The Shy & the Shameless

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IM's batch was special. For various reasons.

It had only a dozen students. The right mix of boys, girls, JEE qualified, Campus Quota, Lateral Entrants, Cancers and Capricorns.

It was our mutual (mis)fortune that I had to take the largest number of courses for that batch: QM1, QM3, EMT, in addition to two semesters of labs for which I happened to be the Lab-in-Charge. For these and other reasons the batch grew to be most intimate not only with me but my wife and Class X son. The batch demanded and squeezed two whopping At-Home Parties from my wife.

IM was 'by far the Topper'. And I used to call him the most 'shameless' (academically speaking and later otherwise too). He got his chance to hit back. There was a sort of bouquet of online encomiums to me on my 60th Birthday from ex-students and well-wishers.

He wrote something like: "gps used to call me 'shameless'. I would love to repay him in the same coin and call him 'equally shameless'"

That was about the best compliment I got from a student who knew me in and out.

Once I bragged to him that at the end of 3 classes of such a small batch I knew 'who is who' physics-wise.

To which he replied that his entire batch knew 'who is who' physics-wise at the end of a teacher's first 10 minutes of his lecture! He said something about 'body-language'.

I don't know if he was bragging. My own student life was a rigid talk-listen conservative stuff 50 years ago. We couldn't guess even after one year. Opaque teacher-student relations prevailing then. We could never dream of demanding and getting an At-Home Party from any of our teachers even after 5 long years.

About 35 years back I had to take a First Year Tutorial Class right after a somnolent lunch. The batch had only a few JEE entrants and the rest were Campus kids (girls).

I used to write down a problem (I think Optics) on the grayboard and sit down quietly in my chair and ask them to do it. Soon after taking it down this boy in the second bench used to go to sleep. That never bothered me since he didn't snore and disturb the sleep of others.

There would soon be giggles from the girls watching him bend his head down and wheeze. The giggles used to wake him up and he would look at me and we both smiled. In two minutes he would show me the answer, while the giggling girls would still be biting their pens on how to go about it. I would put him on the board and while he wrote out the Solution, the rest would be furiously noting it down before I could say: "Good" and erase it.

I would then write out the next problem and he would go to sleep..and the girls would giggle...and the routine was kept up for the entire hour in which he would crack about half a dozen problems. A record of sorts.

Three years later, I taught the batch two semesters of Theory and it wasn't very different. But he was one of the very few students with whom I exchanged practically no words in the Class or outside it. Maybe his sleepy habits made him shy. Once in a while he would quit for a few minutes for a wash and a smoke and get back if the lecture happened to particularly interest him.

It needs no mention that he was again the 'by far the Topper' of his batch.

After ten years or so he ended up in a prestigious Institution and was doing rather well, I was told. We never exchanged mails or visits. He simply vanished from KGP.

After another fifteen years or so, another 'break-neck Topper' spent 'some time' at that Institution on his own admission. This kid was equally shy but somehow kept in touch with me...maybe found in me a virtual soul-mate.

I asked him about the Shy Sleeper of my Tutorial Class and how shy he is now two decades later.

He replied: "Sir, anyone here would be shocked to hear that he is shy. Anything but that".

I then realized that kids grow and acquire mustaches and sideburns with age. And it is the fallacy of Teachers to think that shy students end up shy professionals.

Maybe there is some good sense in the tradition that some Institutes have of never taking their own students as their Faculty. That would stunt their growth and they have to "dye their whiskers green and always use so large a fan that they can't be seen"

I think IIT Kanpur follows this rule.

Also the brash Feynman was shunted to Princeton after his stint as student in MIT for precisely this reason.

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