My First Research Assignment

The other day I was thinking about this and trying to explain myself why and I have come into this field and the suddenly realised that I had been preparing for it since long. My first ever research project was done when I was in 7th standard. Of course, Dad...he had some plans in mind already, way back. Let me share from the beginning. Dad (Shri Brijmohan Gupta)had opened one NGO with his friend to popularize Science all across world. Then was born Science Centre Gwalior . An organization dedicated to make Science look and feel simple and understandable for common people. He believed strongly in the power of curiosity and children were best at it for him. While sitting and discussing with uncle, very casually, an idea was born into his mind and overnight work had resulted in full on product called Children Science Congress. Now it is one of the most popular initiatives taken by Science Centre Gwalior and NSTC. Children are the researchers, hypothesis developers and presenters. I myself had witnessed a lot of magnificent work done by kids of small towns, big cities, educated or not so educated...

Now back to me...while discussing all this at home with we kids, he gave us an assignment. All the kids across our colony were to participate. Each kid was given a topic to explore upon. I remember mine. We went to see the magic show and thought came to my mind to develop a project stating how those magics would have been done by magician. What was Haat ki safaai behind it and I had created one chart detailing out my hypothesis behind his magics. The paper was presented by me in Children Science Congress 91 at Gwalior. Huge audience, all age groups, various profiles and innocent me was asked to stand on stage with a mic on. My mom tells me that I was very confident and brilliantly presented. However, I still don't believe it!

Other cool projects i remember were, herbarium creation by children. Each one as per his/her age was given task to collect flora available in the colony and create herbarium file with names described for each plant, local, scientific or English names, whichever were available. Interestingly, children below age of 6 had classified plants basis shape of leaves....square, rectangle,oval etc. Slightly elder children met with uncles and aunties of the colony to ask for details and local names of plants in their herbarium and oldest ones had to do complete taxonomic classification. Fabulous data was collected by children. We then have prepared paper and distributed amongst us.My younger sister prepared drawing and paper on birds in our colony. To our surprise there were 40 species of birds available in our small colony and she had drawn them all....Ms Salim Ali . My youngest sister did a survey to understand 'Kya banoge munna'. We found that kids below 10 years were interested in being police officer to be able to command their parents and win fights. Girls above 10 expressed their desires to be doctor etc.



The excitement, interest, curiosity, determination of each one was commendable. Everyone was keen and interested. Whenever we use to get stuck, our contact point use to be my dad. He would simplify and tell us...and things use to become easier.

Whole of the kids gang in the colony was united, no body use to fight, we use to have great time discussing and sharing knowledge. We were doing research without knowing that we were. We all were passionate and there was no pressure of performance over our heads.

I saw glimpses of the same philosophy in 3 idiots. 'make the studies more interesting than creating a burden'. Now I don't regret getting absolute zero in Maths class during 7th Standard for a question wherein I was required to write some definition and I had written only essence of it. Nobody cared about the fact that I had understood the theory and my inability to mug up exact words/sentence has hampered me duplicate that on paper :-( ...All izz well