It was going to be a regular post, she thought. An update on her life because someone asked her why she didn’t make one after getting a doctorate. So Bindu Sunil Karinganoor opened her Facebook profile and began typing in Malayalam. She went on to thank the many ordinary people in her life who had touched her through her growing up years. Bindu posted that long post and forgot about it. Three hours later her husband called to tell her, ‘what have you posted? There are a thousand likes already’. A week later, Bindu is still surprised by the attention that an innocent post had brought.
Bindu with Sunil“I thought I should thank the common people who had helped me on my journey but this kind of attention was alarming. There were thousands of likes and shares and so many friend requests. It is all very overwhelming,” she says between happy laughs and cries of her two little girls. They are all in Sweden — Sunil her husband and her daughters. It’s been six years now and Bindu has finally got her PhD in Food Protein Chemistry from the Lund University in Sweden. “It's about oats proteins,” she says. But before oats proteins and Sweden, there has been a long and difficult journey, bits of which you see on that Facebook post that she has written so beautifully. You get the mood from the second line, when she says her first thanks to the teachers at the Vikas Tutorial College who let her study there even as her name had always appeared in the list of those who never paid fees.
Bindu with her professorsThe next line is like a scene from a movie. After her tenth grade she had gone for manual labour at a house without realising it is her teacher Johnson sir’s, and he had to put the first basket of cow dung on her head. She writes that he was trying to tell her without actually saying the words, he should never see her like that again. “Those were days I went to school on the weekdays and worked on the weekends. But after my tenth grade, my mother told me that is enough, we can’t afford anymore. So I went to work with her. But then the results came and I got first class, and that was something good among the students at my school,” says Bindu, her modesty making her repeat she was only good in that little group.
Her interest in studies perhaps began in those days when both her parents had to leave for work and couldn’t look after the kids. She would visit a woman in the neighbourhood who had a daughter her age and who would teach her too, what she taught her children. “I got the idea of always picking the best from watching that amma choose the best for her children. That’s how I developed an interest in biotechnology.”
Bindu putting her thesis outBut interests alone didn’t help. So she continued working, going for odd jobs like road work even as she went to college — PDC and then BSc in Biotechnology. But she never told her classmates about it. “They were all coming from a different background and I was afraid to mingle or talk too much. I always kept a distance but this was sometimes misunderstood.” When it was time for the study tour, Bindu had backed out but the students decided to contribute Rs 50 each and take her along. Life changed once she finished her MSc in Plant Breeding and Genetics from Karyavattom and then her M.Phil in Bioinformatics.
Because then came the scholarships — at first, through the central government allotted CSIR. And then she could go to Sweden. Bindu believes she has a thing for plants, though she had not wanted it. But a little while ago she grasped the concept of cross pollination and became one of the few to do that. There came a piece about her in the Sweden publication Land Lantbruk. She tried to switch to animals but kept falling back into the study of plants. So one day, she hopes to become a farmer, equipped with her scientific knowledge. She also hopes to do something for children like her back home who are academically brilliant but don’t have the means to study. Her story is to be told, to say that it is possible.
