reservation for women in iits at different forums including your blogtell us about iti am not in favour of reservationthere are two ways to increase the number of women in engineering institutes one is the reservation in iits that everyone seems to like there was a committee headed by timothy gonsalves and they actually looked at the performance of women versus men in the iit delhi for over 10 years and they saw that if you look at the similar jee ranks of men and women women seem to perform significantly better and that gap was huge now if that gap is huge it shows that there is some discrimination it may not be conscious but subconscious in the admission process therefore we need to say that there is some discrimination and we need to add some marks to account for that and then the women will come up in the ranks i think that this is the way to look at things the people who are being discriminated against can be countered by giving them extra marks right now what happens is if you give reservation the feeling is that this person was inferior and has come through a wrong method on the other hand if we do something based on research it would convey that this person is actually better and therefore we are admitting herare you going to continue bloggingi do think that blogging is important and blog is an important platform to have discussions on policies i hope more and more scientists and researchers start talking to public at large as an administrator the time is always a concern and whether i should spend time in communication or doing something on the campus will always be a challenge i will have to see how to balance these two requirementswhat is the story behind being a railfanas a child we lived not too far from the sarai rohilla railway station in delhi i used go to the station in the morning and evening and look at the trains passby i used to be really excited about this pink city express i always excited about train journeys and when i was a student in the us we used to have something called newsgroups in august 1989 we decided to have this indian railways fan club and i became the cofounder the forum has over 5000 members and organises an annual convention for railfans