Rain Drops and Pearls

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It was a late rainy evening of lyrical Bengal Monsoon in 1985. To keep ourselves out of mischief, my 4-year old son and I were tossing a shuttle cock in our spacious hall of the Faculty Quarters at IIT Kharagpur.

There was a honk and I found two gentlemen knocking at our door. Dripping wet, they alighted from the only Maruti car in the campus driven by my colleague, the Professor-in-Charge of Training and Placement, who holds as it were the future of the final year students in the hollow of his palm.

The other was a short fair well-built eminence with prematurely thinning hair, 30-ish. The features looked vaguely familiar but not the figure. I welcomed them in; and the T & P Professor introduced the gentleman as Dr. Moorty, the Personnel Manager of TVS, Madras. And I was told that Dr. Moorty generally sends an officer two rungs below him for campus recruitment, but he himself flew down this time to KGP just so he could meet me.

I was a little nonplussed and embarrassed not being able to place him firmly. But we teachers learn how to hide our ignorance and keep the small talk going. We talked of this and that, cabbages and kings, how TVS is doing, how the IITians were faring; and the weather, over cups of hot chai and biscuits for a pleasant half hour.

Before taking leave, Dr. Moorty touched my feet and pushed a sealed envelope into my pocket.

Later, upon opening the envelope, I found 5 crisp 100 Rupee notes and a small ThanQ slip explaining things.

And then it all came back to me as if in a flashback:

More than a decade earlier when I was a carefree bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel, I got a post card in an unknown hand from an unknown Moorty, who said he got my address from a friend of my friend. It turned out that Moorty didn’t do all that well in his B.A. (English) and so had to grab a seat in M. A. (Psychology) which was the only one available for his score at our alma mater at Waltair. And he didn’t do all that well in M. A. either and was footloose at the moment. He asked me if I could please find some opening for him at IIT KGP.

I was amused at Moorty’s temerity: IIT is an Institute of so-called National Importance in Science & Technology; not in Psychology!

I was inclined to trash the post card when it occurred to me that there IS a small service Department of Humanities, so why not make a trip. It turned out that just that year a young Faculty member in Industrial Psychology was recruited at IIT. I met the gentleman and showed him the post card half expecting a rebuke.

But the young man bade me sit down and asked me to immediately wire Moorty to come down with his original certificates. I came to know that this newcomer was bent on starting a one-year Diploma Course in Industrial Psychology that year itself. The minimum number of students required to run a course was an inflexible 4, but since this was a new course, the entry criteria could be relaxed. He could find 3 candidates in the short time available (they were young campus ladies), and was waiting eagerly for a fourth.

Rest is fairytale: the lean young boyish Moorty joined the brand new Diploma Course which paid a handsome stipend of Rs. 400 p.m., did well in the course work under his guide’s close supervision, did his Project studiously at the fledgling IIM Calcutta, got into IIM’s Fellowship Program, completed his Ph. D. in record time, was absorbed as Manager (H. R.) in the Paper Mill at Rajamundry, changed jobs quickly over a couple of years, landed the plum job of Personnel Manager in TVS at a tender age, got happily married, had an infant son, and all was hunky-dory except that something was gnawing his conscience:

Apparently, while at IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student, his fellowship fell a little short of the city expenses, and he had come down once to KGP (the local train fare being Rs. 3) to borrow from me Rs. 50….a thing I vaguely forgot.

That explained his ‘recruiting visit’ to KGP…. to redeem his long-standing debt with a whopping Interest!

There is a charming folklore in A. P. which goes like this: In the dead of the dark monsoon midnight when the Swati Constellation is at zenith in the sky, the thirsty oyster surfaces with its mouth wide open, waiting for a tiny rain drop to fall into it. Its thirst quenched, it clams up and dives down and goes hibernating. After 3 months, lo and behold, the rain drop turns into a glowing pearl of such purity and brilliance that no hi-tech-pearl-culture-technology can ever hope to match.

Moral: The chosen rain drop that finds the oyster’s waiting open mouth turns into a pearl; while its million unlucky friends miss it, slip into the water, merge into the sea, and get lost!