It is not that I had not done anything novel or innovative in all these years. Thomas Edison had famously said that "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration," and unfortunately I must admit, I lacked the patience for that 99%. Converting an original idea into a paper is painful and is fraught with challenges that are both technical and political. In fact my first two papers would never have been published if Gautam Biswas, a former PhD batchmate at IIT Kharagpur and later Director of IIT Guwahati, had not taken the initiative. Yes, I did join the PhD program at IIT Kharagpur for a year after my B.Tech and before getting that coveted Assistantship at UT-Dallas and had worked with Prof PK Nag in the Steam Lab, but that is another story. Gautam-da had taken the two genuinely innovative breakthroughs that I had made in the area of optimisation of heat transfer based on thermodynamic irreversibility, also known as Second Law Analysis, and had patiently polished them into two papers that were published, with him as second author, in well regarded American journals. In retrospect, I still remember the shock and joy of Prof Nag when he saw the integration that I had performed to solve the problem that led to these papers.
After I finished my PhD from UT-Dallas, I could have published my thesis in a journal but was forced to send it to a CSI conference in Calcutta. This was because after returning from the US I was working in Jamshedpur and I could barely get leave to visit my family in Calcutta. As per company rules, one was entitled to earned leave only after a year in employment. Since I was still in my first year in TISCO, I had no accumulated leave so attending the conference gave me a legitimate way to spend five precious days in Calcutta..
Moreover there was no need to publish anything when I was working in the corporate sector so even though I have had a blog and was writing regular columns in Swarajya and other magazines, I never had anything published in any peer-reviewed journal. But when I joined academia, I realised that while my colleagues had many publications, I had none. Not that it mattered because my position in IIT or even Praxis was safe. But when we had to report our publications for AICTE approval and NBA accreditation it looked rather silly that the Director had no publications to report.
Not that I was sitting idle. I was working on my Parashar project to create a database of horoscopes. Based on this work, I had written a paper on a novel application of No-SQL databases to store and retrieve horoscopes based on Indic astrology -- a subject close to my heart -- but of course no "respectable" journal would publish anything on astrology. However brewing in the background was another opportunity. Thanks to our first mover advantage, Praxis Business School had built up a serious reputation in the exploding Data Science space and somehow, word got around that I was a genius in this area -- an impression I never tried too hard to correct, though it wasn’t quite true. Nevertheless, when the Association of Data Scientists was formed by Bhasker Gupta he roped me into the Editorial Board of their journal Lattice and that is when I realised that here was a proper journal that would never reject my paper.
But once the paper had been published, and duly reported in all metrics, I went back to a drawing board with a technique I had used in my corporate world -- reusability. What else could I extract from the considerable effort that I had put in for writing this paper? That is when I suddenly remembered a conversation that I had had when I was in the IT business, that we in India provide services but never create an IP product. I also remembered that in IBM there was a mechanism where even the smallest of innovations were patented and quite a few people would strut around with patents on their CV. So why not try to get a patent for the idea that I had published in the paper?
Since I was a hands-on, DIY kind of person and had successfully used about the print-on-demand mechanism to publish quite a few books on the Pothi.com and Amazon KDP platforms, I thought I would do the same with my patent. I had imagined that this would be simple as getting an ISBN number from the Raja Rammohun Roy National Agency for ISBN which was a part of the Ministry of HRD or the Government of India. I created a login on the Indian Patent Office website and obtained a digital signature to file the application.
This is when I realised the enormous procedural complexity of getting a patent. I had assumed that submitting my published paper would be enough, but that was not acceptable. I had to rewrite the paper in a tightly controlled format, following a whole set of rules, and draft what are known as 'claims'. I was clearly out of my depth and while I could eventually learn all this, the time and effort would not be worth it given that I would be filing just one patent. I had to get a lawyer.
I searched the web, located three or four law firms and after talking to all of them decided to go with Jitesh Gupta of Jotwani and Co, based out of New Delhi. Once the process started, Jitesh vanished and was replaced by the equally capable Babita Singh who after talking to me for hours on the phone and after multiple iterations created the application that was eventually filed. I had asked her how long this would take and she said it would take about two years. Two years! and that too if we filed the Request for Examination right away, which of course we did.
The patent office moves at its own sweet pace and after a year I got a call from Babita stating the Examiner had raised a number of objections to my patent application to which I would have to respond. Once again, she translated my replies into the legal format specified by the Patent Office and after that we all fell asleep again.
Another year passed and I was in Singapore, visiting my son and waiting for my grandson to be born when I got a message from Babita stating that the Patent office had once again raised some objection on the basis of both the existence of "prior art" and lack of "novelty". This objection had been raised by Mr Thiyagaraja Guptha Dhayanandan, Deputy Controller of Patents & Designs and he had scheduled a hearing where we would be allowed to present our case. Dinesh Jotwani, a partner of law firm representing me, was supposed to argue my case but Babita told me that it would be better if I were to participate as well. Since the hearing was happening on video conferencing, I readily agreed and it was good that I did. Mr Dhayanandan asked some pretty tough questions that Mr Dinesh Jotwani, even though he was a partner, could barely answer. I realised that the situation was slipping away from our control and we might get into an infinitely longer loop or rejection and reapplication ( and expenditure of more money). So very politely, I asked the Dy Controller if I could respond on behalf of my lawyer, and he readily agreed.
It is unfortunate that I have no recording of what I said but I believe that I had put in a fantastic pitch for my idea. As a PwC partner I was quite used to making powerful presentations to board level executives in the corporate sector and in almost every case, I had been able to make my point very convincingly. In contrast, The Deputy Controller seemed like a typical mid-level sarkari babu, used to talking down to supplicating lawyers. He had never faced the full blast of PwC partner who was arguing, not the company's or a client's case, but his own personal case. In the end, he quietly and politely accepted my arguments and -- even though he did not say so in the hearing -- it seemed that he was satisfied by my answers.
I was prepared for another long, possibly year long wait, but no, things were moving. A few days after the hearing, in the first week of June, my grandson Prafulla was born and soon thereafter I got a message and a mail from Babita with the good news that my patent had been granted.
But that wasn’t the last reuse of the ideas from the paper. I used them again -- but that’s another, perhaps the next, story.
