Although I have a PhD, unlike the real doctors in my family, I am not a COVID warrior. The privilege of being able to work from home has given me the time to reflect on how to turn this pandemic into an opportunity to cultivate my network and advance my science.

At the beginning of this lockdown, my mental state had temporarily become one of a (novice) housewife. There’s absolutely nothing wrong in being one; it’s simply not something I have chosen to do with my life. Despite having a spouse who helps out equally, there always seemed to be a never-ending list of things to be done around the house – dusting, zadu pocha (sweeping & mopping), grocery shopping and disinfecting, cooking, laundry, and cleaning the dishes. Annoyingly, staying at home all day seemed to bring to the fore new chores that I somehow hadn’t noticed before. Although I figured out protocols to grapple with the chores efficiently, I was starting to have serious science withdrawal symptoms and an existential crisis.

For an experimentalist, being away from the lab for such a long time is unfathomable. Be it for vacations, conferences or emergencies, lab members stick together and help coordinate experiments to keep things moving in the lab.

While necessary to contain the pandemic, the lockdown has forced scientists to work from home and pause all experiments (unless you are Steve Henikoff). Without an end in sight, it can be demoralising to scientists, especially those on the cusp of graduation, applying for jobs, or submitting that final revision of a manuscript.

As many might suggest, one can use this time of isolation to dive deep into the literature and finish writing/ submitting manuscripts or grants. But after this initial phase, you start to miss one of the best parts about being a scientist - discussing and brainstorming ideas and hypotheses with other smart people, which is what moves the field forward. These were previously done via in-person meetings but the COVID-19 situation has completely disrupted this mode of interaction.

Thankfully, a handful of pioneers embraced the situation to come up with innovative ways to maintain connections within the scientific community. Some large conferences (like the TAGC2020) decided to switch completely to a virtual mode at short notice (although the original conference was 1.5 years in the making). Similarly, motivated individuals and universities started virtual journal clubs/seminar series related to their field of interest to keep the community abreast of the latest research and to catch up with friends (here is an example). Slack channels, Discord servers and Zoom meetings popped up discussing a wide spectrum of topics from protocol troubleshooting (for when we return to the lab) to virtual happy hours. It almost appeared as though if your field didn’t have an online webinar series, was it really a field at all? These interactions were what kept my sanity and identity as a scientist alive during those strange times.

This approach of science without borders has been a complete game-changer, particularly for those of us not physically located in an international scientific hub. Young trainees from all over the world can now get ‘virtual’ exposure to leaders in the field more frequently than before. Such platforms also offer greater visibility to younger scientists gearing up for the job market and help build networks to collaborate with established scientists in the field.

This also provides our students with an opportunity to observe and interact with their peers from other countries. This can be very helpful in driving home the fact that their circumstances and abilities are not very different, and that they can perform at par with those in developed countries given the right attitude and strategies. This peer-to-peer setting overcomes inferiority complexes or parochial attitudes more effectively than a sermon from their teacher.

The pandemic has forced us all to test-drive the concept of virtual conferences, something that academics have hotly debated in the past. Not surprisingly, the virtual editions of conferences have seen up to three times the participation and included people from underrepresented countries across the globe. Obviously, there is significant effort involved on the part of the organizers who volunteer to host these online events – if you are one, we salute and thank you for the service you are providing to the community! This is a move towards more inclusive open science, and I hope high-quality online communities continue to grow in the post-COVID-19 world.

For those who might be sceptical of this transition, recall another recent paradigm shift - that of scientists adopting preprint servers to post their latest research. Making publicly funded science freely accessible has catalysed discovery and propelled us towards rapid solutions to this pandemic in the form of diagnostics, vaccine candidates and promising drugs.

Analogous to this, providing the option for virtual participation in conferences will reduce the disparity in participation from underrepresented communities, among other benefits including a reduced carbon footprint. Sure, there is no replacement for in-person meetings - so hybrid meetings, that allow in-person as well as virtual attendance, may be the way to go in the future.

Ironically, social distancing measures implemented during this pandemic have ended up bringing scientific communities closer. For the first time in the history of my generation, a singular unifying event is making scientists around the world seek out ways to connect with each other exclusively through the digital mode, opening up new conversations.

My life BC (Before COVID) was one mad rush. I was on a treadmill that I could not get off from, travelling almost every week for various committee meetings, PhD examination boards, conferences, meetings for collaborations, or workshops. I always kept two suitcases packed, one for trips within India, and another for trips abroad. I was happy when the trips were spaced far enough apart that I managed to get my laundry done in between.

Of course, in between, I had to go to work, do research, meet with my students, teach, and attend more meetings. My list of unread/unanswered emails would pile up, and sometimes I would forget to fill out reimbursement forms. I was not unhappy by any means, but I was tired. By the time I got home late at night, I was usually so exhausted that the only choices for dinner were to cook a two-minute omelette or order dinner through Swiggy. Concerned friends and relatives suggested that I take on and travel less, but that didn’t seem like a viable option for me.

The only matter up for discussion seemed to be whether to complete my trips to Delhi in a single punishing day (wake up at 3 a.m., catch the 6 a.m. flight, sit through a day of meetings, and given that the wretched 8.40 p.m. flight back to Bengaluru was usually delayed, return home 24 hours later) or space it out over three days. But that would mean three days lost to research! To catch up on the literature, I would print papers out to read on the flights, but I would often be so wrung out that the moment I fastened my seatbelt, I would fall asleep, only to wake up when the landing announcement was made.

And then, suddenly, it was March 2020, and everything screeched to a halt. It took me a while to adjust to my life in the AD (Age of Despond? Or is it Age of Deliverance?). During the first few days of the lockdown, I had a sense of impending doom. The walls of my apartment seemed to press down on me. I live alone, and it felt truly strange to see no one else for days on end. I worried that the food I had stocked up on would not last through my incarceration. However, I had many work deadlines to meet. So, in the first two weeks, I worked like crazy, submitting three papers and evaluating dozens of research proposals.

Almost immediately, my daily routine changed. I stayed up all night, usually falling asleep at dawn when the birds started chirping. I gladly freed myself from the tyranny of the alarm clock and woke up only when I heard the vegetable vendor (allowed inside our campus despite the lockdown) shout out ‘Tarakaari!’ (vegetables). I found no reason to change out of my nightdress and stopped colouring my hair. I thought these behaviours were peculiar to me, until I read that they were, in fact, typical of those (mal)adjusting to life in lockdown.

The biggest challenge I faced was adapting to teaching from home. I had been teaching a solid state physics course using an ‘active learning’ approach, where I would lecture for a few minutes, introduce a concept, and then divide students into groups of three or four to solve a few problems based on that concept. Every group was guided either by me or a tutor. I believe this approach was first introduced in basic physics courses at Harvard and MIT, and many studies have proved that it is extremely effective.

However, it was difficult to translate this into an online format, especially when many of the students were at home in rural areas with poor internet connections. I finally had to resort to sending them detailed notes (that took me a long time to write) and lists of problems to solve by themselves. I was not entirely happy with this. I offered to hold discussions over WhatsApp, but very few students chose to do so. Designing a final exam that they could solve at home (with access to websites or books) also proved rather challenging. I had to come up with problems that could not be answered by simply doing a Google search, yet were not too difficult. Of course, the students complained that the resulting exam was rather tough!

My first Zoom meeting was a review committee meeting, which was originally supposed to be held in Switzerland. Scheduling it proved challenging as the committee members were all under lockdown in different time zones. I had attended in-person meetings of this committee before. While I did miss the camaraderie and the chitchat of the previous years, the abbreviated format of the online meeting accomplished all the essential business in a much shorter time. There were disadvantages, however. In this year’s online meeting, we interacted only with the PIs of the project we were evaluating, whereas in previous years we were able to talk to the students and postdocs as well, and get a more holistic view of the projects, as well as a better feel for the morale in the teams we were evaluating.

Although videos of my talks had previously been uploaded online, I had neither given nor attended a live webinar before the lockdown. The first webinar I gave was a ‘plenary guest lecture’ for the ‘Solid State Physics in Quarantine’ course that my friend Sandro Scandolo, a physicist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, conducted online in May. Stuck at home during Italy’s lockdown, Sandro decided to conduct a beginners’ physics course online. He announced it on Facebook, hoping to get maybe 25 students. Within a day, he had reached the maximum possible enrollment of 500 students from all over the world. Interestingly, the country with the highest number of students was India.

I gave a talk during this course, where I used examples from my research to show how the concepts they learnt in the course were used in cutting edge research. After a little hesitation (because I worried that it might appear insensitive to those who were ill with COVID-19), I used coronavirus analogies to illustrate concepts in my research: various aspects of my work were likened to the donning of face masks, ‘flattening the curve’, etc. The questions in the chatbox were interesting as the students prefaced their questions by introducing themselves as being from Afghanistan, Palestine, India, Italy, Peru, the Philippines, etc. After the talk, many students asked me if I could organize an advanced course in my field of research. I am currently discussing this possibility with colleagues.

I found this first Zoom talk difficult to give – I am so used to looking at my audience and judging from their faces whether I am conveying my message or not. With 500 students online, I could not see the participants’ faces, and at one point, I felt that I was talking into a vacuum. It was very strange and disorienting. I also kept forgetting that I was supposed to look at the laptop camera; instead, I found my eyes repeatedly straying to the little thumbnail image of myself in one corner of the screen!

Since then, I have given several Zoom talks: not just about my research, but also about women in science and how to write scientific papers. I realize that with the online format, I am able to reach much larger audiences – each talk has had a live audience of hundreds or even thousands, and the videos have subsequently been watched by many more. I am also able to reach people from small institutions or remote places who do not normally have access to such talks. One of the talks I gave was for students in the Philippines. It would have been difficult for me to give this talk in-person.

Typical for coronavirus times, many old friends and classmates, some of whom I had not heard from in decades, contacted me. A participant in one group call is now a professor of physics; as a graduate student, he had been a TA for the quantum mechanics course I had taken in my first semester at Harvard. I could laugh about a 35-year-old memory of when, as a nervous freshie, I had approached him for help with a problem, he had said, “You are so stupid, I don’t know how you got into Harvard!” Having considerably mellowed from the sharp-tongued Oxonian he was in 1985, he wrote me a letter of apology after our Zoom call, telling me how happy he was that I had ignored his stupidity and bizarre sense of humour, and gone on to become a successful scientist!

I am surprised by how rapidly I adjusted to the ‘new normal’. I am now back to a fairly ‘old normal’ wake-sleep routine, even without an alarm clock. I find I feel much better if I wear nicely ironed clothes, even if no one is going to see me. I have been cooking healthy meals for myself every day and have lost a significant amount of weight. My students tell me that they are very happy that they now have more of my time, even though we mostly interact over Skype and WhatsApp. I suspect that I am also more patient with them these days. Many former students, in lockdown abroad, are lonely and homesick, and I spend a lot of time talking to them.

I was supposed to go to Paris to write some papers with a collaborator, but we have now been working on them remotely. He and I logged on to overleaf (an online LaTeX editor) together, and spoke on Skype, while we whittled down the abstract of our paper to fit in with the journal’s word limits. First, he would delete one word, then I would replace two words with one, then he would remove yet another word, and so on. It felt just like sitting down at the computer together – except, of course, that when we were done, we could not give each other a high five, and go off to have a drink at a cafe around the corner to celebrate!

With the time saved from travelling and commuting, I have been able to return to old hobbies. To help a little girl I know overcome her fear of face masks, I dug out my sewing machine (untouched for twenty years) and made her a kitty-cat mask and a teddy bear mask. These became quite popular and I now have a long list of pending orders for face masks for the children of friends. I have also been baking bread, cakes and pies, though with the lockdown in effect, I feel sad that I have no one to share them with. I have been reading a lot of fiction too; I find myself looking for books with happy endings.

I realize just how privileged I am that the lockdown is, for me, merely an annoyance rather than a life-destroying calamity. My biggest complaints are piles of dishes to wash, and not miles of highway to walk to reach home; it is my internet connection that keeps dying, not the ones who are near and dear to me. When cyclone Amphan hit the eastern coast, during the lockdown period, I called my student Abhishek, who was in a small village in the Sunderbans. “Ma’am,” he said, “the roof of my house just blew off. I fought for six years to get electricity to my village, the electric poles just fell down.” I, however, still have a roof over my head, my salary, a fridge full of food, and the ability to work from home. I have the luxury of enjoying the slowing-down of life, rather than having it represent the end of my livelihood, as it has for millions in India. I feel terribly guilty about this.

One day, I suppose, the pandemic will be over. What then? Will I get back on the treadmill? I suppose I will start travelling again, but I hope that our community will introspect about how much of this travel is really necessary. Most committee meetings can easily be conducted online, saving a lot of money and time. In-person conferences clearly have many advantages – many ideas are born and collaborations cemented in the coffee breaks and on escalator rides. However, in addition to everyone’s carbon credits being shot to hell, this format clearly favours a privileged few - those who have invitations to conferences and a big travel budget.

An online format is far more egalitarian. Someone in a small town in Africa with a mobile data connection, has, in principle, as much access to the conference as someone at Stanford, Oxford, or the University of Tokyo. The online format is also more friendly toward those who have logistic constraints that prevent them from travelling, e.g., the parents of young children. These are issues we should think about seriously as a community. We have now been forced to have the previously unthinkable ‘big pause’. Perhaps we should now confront other previously unthinkable possibilities, and not return to business as usual?

As a final year PhD student, the lockdown came as a bolt from the blue, which was followed by anxiety. The initial days passed by with the hope that the epidemic would subside and our lives would go back to ‘normal’ in our research labs. However, soon we were exposed to the ‘new normal’ and realised that we could hardly carry our work forward the way we used to.

A degree in science at an undergraduate, post-graduate, doctoral, or post-doctoral level not only allows one to enter academia but also opens up multiple other options in allied fields. However, one can never learn how to swim without going into the water. In order to imbibe the true flavour of these opportunities, practical experiences and assignments are important. Keeping this in mind, I decided to make use of this ‘new normal’ to try and have new experiences through new engagements.

As a PhD student, it is difficult to give up the lab-based commitments that are important for one’s career progression. Hence, there is always a need to strike a balance. Being away from the lab during the lockdown made the process of career exploration easier as I had relatively more time to dive into various choices.

I started by exploring two career options: science communication and science policy. The lockdown turned out to be one of the best times to practically engage with both of these career paths.

I wrote my first science news article for Research Matters and submitted an entry for the Science Writing Competition conducted by BioRad Antibodies. Being away from the lab helped me come up with the first draft rather quickly, remove jargon, gain a big-picture understanding of the work, connect with the authors of the paper, ask questions, get quotes, work on the structure, and eventually get the article published. Collectively, these experiences have helped me look at any recent research from two different perspectives – a researcher and a science communication enthusiast.

Meanwhile, I started reading about science policy in India and its history. I learned how science policies are framed, how they affect us, and the ways in which we can contribute. Fortunately, an opportunity to contribute to the creation, launch, and running of an independent forum, Science Policy Forum (SPF) came my way. This also demonstrates the importance of networking since this opportunity resulted from a brief interaction with one of the founding members of the forum several months before the lockdown. Here, being eager for interactions about diverse areas of science and having an elevator pitch ready came in very useful.

Being a part of SPF at a time when India’s Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020 (STIP2020) is being formulated, provided a fertile ground to actively participate in policy preparation. I was able to pitch in my experiences and suggestions from scientific research and science communication thereby helping in building a policy framework. This participation allowed me to understand various aspects of science policy better and put in perspective what working at a Science Policy Centre involves.

As researchers, we majorly interact within a niche of subject experts without a lot of cross-subject interactions. Another aspect of being part of SPF is to be able to work with social scientists and get a holistic view of different aspects of science policy by integrating subjects and knowledge beyond science. For example, studying the funding differences in start-ups founded by men vs women in STEM fields through an economists lens was pretty novel for me. Lastly, I was also able to apply several skills I learnt in the lab like multi-tasking, time management, and communication.

I have just taken my first steps towards science communication and science policy. The lockdown has supported this process and is allowing me to explore, engage, and experience the ‘new normal.’ I am hoping to take these ideas forward to the best of my capabilities even when we return back to ‘normal’.

12 March 2020, 11:30 a.m.

My eyes bore into the screen of my phone in sweet disbelief.

This is to let you know that I really enjoyed reading your submission for my fiction call. Your entry has made it through a round of reviews, and I’ll be happy to include your piece in the print anthology that I am curating about stories on the experience of disability and caregiving.

Best,

Srilata

Srilata Krishnan. An Indian poetess extraordinaire who teaches Creative Writing as a Professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and also holds the position of an adjunct professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute.

I was elated. What started one night as a creative impetus to write about a theme that I hold very dear to my heart - disability - was now set to make it to the pages of a curation by a well-regarded writer and a force to reckon with (Read a preview of this literary work here).

Little had I known that within the next few days, I’d have a lot of these midnight musings, this being the part of the day that I find most conducive to let my pen flow on paper. The first few days of the lockdown were a seamless string of digging into books authored by Srilata Krishnan. Each word she had inked on paper rang like a melodious note to me and my erstwhile blissful solitude. Her poems from the collection “The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans” remained a constant companion throughout the lockdown.

One of the poems from her collection of poetry “Bookmarking the Oasis” particularly hit home for me.

Writing has made its violent way
into hide, skin, wood and paper,
squatting down in two-dimensionality,
no longer kinetic,
slicing through our minds
with its alphabetic, linear whiteness.

Titled ‘A Brief History of Writing’, this poem brings across the sense of agency that different forms of writing can bring to the writer as well as the reader.

The lockdown also brought me closer to my other craft - the craft of groove.

As a drummer being trained in the Rockschool method, I am an out and out purist when it comes to following sheet music notations for my practice sessions. Reading and playing musical notations through sheet music brings a sense of discipline and scientific rigour to one’s art that is very grounding. Much to my immediate neighbour’s misfortune, I happen to be locked in with my drum kit, and I have pretty much set up a parallel laboratory in the music room where I spend a huge chunk of my time experimenting with grooves and fills.

The musical instinct runs deep in my family, with my first foray into music coming in the form of learning the ropes of Indian ragas as a 5-year-old under the tutelage of my aunt, Seema Shukla, trained in the kirana gharana of classical Hindustani vocals at Faculty of Music and Fine Arts, Delhi University. (Listen to her sing an ‘alaap’ in raag Yaman here). Very early on, she had let me into the musical sanctum sanctorum that she had created for herself, a revered nook in the pooja ghar (household shrine) of my nani maa’s (grandmother’s) home that to this day resurfaces my earliest childhood memories. Some of my most distinct memories are of moringa incense sticks that would infuse the entire house with the alaaps of raag ahir bhairav.

As my early formative experiences with Hindustani classical music met my recently acquired rock and jazz drumming chops, my musical identity found home in the songs of an Indie band - Bombay Bandook. Through Spotify’s daily music mixes, I had the fortune of being introduced to the work of these fabulous musicians, who bring together Indian ragas with Indie rock music.

Around this time, inspired by COVID-Gyan’s sundowner sessions, I set out on some podcasting business of my own. The result was ‘Saturday Sundowners’, a podcast that brings stories of people who have been or are actively engaged with science, and their parallel journeys in different forms of art that provide them with a creative and expressive medium. I invited Sannidh, Jagravi and Brijesh from Bombay Bandook for the pilot episode. We had a freewheeling conversation about the creative process of Bombay Bandook as a band and drew parallels between the ‘aha’ moments in the pursuit of science and sound. With Sannidh and Jagravi being biotechnology graduates prior to taking on music full time, we explored the interesting theme of whether being trained in science enabled their artistic pursuits as well.

The motivation behind this exploration comes from my personal journey as a neuroscientist and drummer-in-training. When I sit down on my kit, I begin by exploring all the permutations and combinations in which I can play a groove, and then let my musical instinct take over to play what sounds “right”. We wrapped up an hour of chuckles and friendly jabs at each other with Sannidh breaking into Azaad, Bombay Bandook’s latest original track. (Tune in to the podcast here)

For the next episode of the podcast, I will be in conversation with Sonali Sengupta, a molecular biologist who handles both her pipette and paintbrush with absolute finesse. At present a postdoctoral researcher associated with Louisiana State University, she raised money for COVID and AMPHAN relief measures through her digital portrait page - Brushes and Becomings.

Fondly missing the reverberations of drumming in the premises of my music school, a weekly go-to affair for me before the lockdown, I took to online mentorship to further my practice of the percussive arts.

“You’ll play fast, Vanshika, but eventually. It’s only when you can play at a slow pace with clarity, that you should attempt to reach faster tempos. That’s what my abba would tell me, and I’m here to teach you. Mashallah, you are picking on the kaaydah very well.” Ustaad Toufiq Qureshi beamed at me through the screen, as I dexterously moved my fingers over the djembe - an African hand drum- to play the kaaydah (groove) that he had just demonstrated for me. Ustaad Toufiq renders a unique style to the instrument, bringing learnings from the tabla that he has imbibed from his father, Ustaad Allah Rakha over the djembe. I feel blessed to be receiving an amalgam of rhythmic sensibilities directly from the unparalleled percussive lineage, the legends that are Ustaad Allah Rakha and his sons - Zakir Hussain, Fazal Qureshi and my guru Toufiq Qureshi.

A deep dive into honing my musical and literary skills has afforded me the headspace to think and act clearly about the academic facets of my life as a neuroscience graduate in the making.

Though the pandemic shadows academia with uncertainties like any other line of work, we have been quick to adapt, with rapidly evolving online forums to take our science to. Neurizons, a biennial neuroscience conference hosted by the graduate students of International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences, Göttingen, was conducted entirely in a remote mode this year in the light of the pandemic. While engaging in talks spanning the entire gamut of neuroscience, I also happened to reconnect with an old friend from my parent institute, National Brain Research Centre, who happened to be on the organising team of Neurizons 2020. Isn’t the world a small place, as the saying has it?

Worldwide Neuro is another such venture, born out of the Oxford Neurotheory Forum. It has conducted 55 online neuroscience seminars since March 2020 and has more than 78 upcoming seminars, creating an open online platform for any neuroscience enthusiast to engage with distinguished scientists as well as graduate students and neuroscientists-in-the-making.

As these online communities keep the neuroscientist in me ticking, I have found a deep sense of comfort in honing my craft of writing and music to get through the uncertainties that COVID-19 brings with it. Here is a couplet that I have penned in Urdu, the language of the Sufis, to capture this collective sentiment about the lockdown.

Waqt raet ki tarah haathon se phisaltha hai, suna toh tha
Ab registan-e-marz mein khadi hun, toh raet kya aur waqt kya?
Phir aasman ki ore taak lagayi toh ehsaah ne awaaz di
Tu shaheen hai, apne parwaaz ko mukammal kar

Time eludes you, so I’d heard

Now that I find myself in the midst of a land barren with disease,

I look upon the sky, and a voice beckons -

You are a falcon, realise the flight of your pursuits.

As the present unprecedented situation redefines “normal” life, it also calls for a new definition of “laboratory” life. The sooner we realise and accept this, the more efficient we can become. This pandemic may have created many obstacles for us, but there is still no cause for us to lose hope.

The news about the virus came to me when I was attending an international conference at Tripura University in the first week of March 2020, although the seriousness of the situation only became clear when the Janata Curfew was announced on 22 March 2020, followed by the first 21-day-long lockdown. Although most of my experiments were completed, my planning for future experiments got delayed. Keeping the situation in mind, this was quite acceptable. Initially, just like everyone, the pandemic took me by surprise; however, I stayed positive and started planning my research by drafting and shaping up several pending assignments. I also spent time in reviewing scientific papers which had the dual benefit of boosting my knowledge and helping me tackle cycles of negative thoughts.

With these things in mind and from my personal experiences, I would like to share some tips with my fellow researchers on overcoming negative thoughts emerging from disrupted experiments. These suggestions can be taken into consideration as alternatives to our usual laboratory work, which can be pursued during this pandemic. My hopes are high that we will overcome this pandemic and the situation will be stable soon. I have applied the following insights to my own research activities as well.

1. Writing project proposals:

Being researchers, we should keep writing to enhance our communication and planning skills. What better way to do it than to write project proposals, which not only enhance our knowledge but also save us time in the future? Utilizing the lockdown period for planning can also help secure and stabilize our ideas.

2. Taking up socio-scientific assignments:

During this period, one can also engage in socio-scientific activities like reviewing scientific papers, books etc. which not only expand our knowledge regarding the worldwide work culture of scientific communities but also enhance our power of scrutiny or critical thinking.

3. Planning the research schedule post COVID-19

Since planning is the backbone of research, now might be the best time to organise and schedule our work such that once the educational institutes reopen, a researcher can directly start their work as planned. This will not only boost one’s morale but can also increase the work output.

The above ideas arise from my nine years of research experience. I hope they can benefit my fellow researchers, especially those pursuing their PhDs in different fields.

COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). The rapidly growing number of COVID-19 cases in India led the government to send the country into lockdown, halting our regular professional work and affecting the economy at large.

Talking from a scientist's point of view, our usual research has come to a standstill due to the absence of human resources. PhD students and R&D assistants who are our primary workforce have been stuck at home, just like everyone else. It may appear that this pandemic has put science across the globe on an indefinite break.

But, let’s look at the positive side of this situation. This pandemic has challenged the scientific community in India to break from our conventional research problems, in which we are well-trained and comfortable, and think differently. It has motivated us to use our knowledge, training, and experience to solve the various problems that humanity is facing at the present moment.

As scientists, we should try to identify the problems that have not been solved yet and come up with solutions for the same. This is a war for existence for humanity, with the scientific community acting as its warriors. The majority of the Indian science community, however, is still in its comfort zone. Only a nominal effort has been presented so far against this situation. Despite the fact that many scientists have enough space to work in their laboratory along with fellow scientists without breaking social distancing or hygiene-based protocols, I feel that we are not putting in enough effort to fight this pandemic.

The government, through its funding agencies, is seeking the help of researchers in facing this challenge by floating and promoting various short terms projects against COVID-19. However, many researchers are hesitating to join this cause because we fear that we are not trained and qualified to work on COVID-19 or other infectious diseases.

Personally, I strongly disagree with this mindset. Many virologists and other life science professionals are contributing towards the development of vaccines and therapeutics. Other experts and scientists can help in various ways - material scientists and chemists can design and develop effective Personal Protective Equipment (face shields, face masks, etc.), which common people can afford. Mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists can construct mathematical models that try to predict the course of the pandemic. Similarly, a plethora of problems and fields have emerged; we need to open our eyes and mind and find the right opportunity to become a solution provider.

In this context, I would like to present an example of a collaborative effort which came from my research institute - Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences, Bangalore, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology. When the lockdown was first announced in the initial days of the pandemic, we were instructed to work from home. Being an experimental scientist, it was really uncomfortable to keep myself away from the laboratory and stay at home. Fortunately, G.U. Kulkarni, our institute director, asked all the faculty members to come up with ideas that can help our society in this situation. My colleague Pralay K. Santra and I came up with a plan to design a cost-effective facemask and presented the idea in front of the committee. The very next morning, we met the director at his office in JNCASR Banglore, who added further innovative ideas to our facemask design, making it much more straightforward and effective.

Immediately, we started working as a team on this combined idea and designed experiments. We came up with an innovative technique for making face masks (called Tribo E Masks) that can hold electric charges without any external power to restrict the entry of infectious agents. We have also developed a unique design for the mask and filed a patent. This snug fit design helps create enough space in front of the mouth while speaking. This mask causes no speech distortion, no fogging on glasses due to leaking of exhaled breath, and leaves practically no room for leakage while breathing. Another significant advantage is its high breathability allowing one to wear it without any discomfort.

We have transferred this technology to Camellia Clothing Ltd., a Bangalore-based garment company which wishes to produce[1] [AS2] and sell around one lakh masks per day through different distribution channels throughout India. This whole process, starting from identifying the problem to discussing, collaborating, doing experiments, transferring technology, and producing masks, took place during the lockdown period.

By citing the above example, I want to emphasize that the Indian scientific community must keep in mind that it is the time to collaborate rather than compete. Every scientist has an opportunity to be flexible and work on a new idea, or help and support other scientists doing so. Redefining our research problems and collaborating are the key solutions to overcome an adverse situation like the present.

Just before the national lockdown was announced for the first time, some members of my family had travelled down to Hyderabad, where I currently live. We had arranged to spend time together during breaks from my work, planned walks in my green and wooded campus, and contemplated short treks amidst the strange rocks and stone formations nearby that rested precariously balanced on each other. But barely three days after their arrival, the four of us found ourselves confined to my 1800 sq. ft apartment. We found ourselves facing an overzealous management and some vigilante residents gripped by the fear of the dreaded virus imposing all manner of curbs on the freedoms of movement normally taken for granted!

It took some time for the gravity of the situation to sink in. What! No classes anymore? The untidy chai place that I ambled off to after a tiring class was now out of reach. In the next few days, the reality of the radical readjustments that I would have to make to my routine started to sink in. My mind conjured up the spectre of an Armageddon - we’d reached the time of the final reckoning. Suddenly, everything I taught my students seemed like a waste. Of what value were the lengthy explanations I gave my students on spectroscopy? How did it matter that a single isolated atom has no preferred axis for quantifying its parameters? Would anyone care henceforth about how we measure the total Hydrogen content in the universe?

I simply couldn’t believe this would last as long, and with such impact on our lives, as it has done, even as my well-meaning and erudite physicist friends busily modelled the R0, and the time it would take for the curve to flatten. Meanwhile what certainly did flatten, as the days rolled by, were my spirit and enthusiasm.

My nine-year-old daughter, however, seemed to respond to the situation somewhat differently. That something was wrong outside had been amply conveyed to her, with us insisting that she strictly adhere to all the hygiene protocols that we’d been advised to stick to. But all of a sudden, she was free from the structured environment that she usually faced with school, homework, dance lessons, bedtime etc. This seemed to set off her creative side, from finding ways of getting involved in the house-cleaning routines with forceful insistence (despite various protestations from the elders) to multitasking in front of the TV with a bowl of chips and her big sketchbook.

She also turned keenly observant: the spiders that wove their cobwebs surreptitiously despite our meticulous efforts to make the apartment Corona-free, simultaneously invoked deep interest and fear in her. Our mobile phones turned quite handy when she took to photographing the bugs that visited us on the little balcony we inhabited each afternoon - the only “outing” we got to have - and this activity seemed to lessen her fear of these afternoon visitors to some extent.

The lives of “others” also turned immensely interesting. The routines of the residents of the buildings opposite ours led us to indulge in some backyard anthropology. I watched, over a month and a half, as my clean-shaven techie neighbours slowly started resembling junkies with their straggly looks and laconic movements. All forms of exercise outside of our living premises had been banned.

All around us, high rises that had mushroomed with deafening construction noises before the COVID crisis had grown silent. However, a couple of complexes right next to us had a few construction workers wandering around aimlessly. It seemed that not everyone had managed to flee to their villages. It wasn’t too long before the news was filled with dreadful stories of the tremendous hardships migrant workers were facing in their attempts to go back to their homes in far-flung corners of the country. Yet they were just stories we heard, as we sat around in our confinement.

One day, I observed a small crowd of residents gather outside our building, hidden behind face masks and flagging off a minivan. A few hours later I found a post on our apartment complex website announcing a van loaded with food for the stranded migrants next door! This refreshing news assured me that little acts of kindness do matter.

In the next few days, as the consequences of the lockdown became apparent and my university showed no signs of reopening, I made a brave attempt to visit my campus after obtaining due permissions. As I drove up the path approaching the school, some peacocks scampered away from my path. In the building, I was greeted by a deathly silence. The corridors were still, dusty, with a few empty plastic bottles occasionally rolling by from the light breeze. Two stray dogs that normally visit the premises after school hours ran up to me barking and seemed happy to see me back. It was almost as if they were trying to tell me to get things rolling as before. I felt bad for not bringing along something to feed them. But then, I just gathered the books I intended to use when I started teaching online, something that we had been instructed to do with immediate effect, and left.

I made some queries to my students while adapting my courses for online teaching. This elicited responses that reflected the difficulty of their situations. Many in my class, who hailed from remote villages of India, complained of lack of access to a good internet connection. Many also complained of the frequent power cuts while some places had no power supply at all. Faced with these challenges I decided to wind up the atomic and molecular physics course I was teaching them and email them the class notes on unfinished parts of the syllabus. Strangely, I felt some relief in doing so!

However, it was not all downhill on the teaching front. Another course that I taught along with a colleague - an exploration of how physics connects with other forms of intellectual activities - attracted quite a few students from across disciplines, who didn’t seem to suffer from the vagaries of the internet so much. This course had discussions on the scientific method (and if there is one), physics, and religion, with some history thrown in. The term papers that we have just received and are evaluating make an eclectic list: from a paper on physics and films to one on science and communal violence and another on the connection of physics with spiritual expression. This is surely a welcome act of creativity from these students and gives me hope.

With more time on hand and reduced anxiety about deadlines from the workplace, I found that the mind “could be let loose to wander”. I reached for my guitar, which had been lying in a corner so far, tuned it and started taking lessons from online sites. It felt good exploring my “heart mode” after staying so long in “head mode” from physics. I brushed the dust off my collection of poetry and read them with attention and care. The understanding and insights on the world coming from artists, musicians and poets were so striking. Just a single word or phrase in a prose piece or a poem describing an aspect of nature or a physical event could so exactly capture the essence of the thing. Such crafting of the word, the exactness of description, could become a microscope to the “inner” eye, magnifying and making us see further. I started to think about how we are destroying, especially in India, the idea of a liberal education. Surely, history, philosophy, art, music, and poetry have value to offer in shaping a good scientist.

I seized the brief window when interstate travel was permitted, in the first week of May, and drove to my home city, Bangalore, with my family. I’ve completed my home-quarantine period and even visited the department I used to work in, where I discussed the present situation my masked former colleagues - the mess our economy is in and the miseries of our migrant workers. I’ve been trying to find out if any breakthrough in modelling the COVID spread has been made, but am yet to come across one. I’m sure one will hear an announcement soon on this, once again affirming the untiring spirit of inquiry and perseverance of humans.

Picture this. You have just communicated a manuscript you are very excited about. You have just had a discussion with a senior research fellow in your lab about the next ambitious experiment that she has planned. Her energy reinforces yours and like always, you can’t wait to get back to work the next day. This was exactly the situation in which I got the news about the lockdown.

Optimistic as always, I tried to think that work really could not stop and there would soon be a solution that would allow us to get back to work. But...we all know what happened next.

I have two final year PhD students in my lab. My first reflex was to put myself in their shoes and think about what this meant to them and their plans, and my heart went out to them. The other two students in the lab were at the brink of becoming less dependent on my instructions and this lockdown would be delaying their take-off. The next thing I was worried about was whether they would get paid on time as the fellowship release at the university requires paperwork every month. As some of them were the main earning members in their families, the situation would be quite difficult for them. At the same time, I had to think about keeping the science in the lab alive and kicking.

Staying away from the workbench has never come easy to me or my fellow researchers in the lab. I feel, as a group, we think better when we hold a pipette in our hands. It’s like a magic wand that helps us discover life’s mysteries inside tiny microfuge tubes and 96-well plates. Looking at these tubes and plates before leaving the lab every day is like a “sleep meditation” that we need before letting our minds relax every night. So, the first week away from the lab was quite depressing.

The first thing we did to kickstart the reorientation process was to start online Journal clubs and to schedule them more frequently than the offline ones. This helped us regain our focus over time. This is one thing that I plan to continue even after we get back to the lab. Then we split the lab into two groups and each group started working on writing a review article. The discussions related to the reviews added to the frequency of our virtual meetings and we started to look at this time away from the lab as an opportunity to be twice as aware of the latest research. The lockdown also provided us with opportunities to attend many scientific webinars encompassing our research interests, helping us utilize our time more efficiently. Some of the lab members started taking online courses in coding. It was also a great time to sharpen our writing skills. So, all of us are using this ‘down’ time to ‘up’ our skill set.

A good friend once told me, “Even a tigress takes a step back before she leaps forward” and I am looking at this lockdown as that step back for my lab. I hope that when we get back to our “soulmate” – the workbench, we will be able to work more productively than ever before.

In the meantime, the manuscript we had submitted came back for revision. But it was hard to address any of the concerns raised by the reviewers with additional experimentation. Still, fingers crossed, hoping for the best.

Similar reorientation was required in my teaching responsibilities as well. Classes had to be arranged online and we had to take care that postgraduate students didn’t lose touch with the subjects. But online classes are quite different from classroom teaching. Classroom teaching is like a performance. The teacher’s presence, gestures, movements and the scribbling on the blackboard are all integral to efficient knowledge dissemination. So, when I started taking online classes it was almost like trying to fly without wings.

Besides, all the students did not have access to high-speed internet, especially those who went back to their hometowns in semi-urban areas. So, in addition to online classes, I created WhatsApp groups to allow them to connect at their convenience. I soon realized that being available on WhatsApp groups meant that I had to be ready to face questions 24*7. I am quite proud of the fact that our bright students, kept me on my toes making me answer their queries and resolve their doubts. Sometimes the questions would flow in at midnight or at 4 a.m. in the morning. Together the students and I worked on assignments and tried to make the best of the situation despite its limitations. I sincerely hope that I could live up to their expectations.

I have somehow adjusted to teaching online, but it doesn’t give me the same satisfaction I get while delivering lectures offline. However, since this situation has been felt by everyone in academia, I am really looking forward to seeing a revolutionary change in teaching methods and hope that this would create a world of opportunities for the students.

At this time, when the society at large is suffering, I cannot help but count my blessings and be thankful that I am among the lucky ones who were not hit hard by the pandemic and the lockdown. Perhaps what I am going to say now might sound selfish, but a few days into the lockdown I realized that it was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for personal growth. Never again in this life will there come another time (I really hope it doesn’t) when I would be the BOSS of every one of the 86400 seconds that life gifts me every day. I decided that I would make the most of this time. I could now indulge in all the things that I thought I was missing out on due to lack of time.

The list goes on but if there’s anything that comes close to my passion for science, it's my love for working out and practising pilates. Also, if I had to point out just one regret I have in my life, it would be giving up dancing. And all my life I have had well-wishers asking me to try meditation to tone down my “hyper” personality. With these thoughts, I signed up for online courses on pilates, guided meditation and dance. I am thoroughly enjoying my workouts twice a day- it’s blissful and heavenly. As for meditating, well, maybe someday in another life I might be able to do it. And dance! Well, I realized that I now have two left feet.

But all in all, I am enjoying having the time for these opportunities. I am also loving being able to be there 24*7 for my son and being able to fulfil all “quality time” demands that he has. With all of these, I am recharging my batteries and waiting to get back to work soon with more vigour than ever before, and praying that the paper gets accepted soon.

Trying to maintain an even keel during a long lockdown is hard, and researchers have been no exception. Because my research relies heavily on fieldwork, which has been cancelled owing to the current situation, some quick readjustment was necessary to make sure my lab’s research program kept running during this pandemic. We have been able to weather this so far, and I have been able to keep working from home at a steady clip through the lockdown.

The situation has gotten me thinking a lot about resilience, and how human beings cope with the unexpected (which may be jocularly summed up as jugaad). This process is, of course, a highly personal one, and each of us copes with it in different ways. My personal experiences have been instructive when dealing with unexpected situations in my professional life.

Although dealing with loss in one’s personal life is always difficult, the effects on one’s professional life are also immediate and present. Having gone through the experience of personal loss some years ago, with the inevitable upheaval that it caused in my professional life, gave me some help when dealing with the present. Firstly, it has given me a sense of perspective, having seen what the abyss really looks like, which helps me keep calm. This enables me to avoid overdosing on the daily news, while staying disconnected from social media allows me to further tune out the noise. Learning to pace the flow of information to avoid being overwhelmed and regain control, was an important survival lesson I learnt all those years ago.

Secondly, it has taught me when to make a change to how I work, and to not fear big structural changes to my work schedule. Finally, it has helped me recognize when I have too much piled on my plate and to declutter my thoughts and actions. Getting through the previous system shock has given me some kind of playbook to deal with this current upheaval. However, the very nature of unexpected events makes it impossible to anticipate everything that may happen. That means there are still some days that are more difficult than others, but I have been better prepared this time to keep my work going.

With that preparation in mind, what work can we actually do to make sure we are prepared for what comes after the lockdown? The period immediately after I moved back to India proved very instructive to me in terms of figuring out how to keep myself intellectually occupied and plan for the future. At that time, I was very concerned about losing structure and discipline, so I stuck to a regimented work schedule. I made sure I kept up with reading, wrote down ideas (I may never get to all of them in a lifetime, but it is good to make sure everything is documented), and kept myself engaged in whatever scientifically-based progress I could manage. Even while travelling, I kept my eyes open for potential sources of instruction and inspiration, which I’ve always thought was very important for someone interested in studying animal behaviour. All that legwork was very useful further down the road and continues to be useful now.

Currently, even the access to the park behind my house is blocked off. The birds I study are everywhere, though, and I am lucky to have a variety of birds singing near my balcony every morning. Much has been written about how bird song has ‘increased’ during the lockdown. However, having trained myself to listen, I hear the same birds I have always heard. I suspect that in the absence of the daily hustle and bustle and with not much else to do, people are finally awakening to the bird song that was always there. In the summer heat, I can hear three different parakeets, the beginning of the koel’s summer calls, warblers, flycatchers, magpie robins, ioras, sunbirds, peafowl and many more. All these birds are getting ready to commence breeding as the monsoon begins. I have always drawn research inspiration from listening to bird song, and I continue to do so now, even if only on my balcony in the early mornings. Whether it’s purple sunbirds feeding or a pair of starlings drinking water from a dripping tap, there are always fascinating animals and birds to watch, and new ideas to draw creative inspiration from.

Ruminating further on resilience, I feel those of us lucky enough to be doing research have much to be thankful for. We are never short of things to do, and new and interesting ideas to work on. This, in large part, is also due to resilience - the admirable strength of those on the frontline who continue to keep us and our families safe. Gratitude is a debt we will owe to them in perpetuity. By comparison, I certainly do not feel particularly resilient, and there is no way of telling what the future will bring.

With a clear roadmap and enough flexibility to make sure I am always intellectually occupied, I think I (and my group) should be able to make the most of this period. In particular, as some members of my lab are ecologists studying bats, our work now is both timely and necessary, as we hope to demonstrate the utility that these fascinating animals provide to the public. We can, therefore, hope that the research done during lockdown will make a substantial and tangible contribution to public opinion and policy as the storm of the pandemic wears on. From weathering previous storms, I have every hope that the changes to our lives will eventually turn into a positive, and that the training we get now will stand us in good stead for the long term.

The first few days of the lockdown were a haze. Everyone was adjusting to the new normal. I remember thinking to myself – “I feel less and less like a scientist every day.” Some of my friends were celebrating not having to go to work, and here I was, craving to touch a pipette again.

With a super supportive PI (Karishma Kaushik), who is driven to always make things work despite circumstances, I knew I had to do something to contribute to science. I needed to not feel lost. We decided to use this time to catch up on all the writing that we had put off during the everyday chaos of lab life. We began by working on an international collaborative grant proposal that was due soon. We set up online meetings and charted out the figures and goals of the project. This initial, small start made all the difference and it was what I needed to regain my spirit.

One of my favourite books as a child was “Charlotte’s Web.” The story follows a spider and a pig who become friends. The spider then goes on to weave inspiring words in her web to save the pig’s life from slaughter. I woke up one morning in March, during the lockdown, to my very own “Charlotte’s Web” moment - my curtains, window railings and the sunlight passing through it, formed a pattern that read ‘oil’ on my wall. Was it just a coincidence that we had finished up some experiments on Indian traditional oil-based remedies before the lockdown? Or was this what my PI called “lab withdrawal symptoms”?

Either way, we decided to start writing the manuscript for this project. Giving the manuscript structure gave my life in lockdown a bit of structure as well. I now had specific work-related goals to look forward to – regularly meeting with the other three authors online, plotting graphs, doing statistical analysis, and revising a little Sanskrit too (since our project involved interpreting ancient Ayurvedic texts on wound infections and their treatments)!

Writing a manuscript during a lockdown comes with its challenges, but there are advantages as well. We usually feel the constant need to do better – more experiments, additional replicates, and better error estimates. But, when you cannot access the experimental lab, you get an opportunity to evaluate your work from a distance. We realized we had a story waiting to be written and we eventually finished writing the manuscript and submitted it. We are now writing a new story in our next review article.

My PI is always one to have amazing ideas, at the most unexpected time and places. She called me one morning to discuss an online science outreach idea for young minds, and I was thrilled! In my scientific career, I have seen how important it is to have a strong understanding of concepts, and how, sadly, science is often made out to be a scary subject at school. I have always wanted to contribute in some way to change that. And here in the midst of pandemic chaos, the timing and opportunity were both right.

We started a ‘one-of-a-kind’ science outreach program called “Talk to a Scientist”, where we discuss science with young minds using an interactive webinar format. Our first session was on the recent coronavirus, and the response was tremendous! We had 61 participants from across Pune and India, between 6 and16 years of age, and it was the most rewarding experience for me since the lockdown had started.

Since then, we have continued these hour-long sessions weekly, and have expanded to a range of topics such as biofilms, antibiotic resistance, vaccines, and even a mouth-watering session on how microbes help make our food. With an average turnout of 40 kids each week and a chat window that is never silent, we have had children joining us from as far as Singapore and the US.

As we work on content each week, I realise how challenging it is to explain scientific concepts in simple terms, and how critical this is to enhance public participation in, and perception of, science. I always spend the few days following the webinar discussing how smart these kids are. But then, I immediately begin preparing for the next seminar. This series has been a turning point for me and our research group during this lockdown – it gives the science we do impact, all the while being away from the lab. We intend to continue it each week, are working on making our discussions bilingual (English and Hindi), and want to build this platform as the science outreach arm of our lab.

This lockdown has taught me that there are more ways to contribute to science than just through bench work in the lab. It’s important to find what you enjoy, and keep the science going. For me, that has been through building collaborations, communicating our research, and engaging people through outreach. It has been almost two months since I last touched a pipette and I can confirm that I am doing alright. I still crave to go back to the lab, but I no longer feel lost. I no longer feel less of a scientist. You can take the scientist out of the lab, but the passionate ones will still find a way to science!