Part I
It bordered on disbelief. "Sir, we the outgoing batch of students, would like to meet you and hand over a memento." It was yesterday morning and I was attending a seminar. Thanked those students and requested them to come to my office during the break. We had pics together, went to an eatery and chatted at length from what they may expect in an industry job to how they can offer their first-hand service to a village / slum school around their work place or in their native place. They should not be satisfied just by donating money to some organization - first hand knowledge, regular interaction, association will help grow oneness and someday while taking food for themselves, in their thought will come, "Did the boy / girl of that village / slum who is a kind of loner have his / her food today?" It is this concern without which nation building can have all necessary but not sufficient conditions.
Then came the phone call. An alumnus who spent few years in industry got selected for the best business school of the country. He thanked for whatever little I could contribute. It was entirely his effort. The idea also came from him. I still vividly remember the evening when his team met me for the first time. I just tried to see that their idea gets conceptualized and implemented as I had some experience of field level work. We chatted for sometime and he wished to know my availability to decide when he would come down to KGP. Thank you. May you attain more responsible positions and serve to the best of your capacity.
This evening got an email from an UG student who just completed 2nd year. I was with them for a semester in their journey through one particular course. His mail from an Uttarakhand town said, "The course actually gave me a taste of real engineering stuff especially doing some (of) the matlab programs for voice recognition and processing. Thanks a lot for creating a good learning ambiance in the classroom."
These are my mementos received in last 36 hours. Each of these count. Allow me to borrow a stanza from Tennyson poem, 'Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead' (Link) - Rose a nurse of ninety years,/Set his child upon her knee—/Like summer tempest came her tears—/‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’
Part II
There is a reason for disbelief that I mentioned in the opening statement of this post. The steep target of 'Vision 2020', which the institute has set for itself, needs all of us, the teachers, students, alumni and other stake holders to put up a massive quality improvement effort. This starts with quality consciousness, tying up loose ends, if any within the system at every tier. There are and will be issues. Let us see what we can do within our sphere of influence. I remember the TQM (Total Quality Management) concept of Tata Steel, the organization I served for more than four years. A single drop of oil spillage is to get counted and efforts are put on to stop the same. Besides, we are the best in the country and we have to think and act like the best in every step as we are role model before many. The vibration, the very atmosphere here should induce people, students and teachers alike, to go after the greatest of ideas (does not matter if all of them are not successful) and none to remain satisfied till the best is seen.
It is our failure if we cannot motivate the students enough collectively and their world gets divided into 'Load' and 'Peace'. On personal front, I need to work harder and be friendlier to explain students why quality is important for them, us and all and it is just not an obsession but an integral part of healthy way of living. Every step, small or big counts - even if it is switching off the fan before leaving the class room each day, everyday, not taking a right turn at a road island etc. In Tata Steel I heard: Do the right things right, the first time and every time. The external discipline is equally important to get internal discipline right else there always is a chance to get drifted which is not unheard of.
Enlightenment is not anything that will descend from the sky. We have to act like a one from today and now. This is not to say that we lack quality in IITs. We are unmatched at national level and IITs are pride of the nation. Our students are model before others in discipline, academic prowess and we enjoy the best teacher-student relationship here. But we cannot sit back and relax on the laurels of the past. The future will become more competitive. Also the aim is to get counted among top x institutions of the world. Let us, the teachers, the students, the alumni and all stake holders work together and we can make it happen.
Part III
One of my PhD student gave me this book to read - Affective Computing by Rosalind W. Picard of MIT Media Lab. (I can proudly proclaim that I learn more from my students than they learn from me - that is the dividend one can enjoy for being a part of a premier institution.) The books aims to develop a framework in giving emotional abilities to computer. One arm of our research group works on identifying emotion from speech which drew our interest into the title. The author writes about popular notion on emotion - "Acting 'emotionally' implies acting irrationally, with poor judgement. Emotional response tend to be inappropriate, and even embarrassing. At first blush, emotion seems like the last thing we would want in an intelligent machine."
In the preface she writes, " ...the new scientific evidence is that too little emotion can impair decision making. This conclusion is not obvious from introspection. It comes from studies of unusual patients who essentially have too little emotion. These patients, in rather eerie ways, are similar to today's computers - particularly in how they malfunction."
Part IV
We were in a party mood this afternoon after submission of grades of all subjects within deadline. It was a battle against time as I was averaging fifteen answer-script checking each day. In my letter to students where I arranged display of answer-script evaluation, I wrote "...an answer-script tells lots of things - the strength and weakness of a student as seen by a teacher. It won't be possible tomorrow to address each of you individually (needs 15-30 min. for each of the 113 students). If you are interested, you may visit day after tomorrow or later by taking an appointment (you may try without appointment too but I may be in some other meeting)." I was particularly happy that I could explain the students how the evaluation was done and also showed histogram of marks, grades etc. It appeared that the students appreciated the whole of it.
Therefore, was in a mood to disturb others!!! Who could be the best person but the faculty who never visits tea-shop, not seen in any adda and is always flocked with students! No wonder, he draws the maximum cheer from the students in farewell functions. He is always very kind to give his time for such adda when I bang his room and I must say that I have no hidden agenda to make him more involved with the Dept./Institute. There were three final year students and the adda became brainstorming on how we can improve, what we can do as an individual, what we can do collectively, what are our pain points, how can we structure ourselves to address those pain points and explain the students in an unambiguous manner the milestones to be reached at various timelines so that they have clarity from the very beginning.
We also discussed that the competitive environment is to bring the best out of us and not anything less noble to look for a win at any cost. We have to rise above personal/group/Dept./... interest and embrace superior human values. Others may or may not follow. There will be pain down the road, may be pain of a loner who does not find anybody by his side. But has anything been born without pain? What about us, ourselves, when we came out of mother's womb? In a facebook message, an ex-student, now a proud mother writes, "A human body can bear up to 45 del(unit) of pain. But at the time of giving birth, a woman feels up to 57 del of pain. This is similar to twenty bones getting fractured at a time." Today is Tagore's 151st birth anniversary. He wrote, "jakhan tumi bandchhile tar se je bhishan byatha" i.e. when you were tuning the string (of a musical instrument which was out of tune e.g. guitar, sitar) there was so much of pain! If we agree that there is a need to tune our instrument, we cannot avoid the pain in the process. But what should excite us is the symphony that will fill the air once the instruments are tuned.
Part V
To wind up the post, let me get back to the table in the eatery where we (me and outgoing batch of students - about ten of them) were having a sip at cold drink and discussing what had been their experience here and what they see for themselves in the future. I asked if they were challenged enough. They were in all praise of IIT system which takes their UG experience far and forward. The breadth, the depth, the assignments, the lab.s. Then there was a question if they explored something out of their own interest (not prompted by teacher). IIT provides huge infrastructure and each of us nurtures lot of questions from childhood - could be related to cosmos, say singularity associated with blackhole or graphology, making prediction from hand writing etc. Also, I asked if they discussed each others' projects, if there was cross-fertilization of ideas, if there is a scope to combine the findings of two projects (we teachers are probably conditioned to think in a certain away, the out-of-box solutions can be expected from fresh minds). I also requested to take their jobs seriously. My own industry experience says that there are so much of complementary knowledge to acquire there to complete another quadrant of personality development.
I cannot blame if some of them thought if they made the right decision to give a memento to me and get drawn into a discussion like this :-) After all, their would be job profiles are miles apart from all these. But the inquisitiveness, exploring solutions as a trait will add to the profile of any job. These days one may need to change jobs. Also the domain knowledge always comes handy in trying times. In IT jobs too, there is a gradual but certain shift from coding to more of domain knowledge based solutions. Finally, Sri Ma Sarada (Link) said, "Jake rakho, se rakhe." i.e. If you take care of some thing today, that will take care of you some other day.
Sometimes I wonder if there is too-muchness in all of these, if there is a potential of getting 'misunderstood' (as told by my colleague). The feeling of too-muchness is but relative. What is too much in some place may be very normal in another place. The question is, what sort of baseline we are targeting to?
It bordered on disbelief. "Sir, we the outgoing batch of students, would like to meet you and hand over a memento." It was yesterday morning and I was attending a seminar. Thanked those students and requested them to come to my office during the break. We had pics together, went to an eatery and chatted at length from what they may expect in an industry job to how they can offer their first-hand service to a village / slum school around their work place or in their native place. They should not be satisfied just by donating money to some organization - first hand knowledge, regular interaction, association will help grow oneness and someday while taking food for themselves, in their thought will come, "Did the boy / girl of that village / slum who is a kind of loner have his / her food today?" It is this concern without which nation building can have all necessary but not sufficient conditions.Then came the phone call. An alumnus who spent few years in industry got selected for the best business school of the country. He thanked for whatever little I could contribute. It was entirely his effort. The idea also came from him. I still vividly remember the evening when his team met me for the first time. I just tried to see that their idea gets conceptualized and implemented as I had some experience of field level work. We chatted for sometime and he wished to know my availability to decide when he would come down to KGP. Thank you. May you attain more responsible positions and serve to the best of your capacity.
This evening got an email from an UG student who just completed 2nd year. I was with them for a semester in their journey through one particular course. His mail from an Uttarakhand town said, "The course actually gave me a taste of real engineering stuff especially doing some (of) the matlab programs for voice recognition and processing. Thanks a lot for creating a good learning ambiance in the classroom."
These are my mementos received in last 36 hours. Each of these count. Allow me to borrow a stanza from Tennyson poem, 'Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead' (Link) - Rose a nurse of ninety years,/Set his child upon her knee—/Like summer tempest came her tears—/‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’
Part II
It is our failure if we cannot motivate the students enough collectively and their world gets divided into 'Load' and 'Peace'. On personal front, I need to work harder and be friendlier to explain students why quality is important for them, us and all and it is just not an obsession but an integral part of healthy way of living. Every step, small or big counts - even if it is switching off the fan before leaving the class room each day, everyday, not taking a right turn at a road island etc. In Tata Steel I heard: Do the right things right, the first time and every time. The external discipline is equally important to get internal discipline right else there always is a chance to get drifted which is not unheard of.
Enlightenment is not anything that will descend from the sky. We have to act like a one from today and now. This is not to say that we lack quality in IITs. We are unmatched at national level and IITs are pride of the nation. Our students are model before others in discipline, academic prowess and we enjoy the best teacher-student relationship here. But we cannot sit back and relax on the laurels of the past. The future will become more competitive. Also the aim is to get counted among top x institutions of the world. Let us, the teachers, the students, the alumni and all stake holders work together and we can make it happen.
Part III
One of my PhD student gave me this book to read - Affective Computing by Rosalind W. Picard of MIT Media Lab. (I can proudly proclaim that I learn more from my students than they learn from me - that is the dividend one can enjoy for being a part of a premier institution.) The books aims to develop a framework in giving emotional abilities to computer. One arm of our research group works on identifying emotion from speech which drew our interest into the title. The author writes about popular notion on emotion - "Acting 'emotionally' implies acting irrationally, with poor judgement. Emotional response tend to be inappropriate, and even embarrassing. At first blush, emotion seems like the last thing we would want in an intelligent machine."
In the preface she writes, " ...the new scientific evidence is that too little emotion can impair decision making. This conclusion is not obvious from introspection. It comes from studies of unusual patients who essentially have too little emotion. These patients, in rather eerie ways, are similar to today's computers - particularly in how they malfunction."
Part IV
We were in a party mood this afternoon after submission of grades of all subjects within deadline. It was a battle against time as I was averaging fifteen answer-script checking each day. In my letter to students where I arranged display of answer-script evaluation, I wrote "...an answer-script tells lots of things - the strength and weakness of a student as seen by a teacher. It won't be possible tomorrow to address each of you individually (needs 15-30 min. for each of the 113 students). If you are interested, you may visit day after tomorrow or later by taking an appointment (you may try without appointment too but I may be in some other meeting)." I was particularly happy that I could explain the students how the evaluation was done and also showed histogram of marks, grades etc. It appeared that the students appreciated the whole of it.
Therefore, was in a mood to disturb others!!! Who could be the best person but the faculty who never visits tea-shop, not seen in any adda and is always flocked with students! No wonder, he draws the maximum cheer from the students in farewell functions. He is always very kind to give his time for such adda when I bang his room and I must say that I have no hidden agenda to make him more involved with the Dept./Institute. There were three final year students and the adda became brainstorming on how we can improve, what we can do as an individual, what we can do collectively, what are our pain points, how can we structure ourselves to address those pain points and explain the students in an unambiguous manner the milestones to be reached at various timelines so that they have clarity from the very beginning.
Part V
To wind up the post, let me get back to the table in the eatery where we (me and outgoing batch of students - about ten of them) were having a sip at cold drink and discussing what had been their experience here and what they see for themselves in the future. I asked if they were challenged enough. They were in all praise of IIT system which takes their UG experience far and forward. The breadth, the depth, the assignments, the lab.s. Then there was a question if they explored something out of their own interest (not prompted by teacher). IIT provides huge infrastructure and each of us nurtures lot of questions from childhood - could be related to cosmos, say singularity associated with blackhole or graphology, making prediction from hand writing etc. Also, I asked if they discussed each others' projects, if there was cross-fertilization of ideas, if there is a scope to combine the findings of two projects (we teachers are probably conditioned to think in a certain away, the out-of-box solutions can be expected from fresh minds). I also requested to take their jobs seriously. My own industry experience says that there are so much of complementary knowledge to acquire there to complete another quadrant of personality development.
Sometimes I wonder if there is too-muchness in all of these, if there is a potential of getting 'misunderstood' (as told by my colleague). The feeling of too-muchness is but relative. What is too much in some place may be very normal in another place. The question is, what sort of baseline we are targeting to?
