List of top Questions asked in IBSAT- 2021

Power and possession have been central pursuits of modern civilization for a long time. They blocked out or distorted other features of the westernized renaissance (revival), which promised so much for humanity. What people have been and are still being taught to prize is money, success, control over the lives of others; acquisition of more and more objects.

Modern social, political and economic systems, whether capitalist, fascist or communist, reject in their working the basic principle that the free and creative unfoldment of every man, woman and child is the true measure of the worth of any society. Such unfoldment requires understanding and imagination, integrity, compassion and cooperation among people and harmony between the human species and the rest of nature.

Acquisitiveness and the pursuit of power have made modern man an aggressor against everything that is non human, an exploiter and oppressor of those who are poor, meek and unorganized. He has become a pathological type who hates and distrusts the world and suffers from both acute loneliness and false pride.

The need for a new renaissance is deeply felt by those sensitive and conscientious men and women who not only perceive the dimensions of the crisis of our age but who also realize that only through conscious and cooperative human effort will this crisis be met and probably even overcome.

I am the family face; flesh perishes. I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

So wrote Thomas Hardy in his poem, Heredity, describing direct descent of life from one generation to the next. Indeed, the poem reflects the DNA in our genome. Dr. Drew Endy of MIT quoted this when he described how people at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) bypass nature's constraint of direct descent. Scientists there have used chemistry and biochemistry to produce the first synthetic genome in the laboratory. They chemically synthesized many fragments of the DNA, encoding the 582,970-units-long genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. Next, they assembled these fragments in perfect order to generate the genome of the bacterium.

The DNA sequence of the synthetic one was confirmed to be identical to the natural one. While the DNA pieces were synthesized chemically, the stitching together was done using the biochemical machinery of a host cell. About 100 pieces of the genome, each 5000-7000 units long in DNA sequence, were first joined to produce 25 sub-assemblies, each about 24000 base pairs long. These were then introduced into the bacterium E. coli to produce sufficient DNA for the next steps. Next, they repeated the procedure to generate large fragments comprising 1/4th of the whole genome of M. genitalium.

Now, they used the clever trick of exploiting the process called homologous recombination. This is a basic essential process in every cell, which physically rearranges the two strands of DNA. The JCVI researchers inserted the synthesized DNA fragments into yeast and utilized its homologous recombination ability to generate the whole 580,000 long genome of M. genitalium in one step.

This is clearly a landmark work that leads into the brave new world of synthesizing life itself in the laboratory. It was hardly 200 years ago when Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea, an organic molecule, in the chemical laboratory, thus throwing out the notion of 'vital forces' involved in the components of living organisms. What is the next step, making life itself in the lab, bypassing nature? With single cell organisms like M. genitalium, it might not be far away. It is now possible in the lab to do so, by inserting the genome into a 'host' cell and asking the latter to make the bacterium of your choice. If only we find a way to insert the bacterial genome into this proto-cell, and somehow trigger it to make the bacterium itself! We would have chemically created life in the lab. This is not a pipedream; JCVI scientists are already on the job, and my bet is they will do it within a few years.

This surely raises ethical questions, a matter that JCVI is keenly aware of and is already engaged in with ethicists. Even their present work on M. genitalium was done with prior approval of ethical experts. But then, today it is M. genitalium, tomorrow it could be a more advanced, multi-cellular organism, and that could flummox even the ethicist. Assisted reproduction, which is the other side of the coin and truly a recently initiated technology, has become ethically and morally acceptable. Cloning of Dolly, the sheep, has not raised any outrage, but cloning a human certainly does.

It was a milestone ride to empowerment. A young girl, probably a decade ago, driving a scooter, a little unsteadily, with mom on the pillion. It was the gift of mobility; more significantly, it was a trip to liberation. Now, the girl swings her Scorpio round a dangerous kerb even as mom and a brood of aunt, grandma and nieces squeal in pride. The girl now has a handy tool: her cell phone. Mobility and communication!

Sure, gender cleansing is now a frightening reality. Girls are killed before or at birth, plunging the all-India sex ratio to 927 girls for 1,000 boys. If she survives, the girl cannot assume she'll get a fair share of the family's education budget. Chances are she will drop out; to look after her siblings, to cook at home, to work in the fields, to be married off for money. She might be 'gifted' to a temple. 'Dowry death', a term we gave the English lexicon, is not in danger of fading out. 'The only women likely to keep their daughters are the truly independent-minded, not just the financially independent,' said author Gita Aravamudan. We know of her resilience, ability to raise a family, find happiness somewhere and keep her sanity somehow. All of which is excellent fodder for exploitation.

Out of this tangled mess has emerged the New Woman; a woman 'pushing against the limits society imposed on her'. With an identity no longer defined by domesticity or relationships, she now comes across as a person with a strong sense of self and self worth. A woman taking a tough stand for her rights is no shrew but a woman of substance while a female globetrotter is no adventuress but a woman of spirit. In short, women are going where men fear to tread.

But there are nay-sayers too. "I'm wondering if it is even theoretically possible to define the 'New Woman' in terms of a single set of characteristics. Indian women are so different from each other in terms of their class, caste, regional, linguistic and religious identities that what is 'old' for one is 'new' for the other, and not even on the map for yet another. That said, I think the one thing that has changed is that women are no longer hesitant or apologetic about claiming a share of space and visibility within the family, at work, in public spaces, in the public discourse." said Kalyani Menon Sen of JAGORI. Small concessions to big achievements, she tastes freedom. Her aspirations are taken seriously; count the hailstorm of women-centric TV shows, commercials and food items aimed her way. "It comes with monetary independence," said Usha Srinivasan, HR Consultant.

How is it easier now? Sustained campaigns run by women groups since the national movement. Laws passed to make justice equitable, for corrective surgery of mindsets. Travel, definitely. Her willingness to take up non-traditional workplaces; job opportunities, with IT hiring in bulk. Women began to write and read what other women wrote. And cyberspace, she now blogs and networks, using it for the freedom denied so far to voice her angst, express outrage and disapproval, fulfill the need for acceptance and approval. To speak out.

Harold Pinter, the British playwright, whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation. In more than 30 plays written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal, Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective 'Pinteresque' has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet, director and dramatist, Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also 'supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship' in the last 50 years. His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

In Pinter's work 'words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other' said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Pinter's plays than any other director. But while Pinter's linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction 'pause' would haunt him throughout his career.

Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Pinter said that writing the word 'pause' into his first play was 'a fatal error'. It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect. Early in his career, Pinter said his work was about 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'. Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work.

Pinter was born in Hackney on October 10, 1930. With the outbreak of World War II, Harold was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall. His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of The Birthday Party half a century ago, Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, 'The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.'