Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
Silicon Valley star is now a teacher in Tamil Nadu, busy with rural school start-up
Article by Arun Janardhanan published in The Indian Express
For the rest of the world, Sridhar Vembu is the founder of Zoho Corporation, a Silicon Valley star valued by Forbes at nearly $2.5 billion, who decided to take the unusual step of moving to a small village in Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu last year. But the man himself says he is more of a teacher these days, wearing the traditional veshti and moving around on a bicycle in Mathalamparai.
What started six months ago as home tuition for three children that took up “about two-three hours” of his spare time, Vembu says he now has four teachers and 52 students in the fold, mostly children of farm labourers from the village. The 53-year-old is now all set to take this “lockdown experiment” to the next level: “a rural school start-up” that will provide free education and food, a model that doesn’t believe in marks or degrees or conventional affiliations for certificates, or “credentials” as he calls it.
“This has become a serious project. I am also doing part-time teaching. We are trying to put it together as a model now…busy preparing papers, getting necessary approvals,” says Vembu, speaking to The Indian Express over phone from Tenkasi. He is clear though that his “start-up” will not seek affiliation with the CBSE or any other conventional educational board.
It’s not a new template for Vembu. Over the last decade, his Zoho University, a part of Zoho Corporation, has successfully managed the concept of helping Class 10, 11 and 12 dropouts to become IT professionals and team leaders in his own firm and others.
But the challenge in the village, he says, was different after the Covid curbs came into force. “Practically, it was not possible for them to attend classes (online after the lockdown)…some parents had smartphones but cheap models. I had enough time, and we did some physical experiments, I taught them a little Science, Mathematics and English,” he says.
“On the ground, what I see is poverty…I noticed that kids coming to our tuition centre are actually hungry. How can you learn anything when you are hungry? That has to be sorted. I appreciate the noon-meal scheme but that is not enough,” he says, adding that his “school” provides two meals a day, and snacks around 4.30 pm, before children are sent home.
According to Vembu, policies made in Chennai or Delhi with good intentions get diluted when they reach villages. “There is not enough ground talent to do the implementation,” he says. “There are different categories of students among the rural poor. Some who really want to get credentials, and many others who are actually planning to drop out at one point, after Class 8 or 10,” he says. Retaining the dropouts, he says, is the challenge.
In the village, Vembu says, classifying children based on what they know is better than segregating by age. “It is a real start-up challenge,” he says, pointing to children in Class 7 who do not know the English alphabet.
Vembu insists that the root of most problems in the education system is “credentialism”. “Even the bright students focus only on grades, not the knowledge they acquire. There are many non-traditional learners. They are among us, in our families. We know them, they are brilliant but the exam results will not show that. The system should accommodate non-traditional learners too, those who fail in exams but still do the best in jobs,” he says.
Before the school, Zoho, which clocked an operating revenue of Rs 3,300 crore in financial year 2018-19 with more than 50 million clients, opened over a dozen rural offices in Tamil Nadu during the lockdown to take software engineers back to their villages. “My only demand was to set up offices in rural areas. They decided the locations. We will open 10 more offices in three months, opening more in Tamil Nadu as well as Kerala and Andhra, each with a seating capacity of up to 100 people,” he says.
Career
Meet the Women who Won Nobel Prizes this year
Excerpts from an article by Chelsey Sanchez published in Harper’s Bazaar
Since the Nobel Prize was established in 1895, less than 60 women have been honored with the prestigious international award. This week, four women–Louise Glück, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Andrea M. Ghez–were added to that roster, triumphing in literature, chemistry, and physics. Below, meet the women became Nobel laureates in 2020.
Louise Glück
Louise at the 2014 National Book Awards. ROBIN MARCHANTGETTY IMAGESAmerican poet Louise Glück was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature for “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” The New York-born writer, who is now a professor of English at Yale University, is no stranger to prestigious awards, having previously won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris and the 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night. She was also previously named the United States’s poet laureate in 2003. Her oeuvre includes twelve collections of poetry as well as some volumes of essays on poetry. Glück is also known for writing with clarity on otherwise bleak themes, like isolation, rejection, grief, and betrayal.
Glück is the first female poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature since 1996, when Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish writer, won.
Emmanuelle Charpentier
French researcher in Microbiology, Genetics and Biochemistry Emmanuelle Charpentier at a press conference in Berlin, on October 7, 2020. AFP
Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist, geneticist, and biochemist, was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on a new genetic editing method called Crispr-Cas9, which can be applied to experimental treatments for sickle cell disease and cancer therapies. Together, Charpentier and Doudna are the sixth and seventh women to receive a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all. It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. The discovery of these “genetic scissors,” which can modify the DNA of living organisms with extremely high precision, came about during Charpentier’s studies of Streptococcus pyogenes, a type of bacteria that can cause harmful infections to human. There, she discovered a previously unknown molecule, called tracrRNA. After publishing her findings in 2011, she partnered with Doudna, an expert of RNA, and the two went on to recreate the bacteria’s genetic scissors in a test tube.
Charpentier is now the director and founder of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin.
Jennifer A. Doudna
Dr. Jennifer Doudna was jointly award the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Charpentier for their revolutionary work on Crispr-Cas9, becoming the sixth and seventh women to win in this category. After accidentally discovering tracrRNA, Charpentier tapped Doudna for her expertise on RNA. Their collaboration led to the discovery of Crispr molecules, which made way for highly precise genetic surgery. In less than a decade after the discovery, their technique is now commonplace in genetic laboratories across the world.
In 2017, Doudna wrote A Crack in Creation, a book in which she chronicles the discovery and warns of unforeseen consequences of its use. “We as a community need to make sure we recognize we are taking charge of a very powerful technology,” she said in an interview this week, per The New York Times. “I hope this announcement galvanizes that intention.”
She currently works as a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences. She also helms Doudna Lab, which discovers and develops CRISPR systems and other RNA-guided mechanisms of gene regulation in conjunction with students and postdoctoral associates.
Andrea M. Ghez
STEFANIE KEENANGETTY IMAGES
Along with Dr. Roger Penrose and Dr. Reinhard Genzel, Dr. Andrea Ghez was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
Genzel and Ghez were awarded for their decades-long research in collecting conclusive evidence for a supermassive black hole in our galaxy. Since the 1990s, each has led a group of astronomers that have found “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds,” according to a press release. By using the world’s largest telescopes and developing innovative telescopic techniques, the duo has provided “the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole” at the center of the Milky Way. “The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Ghez is the fourth ever woman to receive a Nobel prize in physics. The New York-born scientist is now a professor of astronomy the University of California, Los Angeles. Her decades-long career is also dedicated to the study of star formation. After her win was announced, Ghez said she hoped to inspire more women to join the field.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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