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About Me I am originally
from India that is Bharat. I was born in India in a rich farm family in
a small princely State, with a prince and a capital city with a population
of about 10,000. The prince had his own police, horses and elephants and
it was fun to watch the two elephants everyday as we walked by. In school
and especially in college, I liked everything I studied, so I kept studying
one subject after another. While a graduate student, I participated as
an interviewer in a study sponsored by the UNESCO in the 1950s. After
getting graduate degrees (called postgraduate degrees in India) from Bombay
School of Economics and Sociology and a law degree in India I enrolled
as a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Madison. I spent
most of my time in Madison in non-academic activities such as watching
TV, learning to sail, canoe, watching other people sail and capsize, and
ushering in the theatre. I also worked on campus in the dorm kitchen managing
to clean the 60-pound utensils. This was my first exposure to hard manual
labor. In my search for an easier way to support myself until I got an
assistantship, I learned to use all the IBM equipment needed in conducting
research with data stored on punch cards (IBM 72, 82, 101, 402, etc.).
The IBM computer in those days had a drum and had to be rewired every
time the programs changed! I was hooked on those machines and wanted to
learn Fortran II programming. I was not admitted to those classes, as
I was a mere sociologist without a degree in mathematics or physics! I
had to learn programming on my own reading the manuals in the computer
center and managed to write a couple elementary but widely used programs,
with help from other programmers. As part of a grant secured from NSF
from the faculty members in the sociology department at UW, I also taught
the use of these machines to undergraduate students during one summer.
I was offered a job for two academic years at Western Michigan University
(WMU) over the phone without an interview, though I requested an interview
more than once. I accepted the temporary job at WMU as one of my professors
at Wisconsin guessed, and told me that WMU probably used to be Kalamazoo
College before it got a University status and it would be a really a great
place for me to teach for a couple of years before I went back to India,
as I had planned. In the meanwhile, India passed a bill that college professors
had to teach in any one of the 14 different official languages, if the
students so demanded. As I was unable to teach sociology in any language
other than English, I decided to stay in the U.S. and teach sociology
in English. The University sponsored me as a computer specialist! There
were not many people knowledgeable about computers in 1963, even in this
country. I also taught the basic computer literacy course in the 1980s
in the Sociology Department for a few years. However, during the last
20 or so years, I have almost reached the stage of a computer illiterate.
Recently I got a lap top through a WMU grant and I am trying to learn
some things again. This web site, however, was created by a student.
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