small miracle ended up being admitted to the Masters by research program offered by the Molecular Biology Unit (now Department of Biological Sciences) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Thereafter smitten by the biology research bug I decided to do a PhD in Neurobiology with the full intention of finishing up somewhere as a Professor of Neuroscience or something like that. But unbeknownst to me larger forces were at work and nature sneaked up behind me with a bit of lead piping, as Bertie Wooster might have said. By the time I finished a dissertation on the neurophysiology of the mammalian visual system, I had moved on to a place (in my thinking) that made it impossible for me to continue on in the field.
"He who has seen only India, has not India seen." There is an Indian aphorism, "he who has seen only India, has not India seen". At the age of 23 when I first left India, I had seen nothing but India. Like many middle-class, city bred Indians, as I grew up I had become inured and insensitive to its problems. I came to America to become a scientist, to pursue a childhood dream. Being here for the past six years I have learnt much about India and about myself. While I started my PhD thinking that I would do research in Neuroscience as a career, most likely in the US, I am now certain that I would eventually like to work in India in a more socially conscious capacity. Despite being involved in basic research for nearly eight years (see ‘academic background’ below), I have been increasingly interested in social causes. About three years ago I began volunteering in my spare time with the Association for India’s Development, a US-based non-profit that supports developmental projects carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India. My volunteer experience with AID included coordinating two projects, one supporting an education program for underprivileged children in government-run remand homes in Maharashtra and the other project supporting the activities of a union of landless agricultural laborers in Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India. Through this experience I have understood better (but only slightly) the inextricably intertwined processes of “modernization” and “development”. My decision to quit Neuroscience and start afresh in Economics stems from a desire to acquire a more systematic knowledge of the economics, the history and philosophy behind such massive changes that affect millions of people the world over. A fortuitous combination of events landed me in the Economics department at the University of Massachusetts, where I am currently in the middle of yet another PhD.
Academic background I received my undergraduate degree in Microbiology from Bhavan’s College, Bombay University. After this I went on to do research in Molecular Biology at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay. I worked in the laboratory of Prof. K.S. Krishnan in the Department of Biological Sciences. My research focused on understanding the process of synaptic transmission (how neurons communicate with each other in the brain) at the molecular level using the fruit fly as a model system. My work has also become part of two peer-reviewed papers in scholarly journals (Sanyal et al 1999 and Sanyal et al 2004, see my CV for full citations). My doctoral research (advised by Prof. David Fitzpatrick at the Department of Neurobiology, Duke University) focused on how animal brains process sensory information. My work has expanded (but only slightly!) our understanding of how different types of visual features are integrated in the electrical activity of visual cortical neurons. These results were published in the journal, Nature (Basole et al 2003). A second chapter of my dissertation was published in Progress in Brain Research in the year 2007. You can find a more detailed description of my Neuroscience research at this link.
Cover Art: Churchgate Station, Bombay-- Sebastião Salgado I find this photograph taken by Brazilian economist, turned photographer, Sebastião Salgado captivating and emblematic. The photograph is one of a series of pictures taken by Salgado around the world. The series is titled ‘Migrations’ and each photograph is a striking moment of masses of humans on the move, captured on film. While some migrations are more “one-time” or long-wave, in that they are constituted of refugees moving to newer territories (recalling to mind the human two lane divided highway between newly-formed India and Pakistan in 1947), this particular photo of Churchgate station is all the more evocative for the endless, short-wave migration (a.k.a commuting) that is depicts.
A word with the surfer Thank you for visiting my site! If anything you read here moves you to agree or to disagree and moves you enough to tell me about it, I would love to hear from you. My email address is listed under "Contact Information". Unlike a painting or a published piece of writing that is finished when it is finished, a website is an evolving entity. It changes as its creator experiences life and himself or herself also changes. On quite a few pages you will find minimal content. This is mostly a place-holder until I find the time to replace it with something more substantive. I hope that the resources posted here (in the form of web-links or article references etc) are of use to some. As regards my own writing to be found online, if you feel the need to quote it anywhere I only ask that you acknowledge the source by citing this URL (www.people.umass.edu/abasole). I am deeply grateful to Shilpi Suneja for creating a beautiful design, far more pleasing to the eye and spirit than I, left to my own devices, could have manged. Contact Information Amit Basole |
