Harihar Swarup
Preeti Aghalayam, 49 just became first woman to head any IIT. She, is excited, about reaching out to the world, at the first overseas campus, in Zanzibar. We need women in STEM, we need diversity in research, we need young people to feel they can chase their dreams here… Her childhood home was a laboratory, she says laughing.
Preeti Aghalayam grew up in Mysuru, Karnataka, the daughter of two academics, a chemistry professor and a linguistic scholar. She dismantled clocks and toy cars in playtime; crafted mirrors from plain glass; stayed up all night to watch a bud bloom.
One summer, she and her now late father-in-law A S Janardan, wanted a bright pink from chapping and pressure cooking beets.
“We were determined to extract their natural sugar, after reading the process in a journal. The kitchen went quite pink too”, she says. “The ‘sugar’ ended up tasting funny and horrible, because the American scientists had used a specific of the vegetable, called sugar beet.”
What she remembers most is that she and her elder Jyothi had found an answer or sparked a conversation. “I was chatty and curious, and for our parents there were too many questions.”
Preeti has just been appointed the first-ever women director of an Indian Institute of technology (IIT). She will head the Zanzibar campus of IIT-Madras (IITM) in Tanzania, the first overseas campus in the 72-year history of the centrally funded elite institutes.
As director, she aims, to build an environment where young people are encouraged to look beyond marks and lucrative jobs, and tap into inventive side, as she did all those years ago.
The new IIT is determinedly forward looking. It opens in October (applications are still being accepted) with two programmes, a four year graduate degree course and a two-year master’s both in data science and artificial intelligence. “I want IITM -Zanzibar to be a place where we can shape young individuals in a way that they do good in the world, where they realize that hard work and academic rigour impacts not just their lives, but a vast horizon of people, places and problems,” she says.
For six months, she has lived between Zanzibar and Chennai. Having a family excited by the change has helped immensely. Her husband Rajiv C Lochan, 52, who heads a finance and investigation firm in Chennai, and their daughter, Vichar Lochan, 19, a student in Chicago, “have constantly pushed me to be my best,” she says.
Preeti has learnt so much from her mother Rama Janardan Rama now 77, earned a Ph.D in language, linguistic and education, while running a house hold and raising two children. “My mother worked so hard. It was the ’80s, a completely different time and environment. But she never changed her ambition to suit any societal norms. She always maintained that, of course, the world is not equal for men and women, but you must know in your heart what you’re capable of, what you want, and chase it.”(IPA)
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