Bias

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Bias, I thought, was prejudice, a negative feeling against somebody or something...till I reached my 4th year BSc (Hons) in Physics at our university in Waltair.

Then we were taught Electronics from the Bible of Frederick Emmons Terman, the father of the Silicon Valley. In an early chapter of that tome was a discussion of diodes, triodes, tetrodes, pentodes, hexodes and possibly heptodes...there were nine-pin mini-tubes as well.

In those glowing vacuum tubes some of the electrodes were biased negatively and some others positively. 

Ha!

And then I joined as an Associate Lecturer at IIT Kharagpur.

And I was asked to each Electronics for our third year physics students, since my MSc Degree Certificate showed  'Electronics' as my Special Paper (it was a joke...there was no other elective offered...Hobson would have loved it).

And I eagerly picked up my old copy of Terman. And found it unteachable. And I visited the Electronics Section of our Central Library, the biggest technical library in Eastern India (possibly the whole of India).

And then discovered the lovely book: "Electron Tube Circuits" by Samuel Seely.  But it was using all sorts of Circuit Theorems without proving them...Thevenin, Norton, Millman, Superposition, Compensation, Power Transfer...

And I traveled to the Electrical Engineering Section. And discovered the book "General Network Analysis" by LePage and Seely which had proofs of all those theorems and much much more...voltage sources, current sources, loop analysis, nodal analysis, duality...the works.

Problem solved. 

That Course went well. There was this student RS Bhagat who shifted to Special B Tech in Electronics next year. He met me later and thanked me heartily for that third year course.

I was always lucky that way. Whenever I had to teach a new subject, I found the precise book I needed. 

In 2000, just before I quit KGP, I was asked to design and teach a new khichri course common to all freshmen. And then I had to write my own book with Prof RS Saraswat. I am told it survives and thrives there.

[Here is a modest certificate:

"I would very much like to have your suggestion on this syllabus. I am requesting you for this because I really like the 1st year Physics syllabus for IIT-KGP engineers made by you. It is just superb. It has a flow-it goes  from oscillation to waves to light to QM. What one learns from one topic is used to understand the next topic.]

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In 1967, I was living in the Faculty Hostel there. There were amongst us youngsters from all over the country and it was a cosmopolitan haven. 

And then arrived there this rather grumpy newly appointed assistant professor. We learned he was from Allahabad (now reverted to Prayagraj). And he was fresh from a 6-year stint at Cornell where he earned his PhD in Theoretical Physics, a tony subject then (and a Lost Cause now). So I thought he was broadminded. But he turned out to be the worst bigot I have ever seen (next only to the one I see in my shaving mirror).

Bigot: Def: 

"The more light you pour into the pupil of his eye the more it contracts"....Oliver Wendell Holmes

Those were the days of violent Anti-Hindi Agitation...Three Language Formula and all that. 

One night I happened to unwittingly land up in an argument with him. He had a bias against South-Indian languages. He insisted all Indians must learn our National Language Hindi; but refused to learn even one language other than Hindi, and English (which he was forced to learn at Cornell...somewhat). 

Accompanied by the strong and silent Dr PCS Krishnayya (whose book "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table", written by the above Holmes, I stole from our Faculty Club Library), we two went all over the campus walking and arguing, standing and shouting, for all of three hours after our dinner: like Alice's "Lion and the Unicorn":

The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town.
Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown:
Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.

That was the first and last argument in my life...I learned my lesson....

Then on I developed a negative bias towards  Hindi...

...till I made friends with Shyam Vir SinghTyagi (fom Bulandshahr) and Ram Sharma Saraswat (from Gabhana)...charming people who insisted on speaking with me in Hindi but never tried to learn my Telugu. I learned spoken Hindi from them without any compulsion...friendship conquers all other biases.

I also learned reading Bengali from another charming friend Hrishikesh Das (from Contai)

The more languages you learn the more the fun.

(It is nice to hear that the biggest heartbreak of our present PM is that he didn't learn any Tamil...with good reason;...why not Telugu? :)

It is said that no politician who can't speak fluent Hindi can survive for all of 5 years as a Prime Minister of India.

That seems to eliminate most of the politicos from the South.

The lone exception was our own PV Narasimha Rao. But he was exceptional. He could speak fluently in half a dozen languages (but chose not to speak in any...often :)

Didi still has a chance...she is learning Hindi from one Kishor I am told...the letter 'e' is missing at the end of his name...may be numerology at work...

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Mothers often have a negative bias against their step-sons,

The most notorious is Suruchi who pulled Dhruvji down from his father Uttanapada's lap. That kid went on doing unshakeable tapas...and so the pole star Polaris is named for him (or is it the other way round?).

Incidentally that star is not all that fixed in the heavens. There is what is called the 'Precession of the Equinoxes' due to the equatorial bulge of the earth. And in a few years (say, 3200) Polaris will be displaced by Gamma Cephi as our pole star. 

But then that star will be called Dhruva Nakshatra then...physicists can't beat us :)

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Also in well-regulated families, husbands have a higher positive bias for their wives than towards their mothers. 

And their mothers, for their daughters and obedient sons.

Just look at the Buckingham Palace Histrionics!

The Real Queen I am told is Oprah Winfrey...despite everything.

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