Page 327 - AWSAR 2.0

“Hard rocks,” I said with a sincere gesture and making it as short as possible.
“Hard rock...isn’t that a form of music?” smirked my visitor.
“Well it might seem so, if you are a die heart fan of Metallica. But I work on vein emplacement mechanism in hard rocks. And this vein is not the one carrying deoxygenated blood beneath the skin, but the ones which are emplaced due to fluid pressure fluctuation in rocks.” I stated pretending to be the flag bearer for spreading geological awareness.
“Well veins...., hard rocks...., sounds quiet good. But why would anyone study such things, what is the utility of doing so?”
Now this is something that would gear up any researcher, especially if the utility of her research work is at stake. I had to defend it before few more questions were raised regarding its applicability. However, before giving them a deep insight into my research work I thought about relating
it to something that had kept
them glued for a while.
“You see some of the most
precious elements and even
gemstones including topaz,
emerald and many others are
hosted by veins (A: please
explain ‘hosted by vein’?). I
could name plenty of them
like tin, lithium, tungsten, and
titanium, which are profusely
consumed by industries of all
sectors. In fact, the entire mica
industry of India banks upon
the pegmatite veins as the
primary source of sheet mica.
Apart from that, the gold bearing lodes of quartz have been economically significant for the mining industries.”
“So you see, one that has economic viability requires a bit of attention to be scrutinized carefully, otherwise we would be
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sitting right on top of the hidden treasure for our entire lives, without even knowing about its existence and potential utility.”
On that note I ended the brief talk on my research objective, justifying it in the most simplistic manner.
Though this incident was a casual one but later while narrating it to some of my lab mates, the question resurfaced on my mind and I kept on thinking about how can our nation benefits from our research works?
Belonging to a country with high poverty rate, and utilizing its monetary resources for scientific research would be regressive if the research work is economically futile. In other words, people with scientific mind should substantially contribute towards accelerating the economic growth of our nation.
But is economic growth the only thing that science propels? Scientific inventions have never been restricted to only responding to
economic liabilities but also to fuel our minds to understand the fundamentals behind our origin and existence. And this bigger picture can be reassembled from the smaller fragments of the puzzle that have been preserved in our age-old rocks. Understanding how earth evolved through geological time and how our continents drifted and reassembled to attain the present configuration requires close observation of the small scale structures preserved within the rocks that form it. Geologists will continue
to ensemble the remnants and reframe the past, until and unless we are blessed with a time machine.
As it is said if you don’t know the past, you don’t understand the present and cannot foresee the future. The Indian subcontinent
For the past few years, apart from verbally certifying gemstones I had been given tasks to explain out the differences between zoology and geology in various social gatherings, but still some of my relatives claimed that geography and geology were the same subjects taught with different course names.