Wedding-Guest

==============================================================

Just back from a Wedding Feast.

Whenever I attend a wedding as a guest I recall the enchanting opening and closing lines of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the longest and most remarkable poem by Coleridge:

***********************************************************************************************

He holds him with his glittering eye-- The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner.

*************************************************************************

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

*************************************************************************************************

A few years before my retirement, a young and brand-new Faculty Member called Pratik by everyone entered my Fourth Year Lab.....'my' because I was promoted to a brand-new Position called Lifetime Guide & Adviser of the said lab for reasons that are as amusing as the naughtiest boy in the School being promoted as School Pupil Leader.

As soon as he sat down in the chair opposite and radiated his trademark smile I knew like the hoary hairy Ancient Mariner: "That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me".

I continued to harangue him for an entire semester.

This never happened before except with my students.

Apparently the feeling was mutual: He wrote in his Foreword to the latest Ishani booklet that the moment he saw me he knew that here is the ultimate nut.

But it is not strictly reciprocal...he did hear a lot about me from my students who migrated to Bhubaneswar...while I never heard of him before seeing him.

Altogether, the advantage was mine because, if you hear earlier about someone, you are already biased and your judgment will not be objective...you find the man either above or below your preconceived mental picture...like Reading & Seeing or Seeing & Looking, we have Hearing & Seeing.

So, by and by I seem to have told him that I am like that Ancient Mariner and asked him to read that poem.

He went home, picked up the text from his vast Home Library and started reading it. And when the storm scene came in the poem, there was a huge Nor'wester at KGP and the lights blew off...Bizarre Coincidences happen to Pratik alright.

Reverting to Hearing & Seeing, students are under a similar disadvantage because they get to hear from their seniors lots of stories about their nutty teachers and form a false opinion and have to painfully readjust when they See the chap in their classroom.

Indra wrote that he was told I was a grumpy chap (and perhaps a student of Feynman to boot) and so avoided me till he got to see me in their classroom. And had to reverse his opinion within 'five minutes', as he boasted. I asked how come and he said that IIT students are very smart and at once grade their teachers by their body language and comfort level in the Classroom.

I am sure he is flattering himself; for, I generally take an entire class hour to grade 'who is who' among the students in my very First Lecture Class if the strength of the class is 20 or less, and as many as two class hours if it is a Jumbo Class of 350 or more {;-}


===============================================================