The man who was concrete

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

Tavaré uncharacteristically animated for Kent against Middlesex in 1988  © Getty Images

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There are some names that, as a young cricketer, you do not want, because they come loaded with a heavy freight. They are almost always familial. Imagine the task of clambering clear of the moniker of Botham or Richards as Liam and Mali once had to do. The Don's son briefly changed his, so distorting was its effect on his life. They are names that do not stand simply for cricketers of note, but for something bigger: a way of playing the game itself.

Imagine then, that you are William Tavaré, who has signed a contract to play professional cricket for Gloucestershire. Because as surely as Botham, Richards or Bradman are names that come laden with meaning, then so is Tavaré. William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavaré. 

No one who saw Chris Tavaré bat will forget it in a hurry, even if the detail is blurred by its endless repetition. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavaré was the conscientious objector who took arms. Tall, angular and splayfooted, a thin moustache sketched on his top lip, he would walk to the crease like a stork approaching a watering hole full of crocs.

Once there, he began not to bat but to set, concrete drying under the sun. His principal movement was between the stumps and square leg, to where he would walk, gingerly, after every ball. If John Le Mesurier had played Test cricket, he would have played it like Chris Tavaré. His innings spread themselves across games, eroding the will of the opposition and the spectator alike, smoothing off the edges as if they were pebbles in a stream.

The portents came early. In his third Test innings, against West Indies at Lord's in 1980, he fussed for more than four hours over 42. In his next game, his 69 and 78 combined to occupy just under 12 hours of playing time.

Then came the innings that cemented (almost literally) his legend. His four-hour-plus fifty against Pakistan in 1982 was the second-slowest half-century in the history of the game, and yet even that paled in comparison to the five-and-a-half hour 35 against India in Madras, a knock that assumed the dimensions of a siege for all involved.

In a team that contained Botham, Gatting, Lamb and Gower, Tavaré truly stood out. The mighty ballast that he provided against the Australians in '81 (179 runs at 44.75) played a part in that famous win, albeit one that never quite makes the highlights reels.

His only Ashes tour in 1982-83 left its scars on the local psyche, too. As Matthew Engel slyly noted, "he was the antithesis of the Australians' idea of a cricketer". In Perth, he treated them to an eight-hour 89, 60 minutes of which were entirely scoreless. Gideon Haigh fell into a trance-like state while watching it on television, and later discovered that Tavaré (a uxorious gent, of course) had been troubled all tour by his wife's fear of flying, a mental trauma that nailed him ever more firmly to the crease.

Like a lot of slow players, stories abounded that he was a wolf in sheep's clothing, capable of pillaging county attacks on quiet Canterbury afternoons. If it happened, no one remembers it now. Instead, his high point as a man of action must remain the classic fourth Test, in Melbourne, that began, on Boxing Day of 1982, with Tav making 89 in just 247 minutes at a strike rate north of three an over, an innings that contained 15 boundaries in an era when the distant reaches of the MCG were marked only by the pickets. It was his anomalous masterpiece, and England won by three runs.

Rather marvellously, Chris Tavaré is now a biology teacher, and his pupils are surely rigorously but gently schooled. Into a cricketing world that he would not recognise steps William, whose first-class record to date is respectable (nine innings at 32.75, with a best of 61), but even if he turns out to be the next Chris Gayle, the Tavaré name will plod after him - slowly and from a distance of course. Good luck, my friend.

A virus that kills cancer: the cure that's waiting in the cold

Sitting in a refrigerator in a Swedish laboratory is what promises to be a cheap and effective cancer treatment. So why are the trials to bring it to market not going ahead?

By Alexander Masters

4:00PM BST 31 Aug 2012

211 Comments

On the snow-clotted plains of central Sweden where Wotan and Thor, the clamorous gods of magic and death, once held sway, a young, self-deprecating gene therapist has invented a virus that eliminates the type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs.

'Not "eliminates"! Not "invented", no!' interrupts Professor Magnus Essand, panicked, when I Skype him to ask about this explosive achievement.

'Our results are only in the lab so far, not in humans, and many treatments that work in the lab can turn out to be not so effective in humans. However, adenovirus serotype 5 is a common virus in which we have achieved transcriptional targeting by replacing an endogenous viral promoter sequence by…'

It sounds too kindly of the gods to be true: a virus that eats cancer.

'I sometimes use the phrase "an assassin who kills all the bad guys",' Prof Essand agrees contentedly. 

Cheap to produce, the virus is exquisitely precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects in humans. Photographs in research reports show tumours in test mice melting away.

'It is amazing,' Prof Essand gleams in wonder. 'It's better than anything else. Tumour cell lines that are resistant to every other drug, it kills them in these animals.'

Yet as things stand, Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD – to give it the full gush of its most up-to-date scientific name – is never going to be tested to see if it might also save humans. Since 2010 it has been kept in a bedsit-sized mini freezer in a busy lobby outside Prof Essand's office, gathering frost. ('Would you like to see?' He raises his laptop computer and turns, so its camera picks out a table-top Electrolux next to the lab's main corridor.)

Two hundred metres away is the Uppsala University Hospital, a European Centre of Excellence in Neuroendocrine Tumours. Patients fly in from all over the world to be seen here, especially from America, where treatment for certain types of cancer lags five years behind Europe. Yet even when these sufferers have nothing else to hope for, have only months left to live, wave platinum credit cards and are prepared to sign papers agreeing to try anything, to hell with the side-effects, the oncologists are not permitted – would find themselves behind bars if they tried – to race down the corridors and snatch the solution out of Prof Essand's freezer.

I found out about Prof Magnus Essand by stalking him. Two and a half years ago the friend who edits all my work – the biographer and genius transformer of rotten sentences and misdirected ideas, Dido Davies – was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumours, the exact type of cancer that Steve Jobs had. Every three weeks she would emerge from the hospital after eight hours of chemotherapy infusion, as pale as ice but nevertheless chortling and optimistic, whereas I (having spent the day battling Dido's brutal edits to my work, among drip tubes) would stumble back home, crack open whisky and cigarettes, and slump by the computer. Although chemotherapy shrank the tumour, it did not cure it. There had to be something better.

It was on one of those evenings that I came across a blog about a quack in Mexico who had an idea about using sub-molecular particles – nanotechnology. Quacks provide a very useful service to medical tyros such as myself, because they read all the best journals the day they appear and by the end of the week have turned the results into potions and tinctures. It's like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black reading the National Enquirer to find out what aliens are up to, because that's the only paper trashy enough to print the truth. Keep an eye on what the quacks are saying, and you have an idea of what might be promising at the Wild West frontier of medicine. This particular quack was in prison awaiting trial for the manslaughter (by quackery) of one of his patients, but his nanotechnology website led, via a chain of links, to a YouTube lecture about an astounding new therapy for neuroendocrine cancer based on pig microbes, which is currently being put through a variety of clinical trials in America.

I stopped the video and took a snapshot of the poster behind the lecturer's podium listing useful research company addresses; on the website of one of these organisations was a reference to a scholarly article that, when I checked through the footnotes, led, via a doctoral thesis, to a Skype address – which I dialled.

'Hey! Hey!' Prof Magnus Essand answered.

To geneticists, the science makes perfect sense. It is a fact of human biology that healthy cells are programmed to die when they become infected by a virus, because this prevents the virus spreading to other parts of the body. But a cancerous cell is immortal; through its mutations it has somehow managed to turn off the bits of its genetic programme that enforce cell suicide. This means that, if a suitable virus infects a cancer cell, it could continue to replicate inside it uncontrollably, and causes the cell to 'lyse' – or, in non-technical language, tear apart. The progeny viruses then spread to cancer cells nearby and repeat the process. A virus becomes, in effect, a cancer of cancer. In Prof Essand's laboratory studies his virus surges through the bloodstreams of test animals, rupturing cancerous cells with Viking rapacity.

The Uppsala virus isn't unique. Since the 1880s, doctors have known that viral infections can cause dramatic reductions in tumours. In 1890 an Italian clinician discovered that prostitutes with cervical cancer went into remission when they were vaccinated against rabies, and for several years he wandered the Tuscan countryside injecting women with dog saliva. In another, 20th-century, case, a 14-year-old boy with lymphatic leukaemia caught chickenpox: within a few days his grotesquely enlarged liver and spleen had returned to ordinary size; his explosive white blood cell count had shrunk nearly 50-fold, back to normal.

But it wasn't until the 1990s, and the boom in understanding of genetics, that scientists finally learnt how to harness and enhance this effect. Two decades later, the first results are starting to be discussed in cancer journals.

So why is Magnus – did he mind if I called him 'Magnus'? – about to stop his work?

A reticent, gently doleful-looking man, he has a Swedish chirrup that makes him sound jolly whatever his actual mood. On the web, the first links to him proclaim the Essand Band, his rock group. 'Money,' he said. 'Lack of.'

'Lack of how much money? Give me a figure,' I pressed. 'What sort of price are we talking about to get this virus out of your freezer and give these people a chance of life?'

Magnus has light brown hair that, like his voice, refuses to cooperate. No matter how much he ruffles it, it looks politely combed. He wriggled his fingers through it now, raised his eyes and squinted in calculation, then looked back into his laptop camera. 'About a million pounds?'

More people have full-blown neuroendocrine tumours (known as NETs or carcinoids) than stomach, pancreas, oesophagus or liver cancer. And the incidence is growing: there has been a five-fold increase in the number of people diagnosed in the last 30 years.

In medical school, students are taught 'when you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras' – don't diagnose a rare disease when there's a more prob-able explanation. It leads to frequent misdiagnoses: until the death of Steve Jobs, NETs were considered the zebras of cancer, and dismissed as irritable bowel syndrome, flu or the patient getting in a tizz. But doctors are now realising that NETs are much more prevalent than previously thought. In a recent set of post-mortem investigations, scientists cut open more than 30,000 bodies, and ran their hands down the intestines of the dead as if they were squeezing out sausage skins. One in every 100 of them had the distinctive gritty bumps of NETs. That's two people in every rush-hour tube carriage on your way home from work, or scaled up, 700,000 people in Britain, or roughly twice the population of the city of Manchester. The majority of these tumours are benign; but a small percentage of them, for reasons that no one understands, burst into malignancy.

Many other cancers, if they spread, acquire certain features of neuroendocrine tumours. The first person to own a successful anti-neuroendocrine cancer drug – it doesn't even have to cure the disease, just slow its progress as anti-retrovirals have done with Aids – will be not only healthy but also Steve Jobs-rich. Last year the pharmaceuticals giant Amgen bought a cancer-assassinating version of the herpes virus for $1 billion. That Magnus's virus could be held up by a minuscule £1 million dumbfounded me.

'That's a banker's bonus,' I said. 'Less than a rock star's gold toilet seat. It's the best bargain going. If I found someone to give you this money, would you start the clinical trials?'

'Of course,' replied Magnus. 'Shall I ask the Swedish Cancer Board how soon we can begin?'

I do not have a million pounds. But for £68 I flew to Uppsala. I wanted to pester Prof Essand about his work, face to face, and see this virus, face to petri dish. I wanted to slip some into my mittens, smuggle it back to England in an ice pack and jab it into Dido.

Magnus's work is already funded by the Swedish Cancer Society and the Swedish Children Cancer Society (neuroblastoma, the most common cancer in infants, is a type of neuroendocrine tumour). A virus that he previously developed (against prostate cancer) is about to enter human trials in Rotterdam, supported by a European Union grant.

The difficulty with Magnus's virus is not that it is outré, but that it is not outré enough. It is a modified version of an adenovirus, which is known to be safe in humans. It originates from humans, occurring naturally in the adenoids. The disadvantage is that it is too safe: the immune system has had thousands of years to learn how to dispatch such viruses the moment they stray out of the adenoids. It is not the fact that Magnus is using a virus to deal with cancer that makes his investigation potentially so valuable, but the novel way he has devised to get round this problem of instant elimination by the immune system, and enable the virus to spread through tumours in other parts of the body.

The closer you get to manipulating the cellular forces of human existence, the more you sound like a schoolboy babbling about his model aeroplane. Everything in the modern genetics lab is done with kits. There are no fizzing computer lights or fractionating columns dribbling out coagulations of genetic soup in Magnus's lab; not a single Bunsen burner. Each narrow laboratory room has pale, uncluttered melamine worktops running down both sides, wall units above and small blue cardboard cartons dotted everywhere. Even in their genetics labs, Swedes enjoy an air of flatpack-ness. The most advanced medical lab in the world, and it looks like a half-fitted kitchen.

To make and test their virus, Magnus buys cell lines pre-fab (including 'human foreskin fibro-blast') for $50-100 from a company in California; DNA and 'enzyme mix' arrive in $179 packets from Indiana; protein concentrations are tested 'according to the manufacturer's instructions' with a DIY kit ($117) from Illinois; and for $79, a parcel from Santa Cruz contains (I haven't made this up) 'horseradish peroxidase conjugated donkey anti-goat antibody'.

In a room next to Magnus's office, a chatty woman with a ponytail is putting DNA inside bacteria. This God-like operation of primal delicacy involves taking a test tube with a yellow top from a $146 Qiagen kit, squirting in a bit of liquid with a pipette and putting the result in a box similar to a microwave: 'turn the dial to 25 kilovolts and oophlah! The bacteria, they get scared, they let the DNA in. All done,' the woman says. As the bacteria divide, the desirable viral fragments increase.

What costs the £1 million (less than two per cent of the price of Francis Bacon's Triptych 1976) that Magnus needs to bring this medicine to patients is not the production, but the health-and-safety paperwork to get the trials started. Trials come in three phases. What Magnus was suggesting for his trifling £1 million (two Mont Blanc diamond-encrusted pens) was not just a phase I trial, but also a phase II, which, all being well, would bring the virus right to the point where a big pharmaceuticals company would pay 10 or 100 times as much to take it over and organise the phase III trial required by law to presage full-scale drug development.

'So, if Calvin Klein or Elton John or… Paris Hilton stumped up a million, could they have the virus named after them?'

'Why not?' Magnus nodded, showing me the bacteria incubator, which looks like an industrial clothes washer, only less complicated. 'We can make an even better one for two million.'

There are reasons to be cautious. A recent investigation by Amgen found that 47 of 53 papers (on all medical subjects, not just viruses) by academics in top peer-reviewed science journals contained results that couldn't be reproduced, even though company scientists repeated the experiments up to 50 times. 'That's why we have to have such a careful peer-review process,' Dr Tim Meyer, Dido's energetic, soft-spoken oncologist, warns. 'Everybody thinks that their new treatment for cancer is worth funding, but everybody is also keen that only good-quality research is funded.' Similar to Prof Essand in youth but less polite of hair, Dr Meyer is the co-director of the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre at University College London. Beside his office, banks of white-coated researchers are bent over desks, busy with pipettes and microscopes. His team pursues an exciting brew of new anti-cancer ideas: antibody-targeted therapy, vascular therapy, DNA binding agents and photodynamic therapy. Each of these shows remarkable promise. But even for such a brilliant and innovative team as this, money is not flowing.

Everyone in cancer science is fighting for ever-decreasing small pools of cash, especially now the government has started tiptoeing into charities at night and rifling the collection boxes. It is big news that Dr Meyer and the UCL team won a grant of £2.5 million, spread out over the next five years, to continue his institute's cutting-edge investigations into cancers that kill off thousands of us every week: leukaemia; melanoma; gynaecological, gastrointestinal and prostate cancers. Without this money, he would have had to sack 13 members of staff. The sum of £2.5 million is roughly what Madonna earns in 10 days.

He peers at Magnus's pairs of photographs of splayed rodents with glowing tumours in one shot that have vanished in the next. He knows the Uppsala neuroendocrine team well and has great respect for them. 'It may be good,' he agrees. But until Magnus's findings are tested in a clinical trial, nobody knows how good the work is. Astonishing results in animals are often disappointing in humans. 'We all need to be subject to the same rules of competitive grant funding and peer review in order to use scarce resources in the most effective manner.'

Back at home with whisky and fags, I nursed my entrepreneurialism. There are currently about half a dozen cancer research institutes in Europe developing adenoviruses to treat cancer – all of them pathetically short of cash. Enter the Vanity Virus Initiative. Pop a couple of million over to Uppsala University, and you will go down in medical books as the kind heart who relieved Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD of its hideous hump of a moniker, and gave it the glamour of your own name. What's the worst that can happen? Even if Magnus's innovations don't work in clinical trials the negative results will be invaluable for the next generation of viruses. For the rest of time, your name will pop up in the reference sections of medical papers as the (insert your name here) virus that enabled researchers to find the cure for cancer by avoiding Magnus's error.

On my third glass of whisky, I wrote an email to Dr Meyer suggesting that he issue a shopping list each year at the time that bankers receive their bonuses, which could be circulated in the City. The list would itemise the therapies that his Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre have selected for support, and quantify how much would be needed in each case to cover all outstanding funds and ensure that the work is branded with your name.

The corridors connecting the different research departments of the Uppsala medical campus are built underground, in order to protect the staff from death during the Swedish winters. Professors and lab technicians zip back and forth along these enormous rectangular tunnels on scooters, occasionally scratching their heads at the tangled intersections where three or four passageways meet at once, then pushing off again, gowns flying, one leg pounding the concrete floor like a piston, until they find the right door, drop the scooter and rise back upstairs by lift. Suspended from the ceiling of these corridors is a vacuum tube that schluuuuups up tissue samples at top speed, and delivers them to the appropriate investigative team. Magnus led me along these tunnels to the Uppsala University Hospital, to visit the chief oncologist, Kjell (pronounced 'Shell') Oberg – the man who will run the trial once the money is in place.

'The trouble with Magnus's virus is Magnus is Swedish,' he says, wincing and clutching the air with frustration.

'It is so,' Magnus agrees sorrowfully. Swedishly uninterested in profiteering, devoted only to the purity of science, Magnus and his co-workers on this virus have already published the details of their experiments in leading journals around the world, which means that the modified virus as it stands can no longer be patented. And without a patent to make the virus commercial, no one will invest. Even if I could raise the £2 million (I want only the best version) to get the therapy to the end of phase II trials, no organisation is going to step forward to run the phase III trial that is necessary to make the therapy public.

'Is that because pharmaceuticals companies are run by ruthless plutocrats who tuck into roast baby with cranberry sauce for lunch and laugh at the sick?' I ask sneerily.

'It is because,' Kjell corrects me, 'only if there's a big profit can such companies ensure that everyone involved earns enough to pay their mortgage.'

There is no ready source of public funds, either. For reasons understood only by Wotan and Thor, the Swedish government refuses to finance clinical trials in humans, even when the results could potentially slash the country's health bill by billions of kronor.

All is not lost, however. Kjell does not have to wait until the end of the trials – which could take as much as 10 years – for the full, three-phase process before being able to inject Magnus's virus into his patients, because as soon as the test samples are approved and ready for use, he can by European law start offering the medicine, on an individual basis, to patients who sign a waiver confirming that they're prepared to risk experimental treatments. Within 18 months he could be starting his human case-studies.

At several moments during my research into this cancer-delaying virus from the forests of Scandinavia I have felt as though there were someone schlocky from Hollywood operating behind the scenes. The serendipitous discovery of it on the internet; the appalling frustration of being able to see the new therapy, to stand with my hand against the freezer door knowing that it is three inches away, not well-guarded, and that it might work even in its crude current state, but that I may not use it; the thrill of Kjell Oberg's powerful
support; the despair over the lack of such a silly, artificial thing as a patent. Now, Dr Leja steps into the narrative: she is the virologist whose brilliant doctoral thesis first put me on to the cancer-eating-virus-left-in-a-freezer, and whose name heads all the subsequent breakthrough research papers about this therapy. She turns out to be 29, to look like Scarlett Johansson and to wear voluptuous red lipstick.

Justyna Leja slinks up from her chair, shakes my hand and immediately sets off into a baffling technical discussion with Magnus about a good way to get the patent back for the virus, by a subtle manipulation that involves something called a 'new backbone'. She also has in mind a small extra tweak to the new-backboned microbe's outer coat, which will mean that the virus not only bursts the cancer cells it infects, but also provokes the immune system to attack tumours directly. It will be easy to see if it works in animals – but is it worth lumbering the current virus with it for use in humans, who tend to be less responsive? The extra preparatory work could delay the phase I and II trials for a further year.

Back at his lab, Magnus opened up the infamous freezer. I took a step towards the plastic flasks of virus: he nipped the door shut with an appreciative smile.

'What would you do,' I asked bitterly, returning my hand to my pocket, 'if it were your wife who had the disease, or one of your sons whose photograph I saw on your desk?'

He glanced back at the freezer. Although his lab samples are not made to pharmaceutical grade, they would be only marginally less trustworthy than a fully-sanctioned, health-and-safety certified product that is between 1,000 and 10,000 times more expensive.

'I don't know,' he groaned, tugging his hair in despair at the thought. 'I don't know.'

To donate money to Professor Magnus Essand's research on viral treatments for neuroendocrine cancer, send contributions to Uppsala University, The Oncolytic Virus Fund, Box 256, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden, or visit www.uu.se/en/support/oncolytic. Contributions will be acknowledged in scientific publications and in association with the clinical trial. A donation of £1 million will ensure the virus is named in your honour

Am I A Product Of The Institutions I Attended?

Amitabha Bagchi

I have been thinking for a while about how the institutions we affiliate ourselves to—or maybe our parents "admit" us to, or social pressures force us into—as students affect us, form us, shape us, turn our lives decisively down one of the many roads available to us. This question—Is what I am a product of the institutions I attended?—falls in the family of questions engendered by the basic question: What makes me who I am? This question, often asked before the perhaps more fundamental question—Who am I?—is not so easily answered. After all, our lives are produced by a complex interplay of factors, some determined in advance—race, class, gender, geography, personality, biology—and some random and contingent. The lens of science fails in the face of this complexity.

But the novelist, unlike the scientist, has a different relationship to questions. His job is not to answer them. His job is to put them into play. The unanswerable question is one of the basic tools of the storyteller's trade. Let me give you an example: Should Ram have made Sita take an agni parkisha because of what the washer man said? This question, so simple to state, is a vortex that begins spinning slowly, but then it widens and becomes stronger and stronger. As we argue and debate, it sucks in ship after ship of the fleet of human experience. What portion of a man's life is subject to his duty? How far does the power of love extend? What constitutes fidelity in a marriage? What is the nature of trust? Keep answering these questions, and like the asura Raktabija, who had a boon that every time a drop of his blood fell to the ground a new Raktabija would be born, a new set of questions emerges with each answer. The novelist's job, then, is to set questions into play, ornament them and lead them through the lives of people, and watch as they draw those lives into their fold.

And so as a novelist, I find myself asking this question—Am I a product of the institutions I attended?—in an attempt to open out a field of questions, in an attempt to add to the form of human knowledge that is full of errors and poetry, that form of human knowledge that is most intimate and personal.

Having used the P word—personal—let me start by saying that in the years since I left school I never thought that I would get an opportunity to thank NCERT for the impact it has had on my life. I could probably find a number of things to say in thanks, but let me just focus on one. In all my English textbooks since class nine I always found at least one story or play by a writer called William Saroyan. His stories of a young Armenian boy's life somewhere in the central part of California made a deep impression on me. In the years since, I have derived many things from those few stories I read. I learned that there is a deep sadness that lies right at the heart of the immigrant experience—something that the now fashionable generation of immigrant writers has never fully captured. I learned that a gentle kind of realism is the best way to describe the lives of people trying to live a dignified life in the face of hardship. I learned—and this is the one realization on which my brief writing career so far has rested, and, I suspect, whatever I write in future will also rest—that the strength of weak people is the stuff of literature. But it was only when I moved to California in 2002 that I learned that Saroyan is all but forgotten in his home country. That's when I really thanked the people who decided to put him into an NCERT textbook for almost every year since class nine.

Class nine was also my first year at a prominent school in South Delhi. Those of us who live in Delhi think of it as flat but every here and there we do come across small hills and this school is located on one such hill. So it happens that when I think back to this school and my days there I often find myself thinking of walking up an incline towards the large metal gates, manned by a chowkidar. I had been to other schools before that one, whose topography was as flat as the rest of the city's, but somehow when I think of school, I think of walking up a gentle slope, I think of a mass of grey boxy buildings sitting on a hill. Perhaps the fact that it is harder to walk up a hill than it is to walk on flat ground has something to do with it. When you reached those gates, there was an invisible membrane you passed through, like a scene from Star Trek where you stepped through a portal and you reached another dimension. Those gates were a valve, easily entered but hard to exit through. Those gates separated the world within the school from the world outside. Inside those gates we were safe from things we did not even know existed outside them. Within them lay a world of classrooms and corridors, playing field and Principal's office, labs and the library. And in each of these spaces there was a protocol, an acceptable way of carrying yourself, and an unacceptable way.

So school then is the place in which we learn what decorum is, and that each space has its own notion of decorum. But we learn this in what is to my mind the wrong way. We learn that decorum is linked to policing. That we should not be walking down a school corridor without an excuse during class time because a teacher may accost us. We learn that we should not talk too loudly in an unattended classroom, because someone may come in and drag us off to the Principal's office. And this structure of learning engenders another learning. We find those distant corners of the football field where cigarettes may be smoked. We figure out which shadows under which staircase are best suited for stealing kisses with our new love. We share stories of rules broken without consequence, we aspire to create narratives of ourselves as clever lawbreakers. We begin to value duplicity and deceit. Perhaps this process could redeem itself if it helped us lose our fear of authority. I have always believed that fear of authority causes psychic damage that diminishes human society, and that the social control we get in return does not justify what we lose. But the problem is that plotting and scheming to undermine authority because it is a subcultural imperative—as it becomes in these situations—does not rob us of our fear of authority. We remain fearful. And we become sly.

School was not only a spatial category, it was also a temporal one. School was the world of 7:40 am to 1:30 pm. It was a division of the first part of the day into neatly ordered chunks of time, never shorter than 20 minutes, never longer than 45. I have sometimes wondered about the daily routines, and their fixed nature. At first, rather unfairly, I used to think that social control was best enforced by controlling a person's time. Marx, in his own take on this matter, wrote about the centrality of the working day to the capitalist project. Not as theoretically developed as Marx's but I too had—and still have—a rebellious schoolboy's approach to the regimentation of time. But then I also began to think of it in another way. Is unplanned time as threatening as unmapped space? School, the place where space was made safe for us, was also a place where our time was organized for us: the day was chopped into a sequence of intervals, each interval to be used in a particular way.

I was one of those people who stayed on the straight and narrow, but in my school bus there were two older boys who revelled in informing students like me of their escapades. These escapades involved getting off the school bus just like the rest of us, but walking off in the other direction, through the government houses that neighboured our school, onwards to a South Indian restaurant on Rao Tula Ram Marg. They had their breakfast there, it took about half an hour, and then walked leisurely past Moti Bagh to the Sarojini Nagar railway station, reaching there around a quarter to nine. Then they boarded the Ring Railway that took about two hours to take them around the city and bring them back to where they began. Getting off the train they would head towards the now demolished Chanakya cinema, reaching in good time for the eleven o'clock show. That would last till around one pm, a convenient time to take a bus back to school, getting there just before the school bus left for home. It took me a while to realize that although these not-so-orderly schoolboys had rejected the school's way of organizing the morning hours, they had not rejected the notion that the morning hours needed to be organized.

Those two boys fell neatly into one category of the taxonomy we informally maintained in my academically oriented school. They were what were called bad students. After that category came good students and then brilliant students. There were other classifications too: some students were there to improve the school's results, some to fill its coffers and some to ensure that Delhi's political class looked upon our school favourably. But the various categories that we had in my school in Delhi—it was one of what we still call the "good" schools of Delhi—were to prove wholly inadequate when I graduated and found myself at college in IIT.

When I entered IIT Delhi in the early 90s, I happened to be assigned the same hostel that my cousin who had entered IIT in the middle of eighties had lived in. When given a choice between attending class and spending his time in the hostel's music room, I was told by some of my seniors who had known him, he preferred the latter. In this music room, he told me when I asked him, used to live a large collection of cassettes on which generation after generation of hostel residents had painstakingly recorded, from whatever source available, a fund of music that comprehensively represented the popular musical production of the American sixties and seventies. Rock musicians who were long forgotten in the US lived in recordings that were revered in our hostel at IIT. That music room formed the person he was, and the person he continues to be today. But, oddly enough, of the trove of music the music room had housed there remained but three tapes when I got there. I used to go there to study sometimes, because no one else seemed to have any use for that space. Outside that room, in the rest of the hostel, instead of long discussions over the superiority of Deep Purple over Led Zeppelin, now arguments raged between those who worshipped Madhuri Dixit and those whose hearts beat for Urmila Matondkar. In the common room next door, the newly installed cable TV was firmly tuned to the one or two channels that had discovered a business model built around twenty fours hours of Chitrahaar. Something had changed between the time my cousin had left and I had entered.

Today when Hindi soap operas command literally 20 times more viewer- ship than English programming, we know well enough the shape of the change. But at that time this churning was just beginning—obfuscated by pointless debates on the impact of cable television on "Indian culture". Each discipline—Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science—has its own explanations for this change. I myself think of it as the era in which the spread of coaching classes made it possible for people outside the metropolitan centres to succeed at the IIT entrance exam. At IIT we complain about the influence of the coaching class culture on the quality of our intake. But anecdotal evidence makes it amply clear that the rise of the coaching class culture meant the end of the dominance of English speaking elites from urban centres at IIT. The end of the dominance of people like me.

If someone were to look at the grade sheets from my first year they would conclude that I didn't learn much that year, but the truth of the matter is that I learned a lot. I learned, for example, that I loved carrom board and I was really good at it. I spent hours and hours playing carrom. In the process I made friendships with other people who spent hours and hours playing carrom. One day I was partnering a boy who was one year my senior, and we were playing against two others from his year. One of them, Gaurav, from a "good" school in Chandigarh, pointed to my partner and asked: Do you know what his name is? An odd question, I thought at that time. Of course I knew what his name was, I saw him every other day at the carrom room. His given name was Sumer Lal and his surname was one that I had learned by that time was shared by other people who got into IIT on the Scheduled Caste quota. "I know his name," I said. Gaurav, who hadn't a trace of any negative sentiment in his voice, said: "I didn't find out his name till the end of my first year." Gaurav, who probably became friends with the Rohits and Amits and Viveks within days of reaching the hostel, spent almost 12 months there before he learned Sumer Lal's name.

One of the interesting things we were all made to do during ragging was to read certain texts in Hindi written by a person whose name was always Mast Ram. The technical term for this literature was uttejak sahitya. We all had to read it, especially those of us who found it objectionable. I didn't find it objectionable, but for me a different task was assigned: I was made to translate it. Me and those few others who, the assigner of the task knew, would have trouble translating it. I knew the dirty words, that was not a problem, but I still struggled with the translation, stumbling over the heavily idiomatic language, the richly textured euphemisms that seemed to come so naturally to Mast Ram. It was probably the first time it struck me that my school Hindi textbooks had done me a disservice, and that the Hindi Cell style signage that I saw around the city was a total misrepresentation of a living breathing language. In those early days in the hostel, when I was keen to offer friendship to whoever IIT had arbitrarily chosen to put along with me in the hostel, I struggled to cross a barrier of language that my education in Delhi had created for me. But the people on the other side appreciated the fact that I did struggle, at least I think they did. And even if they didn't, several years later when I picked up and read end to end my first Hindi novel—Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari—I had them to thank for showing me that Hindi had a colloquial richness, a richness that would serve as a magnet for a person who loves language. And that magnetic attraction could take me to places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, shown me things about the country of my birth that I would not have otherwise chosen to see.

When I was in school my mother would sometimes go shopping at one of the prominent fresh produce markets of Delhi. On occasion we would stop at a South Indian dhaba that sat at the mouth of this market. Much to my astonishment some time into my stay at IIT I found that the dhaba was owned by the family of one of my closest friends at IIT—he is now a leading computer scientist in a prominent research lab in the US. I cannot forget the day he came to me, some time in our third year, and asked: "Bagchi, tu dose banaa letaa hai?" Before I could answer this question in the affirmative or negative he told me that his father was thinking of locking out the "labour" at the dhaba. "Ek do din maalik logon ko hi kaam karna padega." I nodded my agreement at the kind of prospect that I, the son of a civil servant father and schoolteacher mother, had never contemplated in my brief life. The thought of crossing the counter that I had sat on the customer side of sent a thrill up my spine. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the labour came around by that evening and I never did get to make dosas on the large tavas the dhaba had, but for a brief moment there I teetered at the edge of it, and I had to project out of my own world into another world where shop owners and labour squabbled while dosas waited to be made.

I cannot claim that the life I live now is fundamentally different in its everyday rhythms from the lives of the other English speaking students I went to school with. I cannot claim that what I learned in the years I was thrown into close contact with people who I had only seen from a distance before transformed me, because I have no way of knowing what I would have been like if I had not had that experience. But I do know that while I treasured what my teachers taught me at IIT—and treasured it enough to have joined their ranks today—I treasure equally, if not more, what I learned in the hostel's carrom room, in the canteen, in the corridors.

It is not my contention that we all learned to get along. Please do not think that I am trying to portray IIT as some happy melting pot of India's diversity. It was not that. It was as riven with casteism, communalism, classism, sexism and all the other ugly isms that our society nurtures. How could it not be? But by pretending that these things didn't matter, that exams and grades and job interviews were more important than all these things, it gave an opportunity to those who were willing to learn to get along with people who weren't like themselves. It gave a quixotic notion of an India populated by Indians a chance. Indians who were consumerist, over-ambitious, self-important technocrats perhaps, but who were, nonetheless, more Indian than anything else. And the fact is that this learning was not part of any of the curricula at IIT. But, as all of us who have been teachers for even a short while know, all we can do is give people an opportunity to learn. And if they don't learn, we can give them another opportunity, and another. Because the truth is that in a class of 100, there will only be four or five who get it the first time, only 10 or 15 who understand it in outline, and the remaining will take it in one ear and let it out of the other. I know people who still use the word "shadda" to refer to people who got into IIT through the SC/ST quotas, despite having played hard-fought games of volleyball in the same team as some of them, despite having stayed up long bleary-eyed hours preparing for exams along with them, despite having drunk too much and thrown up with them. Some people never learn. That is the teacher's frustration. But some people do learn and that is the teacher's reward. And, a priori, we teachers never know which is which.

It's a complex and random process, this interaction with young people that we teachers enter into for a living. It has many sides. Like so many other teachers I spend a lot of time thinking about my students, and, also like many other teachers, I don't spend enough time thinking about what they think of me. But when I do, I am forced to remember how I saw my teachers. Physically I saw them through a forest of dark haired heads—I always preferred to sit near the back of the class. I saw them standing up on the raised platform at the front of the class, on which the short looked tall and the tall looked taller. I took their careful grooming for granted—not realizing that if one of them turned up looking slovenly I would probably have been as upset or offended as the school's principal. I associated a certain amount of self-possession with them. And I thought of them as older. A small anecdote here: In class nine I entered a CBSE school and took Sanskrit instead of Hindi. My mother was concerned that I wouldn't be able to cope so she went to meet my teacher. Afterwards I asked her how the meeting went and she said: "Your Sanskrit teacher is a very sweet girl." I realized that my mother was probably fifteen or twenty years older than my Sanskrit teacher, and senior in the same profession, but still the idea that my teacher could be thought of, by anyone, as a "girl" was very difficult to comprehend. So difficult that I still remember that statement, long long after, I'm guessing, my mother forgot all about it.

So there you are, you poor teacher, frozen in eternal adulthood, even on those days when you wish you could just curl into a foetal position and suck your thumb instead of having to stand up and talk for an hour to a room full of young people who are looking at you, or at least should be looking at you. Sometimes in the nitty-gritty of the syllabus, the announcements about exams and homework, the clearing of the last class's doubts, you forget about the current that emerges from your body and flows out into the class. You forget what you mean to them.

I was lucky to have some excellent teachers at IIT Delhi, and I am not just saying that because some of them are my colleagues now. Let me explain with a story why I thought well of them. In my second year I had a class in computer architecture. Before the first semester exam, being somewhat lazy I didn't memorise certain assembly language keywords and their meanings. When the exam paper came there was one big question that involved explaining what a fragment of assembly language code did. It was impossible to answer without knowing the meaning of those keywords. One of my friends from the hostel who knew I hadn't memorised the keywords looked at me and snickered. Stung by this I decided to take a risk. I raised my hand and called the professor. "I don't know what these keywords mean," I said. He looked down at the paper, thought for a moment, then went to the board and wrote out the meanings of all the keywords. Right there, on the spot, he decided that this question was not a test of memory, it was a test of understanding. Not only did I snicker back at the friend who had laughed at me, I also never forgot the lesson. I apply it in my classes even today.

I knew from around the age of 19 that I wanted to be a professor. I was 30 when I actually became one. In those 11 years, especially towards the end of that period, I often used to daydream about the time when I would stand in front of my first class. When I dreamt about it I always saw myself standing in a particular lecture room at IIT Delhi, Block VI, Room 301, where most of my lectures in the latter part of my stay at IIT had been held. I would see myself standing up on the platform of VI 301 about to say my first words to my first class, and I knew I would be feeling something. I just didn't know what it was. As it turned out, my first teaching job was at IIT Delhi and when I got the room assignment for that first semester I found out that the class I was teaching would meet in VI 301. I walked up the one floor from my office, my stomach fluttering. I turned into that familiar door, carrying the attendance sheets, the sign of my authority, in my right hand, and walked onto the podium. I put the attendance sheets down on the table and turned towards the class. I looked up at them, seventy something of them, sitting in those long desks where I had so often sat and would never again sit. I looked at their faces and suddenly I ached at the pain they would feel in their lives. They sat there looking up at me, innocent to the suffering their future would bring them, and it came running through me, unexpectedly, this thought: There is so much you all will go through in your lives. Sometimes when I feel I am forgetting what my students mean to me and what I mean to them, I remind myself of that moment when I stood in front of my first class, that hot July day when I learned something about who I was and about the life I had chosen for myself.