My Gurus – a Tribute on Teachers’ Day
Posted in: Featured, Guest Articles on September 19, 2009 | Comments (0)
The Scholars’ Avenue wishes to thank the faculty member who contributed this very excellent article. In deference to his wishes, the article is anonymous.
I am a through and through mediocre person except for occasional bouts of intelligence exhibited typically during leap years. Matters could have been far worse but for the fact that God, in the from of guru, interfered with my life, and guided me as if I was a confused sheep. I carry lasting impressions of some of these great human beings who helped me steer my life and instilled vague love for science and engineering and teaching using which I am able to survive in this greatly bewildering and intimidating world and also make ends meet. At this juncture of pushing very late forties, an inner call tells me, I must make public my reverence and gratitude for these people.
I have to start with Sriharirao garu, my tuition saar in primary school. He would come during the afternoons to our home where a handful of my friends used to gather to sit on the floor on reed mats and to be taught math by him. There would be much trepidation and the atmosphere used to be thick with fear of unknown. Sriharirao master was an old-timer and belonged to an era when children did not have any rights and an occasional whack with cane was considered to be perfectly fine. Not that he whacked the hell out of us or anything, however, it is difficult to conjure up an image of Sriharirao master sitting on the chair with all of us gathered around him on floor, without the cane in his hand. I myself have vivid memories of being on the receiving end of the cane on a few occasions. He was too fond of math tables and we had to know tables up to 20×20 downside up. It will be wrong on my part to give credence to whacks, but the fact remains that I developed liking for numbers and for the way they nicely fall into place when you treat them respectfully, largely due to Sriharirao sir with cane. Those were days far removed from Xbox and our hobbies would consist of collecting empty cigarette packets and caps of cool drink bottles. We did not have electricity in the village and we used to play like hell outdoors and do very nasty things like catching and tying strings to tails of dragonflies. I feel quite sorry for the ill things we did to various kinds of insects in those days.
During my secondary school days we shifted to a town that is district headquarters. There is no place in the world like Konda Parvathi Devi Theosophical High School with the statue of Anne Besant in the sprawling grounds, around which we would gather for morning prayers. We used to slog for days together in decorating the class rooms for Independence Day. We would lose prize for the best looking class room, but the following year would work harder. Seshavataram master used to teach physics and chemistry, more than that he showed physics and chemistry. We loved the sight of the flare of lighted match stick in a glass tube of freshly made oxygen; we wrinkled our noses and made faces when the glass tube of hydrogen chloride was passed around. He split light into seven colours in front of us by passing it through glass prism, with spring balances he could prove what Archimedes was telling all the while, he was simply a hero, a magician and darling of the class. You had no choice but to be all eyes and ears for him, and to get caught in his love for science that is seen. He knew far too much than what the class books wanted him to teach. The spirit of physics and chemistry was let loose and he was the ring master. Among other things, the science lab used to have several kinds of embryos stored in bottles of formaldehyde, and a standing human skeleton in glass box. We used to steal occasional glances but were never bold enough to confront the thing in the glass box eye-socket to eye-socket. If you were late to class, you would end up sitting next to the skeleton. It was my great fortune that I studied in KPDT School, but for this, I would have been selling bus tickets for State Road Transport Corporation.
Prof A B Mukherjee was a Bengali in every sense of the word. He would exude elegance and he was stately, tall, and upright and erect in his walk. His broad forehead, thick rimmed glasses, curly hair, attire of tucked-in half sleeves shirt, and his typical old medical representative type leather bag, his moving around on bicycle, and above all his command on geology would invite immediate respect. He did not believe in smiles and small talk. When he spoke, it was like pearls rolled in front of you. Each and every word used to be golden, and not a single word was out of place or out of context. And the accent and pronunciation! You must hear to believe! It was like Berlin Philharmonic. He was in complete control; the lecture was complete perfection and a completely serious matter. You had to make sure your breath did not make noise, and no applause anytime as you wished! We were so much inspired that in a spontaneous gesture once all of us in the batch chipped in money and presented to him the most expensive fountain pen available in Thacker’s.
‘You are incorrigible’ was what once Prof Misra told a bunch of us doing project with him. Immediately then I did not know the meaning of the word. He was not too happy with the results of the experiments we had shown. He was tough, demanding, and aggressive. He was extremely passionate, and his eyes would open wide with excitement when he was explaining things in class. When he looked at you his eyes would see through you. You had nowhere to hide. You would find assortment of things in his room: strain gages, thermocouple wires, and various contraptions of glass and metal. He was a hands-on teacher and thoroughly believed in experiments. He was an engineering teacher with strong scientific temperament. When you look at text books in our field in India, in terms of the mathematical treatment, his book on ventilation has no parallel, even today. In his own favourite phrase – I was inspired ‘so much so’ that I embraced his line of research during further studies. He was the undisputed master in the class, he could be intimidating, but you would know you have learnt something. In later years I had the fortune to work with him as colleague. It used to be amazing to see during consulting visits, how different managing directors and general managers and other top brass would feed like kittens from out of his hand. He was quite magnetic, he was the messiah, and he was the professor saab.
Prof McCarter was a class apart. He was a religious Mormon, with mind open broad and wide, very loving and caring with students without being sentimental, and very bald and very tall. He was the Department Chairman (and still is!), but in all probability you would find dirt on his hands and the shirt sleeves rolled-up, because he was working with rocks in the lab. He believed in teaching what he practiced. He was a planning engineer with Kennecott Copper’s Bingham Canyon, the world’s biggest mine, before deciding to become an academician. In 1983, in the days of first generation PCs, he would pick up signals of landslides during snow melt from Wasatch Mountains and monitor their movement online from computers in his lab. Once during an experiment to simulate velocity of detonation, I had to capture an image of a waveform, from an oscilloscope, with a Polaroid camera. I was a student among many in the class, and went to him, after unsuccessful attempts with an entire pack of 10 films. He quietly gave me another pack, and said ‘keep trying’. There were occasions when he would call students to his home, but served punch without alcohol. His two lovely kids and his dog (Megan, Trey and Muffin – respectively – perhaps) used to be equally excited and happy to receive us. He would correct the term papers, take home exams, etc with unimaginable level of sincerity, and in his inimitable handwriting (uppercase letters with first letter larger) he would make numerous observations in the margins.
During the previous three years I had spent most Saturdays in the main building ground floor. As I would pass by F127 at about 9.30 I would notice a packed class lectured by a simply clad, uniquely unassuming teacher, in crystal clear and loud voice with great amount of energy and confidence packed in it. Around 12.30 the situation would be status quo. The same packed class, the same loud, clear and highly energetic voice. He apparently did not take attendance considering in some subjects students were in excess of 200, but on the other hand, students did not come to his classes for attendance. You would find him taking classes at odd times, because he had to accommodate as many students as possible, there were no upper bounds for him, he never said no to any student who wanted to sit in his class. He would come to class five minutes ahead, switch on lights and fans, cleans the board thoroughly and starts writing on the board making clear and firm impressions with chalk. If a large section of students are alive in the IT world today and if the system itself is alive, one need not look too far for reasons. I am most certainly awed. Keeping up with times, if the present lot of students wish to offer their guru ‘rock salute’ any time, they can count on me to join.
—– Teachers’ day 2006, The writer teaches (or whatever) at IIT Kharagpur.
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