Rohini Balakrishan - Session 01

OH-002-1-1

(00:00:00) Early life and primary school

Rohini talks about Mumbai, her birthplace, which her family would keep returning to as her grandparents lived there. Her grandfather was an electrical engineer in BEST (Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport). Her father, T S Balakrishnan, had a Master’s in Physics from Allahabad and worked at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) from 1947-50 with CV Raman in the Physics department, decided it was not his calling, and wanted to work in geology and geophysics. He worked at the Geological Society of India in 1955. A year later the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) was formed and he was one of the first 50 employees to join, and worked there for the rest of his life.

Her mother, a botanist, trained as a teacher but did not work. Her sister Meera Balakrishnan became a computer engineer.

The family moved to Gujarat when Rohini was a year old. They lived in the ONGC colony in Baroda – she remembers the presence of several animals in the vicinity and says she grew up playing outdoors and interacting “quite a bit” with animals. Her formative years were spent in Baroda and Bhavnagar, and the family later moved to Chennai for three years. She did Classes 2, 3 and 4 at Bain School.

(00:05:24) Moving to Iraq

Rohini’s father was posted to Baghdad, and insisted that the family go with him. Balakrishan had just completed Class 4, and “broke school” for two years when the family lived in Baghdad – her father believed that education didn’t come from school alone, and that his children would learn from living in another culture. Rohini says she spent much of those two years playing on the streets with other children. In the family’s time there, they also did a couple of trips to her father’s field site in the desert, where he was exploring for oil.

(00:11:45) Return to India

From Baghdad the family returned to Dehradun. Rohini had been out of school for two years, but her mother persuaded a school – Cambrian Hall – to admit her to Class 7 instead of Class 5. She had a tough six months trying to catch up, but at the end of it she received a progress prize from the school.

(00:16:10) Choosing biology

In Class 10, she leaned towards the arts – she took part in theatre and the choir. But she also “absolutely loved” Biology, and loved the school trips that she went on, including one to Corbett National Park at the age of 12. That’s where she got her first exposure to being in the forest and going on a field trip. She also went on trips with her father studying rock formations in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh – the “most extreme” was one week before her Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) board exams. She says both of them gave her “a huge love for the outdoors”, and if she had not been a zoologist she would have been a paleontologist. But she always had a love for animals, and so she picked science subjects and biology for Class 11 and 12. She says having an “amazing” biology teacher in school, Veena Saxena, made the subject interesting and a natural choice.

(00:27:12) Finding a college

Rohini passed Class 12 – the ISC [Archivist’s note: Indian School Certificate] board exams – in 1981. She says she got the highest marks in her school and in her area. There was also a crisis in the family – Rohini’s grandmother and mother had serious medical problems – so she says her future wasn’t foremost in her family’s minds.

Rohini says her father didn’t want her to study in Delhi because he felt it wasn’t safe, and she felt that way about Dehradun too. She says one would often get molested on the street – she would walk or cycle to school and would often be followed by gangs of boys and sometimes assaulted. Rohini's father called up his brother in Bangalore and asked him to find her admission in a college in Bangalore as she wanted to do a BSc. He wasn’t particular about where she gained admission, as doing a BSc or studying zoology and wanting to “roam around in the forests” perhaps didn’t seem very important (as compared to maths or engineering, which her sister was studying).

Rohini moved to Bangalore to live with her uncle, who was an engineer and ran a factory in Bangalore, and his wife and children. She says that though her marks in ISC were around 70 percent, which was considered very high, in Karnataka it was possible to receive 90 percent in the equivalent state exams, so she was at the bottom of every list and found it hard to gain admission in colleges.

(00:32:53) Studying at Mount Carmel College

A friend of her uncle and aunt who was a teacher at Mount Carmel College suggested that they try to gain admission there, and through a quota for students from outside the state, she was able to gain admission to study Chemistry, Botany and Zoology.

She says ISC standards were higher than those in Karnataka and she already knew a lot of what was being taught in college. She says, “academically it was the worst period of my life”, as it was very boring. For biology practicals they would have to do a lot of drawing – a practice that she says still continues, 40 years on.

For two years Rohini lived in her uncle and aunt’s place in Malleshwaram, and when they moved to Mangalore, she moved into the Mount Carmel hostel. She says she hated living in the hostel, though being in Bangalore did mean the ability to move around in the city with a lesser degree of worry than in North India. She had grown up with a lot of freedom, which continued in her uncle’s house as well, so moving to the hostel felt like a more drastic transition. She looked forward to finishing her degree and leaving as she didn’t like the overly restrictive hostel rules and lack of personal freedom.

2019-02-06

Oral History: History of Science

Rohini Balakrishan

Rohini Balakrishan - Session 01