twitter

Friday 1 March 2013

Maternal investment

So it is my mother's birthday new week and I hope she thinks she got some return from her investment. I published most of my father's writings. Even if the books do not stay in print one of his stories is in my doctorate thesis and in a published paper and those don't go out of print or disappear. I thought my books would be safe in the Vancouver Public Library (until earmarked for sale) but one has disappeared and I hope it has been reordered. I also published a story by my father in an 2012 Indian publication called "Celebrating India", so at least more people know that the name Lans existed before it became an acronym. My published papers are still in the most downloaded category and my mother ended up paying for those. I could not publish them within the grant period and got no funding afterwards. I guess the funders could not predict that the papers would be popular, or thought that they would be used but not by high ranking people. Speaking of grants this week I was given an opportunity to revise, get reciprocal peer review and resubmit a grant. As commonly happens, the topic for this new grant year includes aspects of the grant that I submitted the year before. So I logged in to participate and I noticed that my grant had no public support the previous year and it was one of those new "popularity" based grants. So I decided not to participate. So there, I am not popular or paid; who knows if my kids would have been popular and successful, or would have survived long enough to make their grandparents proud?