Horns of Dilemmas

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Saswat has responded gracefully and handsomely as I knew he would. To be honest, I was taking undue liberties but, as always, students and children forgive their teachers and parents.

And, Saswat has something stunning to say, which I didn't expect.

I am amazed to know that he is wearing two huge big hats: continuing to do cutting-edge research in String Theory with Brian Greene by night and equally challenging work in Quantitative Finance by day.

Mind-blowing! I couldn't guess. It was a revelation.

It is not everyone that can, or is, allowed this sort of luxury of a Jekyll-Hyde double life.

I cheer him lustily and wish him all the best! God Bless You!

But I must confess that although I cloaked my 'duck-wail' in funny sales talk, it was neither a slip of the tongue nor an off-the-cuff wisecrack. Such thoughts have always racked my brain. Added to that I have been re-reading RKN's 'The Indian in America'. Although it was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still not happy reading. And to one at my age, if not ripeness, 25 years is just yesterday. Particularly after reading Bill Bryson's book which deals with timelines on the geological scale.

I am fully aware that 'home-coming' is an intensely personal and toughest of all choices.

All of you know very well that teams of the highest-ups of prestigious Indian Academic Institutions are camping regularly in the US urging their alumni to please return home: "We need you more than you need us".

India is now in a position where it can afford to do this. The de-licensing of our Economy that started 20 years ago is just now bearing fruit. The consistent 7 or 8 % growth simply means that the Govt of India which was perennially poor is now flush with funds garnered by various types of inventive taxes. So, higher education, which was neglected for 6 long decades after Independence, is now taking off. I am sure that our Government is now much better placed to take reins of this vital activity rather than leave it in private hands, which, for all their enthu to step in, can never match the funds and resources of GOI. After all it is only the GOI that can print genuine currency notes backed up by software exports.

Look at at the number of IITs they have unleashed in the past few years. I always felt while at IIT KGP that we were very elitist and perhaps we could have democratized more by admitting a much larger number of students. When I started teaching at KGP in 1965, my B Tech Lecture Classes rarely went beyond 40, the Departmental Classes beyond 12, and the Tutorial Classes just about 12. When I retired these were 350, 60, and 40 respectively. Now even more.

I recall that when I was teaching a Class of 350 freshmen in my last and their first Semester there, the Class was full, though I didn't take attendance at all. And there was as much of a pin-drop silence as during my Lecture Classes in 1965 (as I explained earlier I cleverly converted every Lecture into a vast Tutorial Class).

A Japanese Professor who visited IIT KGP in the 1960s was stunned by the extraordinary 'wastage' of our resources, human and 'inhuman'; and remarked that with such vast resources, he would have run 3 shifts and increased the student strength ten-fold. That Japanese Prof should be happy now: his wishes have come true.

It is very easy to increase the student strength ten-fold and provide them with infrastructure like Hostels, Labs, Lecture Complexes, IT hubs almost overnight.

But not the human resources. The best of our lot still go to the US & UK; and stay put there. And if one dilutes the criteria for our faculty positions, it would cheat our very purpose: IITs would become so many private Engg Colleges (AP alone has about 700 of them!).

So, when do we get that break-even take-off point? We can't manufacture Sougatos, Indras, Saswats et al at the same pace we can manufacture tables, chairs and pcs.

Right?

So, what is the solution? If we can't get clones of a Feynman, Brian Green, or Coleman, we can at least try to get back their students that were originally 'ours'.

Nothing wrong in this, no?

Possibly the best solution would be 'Adjunct Faculty': Spring Semester at KGP and Fall Semester at Columbia. I do hope the GOI will one day wake up to let this come true. We do hear of dual citizenship. I do hope things in the academic world truly get globalized.

I stuck to KGP against all pressure from my family to get back home and take up a lucrative JEE coaching job there (the take-home then was tenfold for a chap like me who solved all Problems of Irodov for fun and preserved copies of their Solutions). I was selfish. I liked KGP so much for its academic freedom, student brilliance and company of stalwarts like SDM and DB. And its Central Library. I sacrificed my wife's career: she is an MD and could easily have risen to be a Professor of Microbiology in some Private Medical College in AP sooner than I could at IIT KGP.

But my gamble paid off: my only son could get the best of KGP from Nursery to IIT staying with us; and then on he chose to stay with us for reasons known only to him (genetic laziness, in praise of which I sang paeans as you all know).

But now I desire that my granddaughter Ishani too gets the best of higher education staying in Hyderabad without having to migrate to Australia, China, Russia, or Timbuktu. After all, my Boston Brahmin friend, Edwin Taylor, didn't have to dispatch his kids to Hyderabad and Benguluru for higher education and jobs, although Obama daily wakes up from this nightmare.

Wrote a lot.

From the heart.

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Aniket writes that he got a gift of precisely the same Edition of Webster from his father when he was a boy (Aniket, I mean). And that he puts it to the same wacky use as I do: beguile an hour or two browsing Webster! Two great and lazy minds but one unique pastime!

He also quotes this charming Ogden Nash verse his father inscribed on it:

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"Oft in the stilly night,
When the mind is mumbling muzzily,
I brood about how little I know,
And know that little so fuzzily
Ere slumber’s chains have bound me,
I think it would suit me nicely,
If I knew one tenth of the little I know,
But knew that tenth precisely"

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But he adds: "And then it struck me how the new Web has now replaced the old Web for our browsing pleasure".

Here I beg to differ. The new Web can never replace the old Web. Just as the 'online gps', whom Saswat says he can call up (like genie from the bottle) anytime from his blog and watch him perform, can never replace the 'old gps' of KGP: how can one get that disarming smile (cf Indra), that expressive eye (cf anushree), that spin-doling spoon (cf Vinit), that instant gul (cf gps), and that subverting praise?

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PoLtS posted many kind and some cool comments (which I transmute into gold by my patent 'heavenly alchemy') on my post: 'India Calling'.

First he wants me to write a book.

Perhaps he is not aware that I did write an absolutely original 270-page FAMOUS magnum opus distilling all my ignorance, called 'Lecture Notes on Optics & QM' with RSS (which RSS whisked away with him to Heaven, although Mahinder Thacker consoled me the other day that copies of it are still being sold outside IIT KGP; like the Puri Gate waste-merchants shops).

Cognoscenti (rhyming limerically with literati, glitterati and confetti), have told me that the (null subset) of about 3000 captive student-audience who read the text between its close-packed lines, topoed honestly solutions to all its 200 odd Problems and consulted its many (unavailable) papers of gps named in its References, feel that it has been a worthless or a priceless experience depending on whether they paid the whopping Rs 116 (magic figure of one hundred sixteen ony) or filched it.

I still have 2 copies of it, bought paying hard cash, since I was too lazy to fill up the book-grant forms in triplicate and get them signed by my HoD (Hail Bureaucracy!). I have willed that they be kept a dark secret from Ishani, since I wish she would rather pursue English Literature (my first love).

And I have already written even more glorious and original booklets (3 so far and the 4th one in the offing, with his name in the Queen's Birthday Honors List).

I cherish all these book-works of mine dearly (pun intended).

All my other invaluable manuscripts are safely lodged in my own theft-proof locker: my 1000 MW brain, to be taken out of my hat at an appropriate event.

Next PoLtS complains that I never guided a Ph D student.

But I did vastly much better:

In my own specialization I misguided more than half a dozen gifted M Sc Project students, each of them ten times more capable than me (ask Aniket who was my. foster student). They all gave me fantastic joint papers in prestigious Journals of the era like Phys Rev, Journal of Physics (A), Proceedings of the Royal Society, London (much after the 'Royal' thing dissolved into thin air, leaving all but the crown emblem studded with our jewels), American Journal of Physics (it IS American!, and much more widely read than Phys Rev; and its rejection rate is the highest, next only to Nature and PRL), European Journal of Physics and Physics Education (UK), and sundry other 'phoren' Journals.

More audaciously I blissguided about half a dozen most ambitious M Sc Project students in a subject I didn't know from Adam to Madam. Although they didn't give me any papers, they enjoyed their work, and ALL of them are now esteemed GR and Cosmology experts in spite of me.

There is a vast difference between taking a Ph D student and an M Sc Project student: like between taking a wife and a mistress. One has to suffer 5 years of intimate bedmanship before a consensual divorce; the other just a breezy 3-month highly productive enjoyable affair.

And all of my M Sc Project students ran away like bats out of Hell to places other than KGP for their M Techs and Ph Ds instead of sticking with me.

Only one most talented Project student of mine said charmingly: "Sir, aapni amaake jodi neethen, ami aar kothhavoo jethey hotho naa".

But one declined swallow doesn't make a winter vacation.

Let me state the bare truth: there were far too many guides fighting for too few Ph D students then; I don't know now.

And I was never a fighting soul.

Still, if any KGPians are pining to be guided by me, they are most welcome to quit the US and take the next flight to Hyderabad; noblesse oblige!

Over to you, PoLtS!


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