Badly wanted this break. July thru September first week, was much squeezing with all the task deadlines falling in the first week of September.
However, there was lot of learning going and I love that. Keeping updated gives
me more confidence and at times, neck pain too 😊. I will write in detail about these tasks on my technical blog soon but
will cite them here. (Task#1) Writing a paper with Tamil NLP team, worldwide formed
by Bharathi raja from Ireland. My part was very less but I learnt so much from all the team members and I love working with that team. (Task #2) A proposal had to be
written for our School of Computing and I had to coordinate it and needless to
say, I have to give top priority for SRM tasks always! (Task #3) Then there was a request from Dr. Alice
Nithya from our Institute to give a hands-on session on, “Reinforcement
Learning (RL)”. “Saying no” is generally very difficult for me and for nice
people like her, “saying no” can’t be done. I know few RL concepts but never knew
to code RL in Python. Through this workshop, I came to know of “Open AI Gym” libraries,
and it was a nice experience to give that session on Sep 7th. (Task #4) Then
the most important task about which this post is mainly about got included.
Writing a paper on “LGBTQIA”. Until the work is published, I can’t write about
the research work but just thought of writing the thought process that I went
through here. Surely, will write about the research work on my technical blog, once
the paper gets published and this task had the deadline on Sep 6th.
Dr.Lavanya from SRM wanted to work with me on a paper. I was
very hesitant as I was already on a tight schedule with the above-mentioned
tasks along with my regular academic and research duties at SRM. I had to pull
out a “NO” to her initially. Then there was call from a Springer journal
Special issue on “Equality and Diversity”. When I saw that one term, “LGBTQIA”,
I thought I should not miss this. So, called her again to ask if she is ok to
write a paper on “LGBTQIA”. Like I was ignorant about LGBTQIA, a few months
back, even she was ignorant about it, when I spoke to her. Then after I
explained about LGBTQIA, she readily accepted. I would like to thank her for
having accepted to work on this topic and I learnt a lot from her. Though this
task had to be taken totally out of schedule, we somehow managed to get it done
and submitted our paper on Sep 6th. Fingers crossed. Let us see how
it goes with the reviewers.
A few years back, there was a positive talk on LGBTQIA among friends,
but I was feeling totally uncomfortable and was not accepting the fact behind
it. Then I just thought why not I should accept the fact about LGBTQIA as the friend
who spoke for it is so knowledgeable and one of those, whom I trust the most. Then I
taught myself about the positivity and the fact behind LGBTQIA community. I was
very upset to see the sufferings they undergo. What is commonly unfair among
the humans is that “Until we undergo, we won’t understand”. I include me also here. Yes, for the readers, who are yet to know what
LGBTQIA is, let me explain. LGBTQIA is short form for Lesbian, Gay,
Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Inter Sexual and Asexual community.
Twitter is one of the eye opening social handles. If you are on twitter you get to listen to legends on a regular basis. I just love tweets of Sundar Pitchai, my gurus, Andrew NG, Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky .. I saw a tweet from Sundar Pitchai supporting LGBTQIA. Here is a letter that he sent to LGBTQIA employees. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/12/18663017/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-lgbtq-employees-letter-harassment. June month is celebrated as the pride month for LGBTQIA community and almost all top software companies around the globe came forward to support LGBTQIA and hoisted the LGBTQIA flag. Here is a picture of google with LGBTQIA flag and here is the blog link https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/history-pride-flag/ .
I request the readers to filter out the bad contents while
knowing more about LGBTQIA, as those bad contents stand as the most important
reason behind stopping us from understanding the ground truth. India still lags
so much behind in accepting LGBTQIA community. At least, we have now accepted Transgenders. I
am sure positive things will happen soon.
Just because heterosexuals form the majority in the society, the
LGBTQIA who form the minority should not get suppressed and depressed. Most of us
think that it their choice. It is not their choice and even they may be struggling
to accept themselves. It is decided in their genes right from their
birth. Just because, we fellow citizens are not willing to understand and
accept, many talented individuals from LGBTQIA community are undergoing great
depression instead of focussing on their career and personal life. This is
totally unfair. The world needs more of talents from all sorts of community and
if most of the good talents are deviated and allowed to get depressed just because
of our narrow mindedness, then we are not leaving a better world for our next
generation. Here is a picture of Menaka Guruswamy and Arundati Katju . Menaka Guruswamy
and Arundati Katju are advocates of Supreme court of India and their most
important identity is that they are couple. They have and they are fighting for
LGBTQIA community to bring more legal rights to them. More of such powerful instances
should come out from LGBTQIA community and that can only happen if we are supporting
them.
Sometimes I think, who are we to support others. Every human
being has the rights to live their own way in this world. If someone is not
harmful to the society, then it is not definitely our business to barge in his/her
personal life. Not only for LGBTQIA, but the same sort of suppression happens for
Divorcees, single parent, Not Married and so many such ppl in the society. At least now it is time to stop asking
personal dumb questions at least in the professional place like, “Are you married?”, “How
many kids do you have?”, “why are you not married yet?”, “why did you stop with
one child?”, “why you got divorced” bla bla bla. I am happy at least the
question “what is your caste?” has got eliminated in most of the professional
places. Thanks to the 80, 90 and 2k kids for this. I am sure the world will get
better and better soon. Spreading love is the easiest thing in the world and it
is free of cost so let us spread love!
If I have sown a positive vibe through this blog post, I am
really happy and thank you so much.
Even if you are not still convinced, I still thank you for
patiently reading this.
Have a great day ahead and those who are gearing up to
celebrate Vinayaka Chaturthi, Happy Vinayaka Chaturthi to you!
Subalalitha.
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