To put it in a nutshell, every Tuesday Afternoon in the Autumn Semester of 1973-74 turned out to be an intensive but pleasant session of Lab Viva with me as the target.
In 1963 my alma mater, AU of Waltair (the Port City of Vizagh), in its own wisdom, was pleased to award me a beautifully calligraphed parchment paper on which it was spelled out that I deserved an M Sc Degree with the following particulars inked in:
1. First Class; 2. Physics (Main); 3. German (Foreign Language); 4. Electronics (Special Paper)
First things first: That First Class simply meant that I was damn good at ingesting without digesting an enormous amount of hard stuff like the Perturbation or Variation or Heitler-London or whatever Method of Solving the Schrodinger Equation for the Hydrogen Molecule approximately; and vomiting it on plain paper.
Second: The Physics I learned there with pleasure could be written on a grain of rice; it took me five long years of Teaching to progress from Resnick-Halliday to J D Jackson (the slim and beautiful First Edition...the Second Edition 25 years later was three times as big and worse...it omitted completely the lovely solution of the Electrostaic Field of a charge Q dumped on a thin circular conducting plate).
German: The only German word I still remember even now is: Madchen with an umlaut on 'a'. It means a girl. Now we had this young Pudding Teacher just returned from Germany and proud of his ready wit. A naughty boy in our Class once stood up and asked innocently why Madchen is prefixed with the neuter gender article 'das' instead of the feminine gender 'die'. The Teacher guffawed and joked: "Madchen is a young girl child not yet ready for sex". And bit his tongue and blushed pink when he noticed that there were two sari-clad girls in our Class who presumably were 'ready for sex' by implication.
Electronics: Here our AU did us proud. We had possibly the best Electronics Student Lab in the Region. For three afternoons every week for two years we were allowed to play with gadgets we liked. The summum bonum came towards the Final Month when we had to build a Superhet Radio Receiver and also calibrate it; which meant that we had to build and connect in series an RF Tuned Amplifier, Local Oscillator, Converter, IF Amplifier, Detector, AF Class A Voltage Amplifier, Class B Push-Pull Power Amplifier to a Speaker; and demonstrate it by catching signals from Radio Ceylon playing a Lata song. We became such experts in hands-on Electronics that we were sure we could be employed as Post-Graduate Assistants in any of the dozens of Radio Repair Shops sprawling in Vizagh if we didn't get any other job. Moreover, I spent two years there building high-frequency Super-Regenerative Oscillators for my NQR work. So when I joined IIT KGP as a Teacher, Electronics Labs held no terror for me; thanks to AU.
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After his post-lunch siesta, SDM would cycle down leisurely to the Electronic Lab which was then housed in the Old Building where now the Nehru Museum muses ponderously, knowing that I would start the ritual Allotment of Experiments to students with the help of the then-Lab Assistant Chandra.
And would sit across the Teachers Table and start talking about whatever happened to be exercising his mind, mostly reminiscences pleasant and otherwise or propound inane theories on the Political or Economic Situation in the Country of which his understanding was somewhat less than Electronics.
Then a student would walk up to our Table to report that his Colpitt Oscillator was not 'oscillating'. I would then ask him to bring his Circuit Diagram which he must have topoed from his equally innocent seniors. And then suggest he replace his fixed 10 K Plate Resistor with a 20 K Pot and try swiping it. The student would go and won't return in a hurry as this is a common complaint with as common a remedy.
SDM would then bend forward and ask in a hushed voice what a Pot is.
I had to tell him that it has nothing to do with the earthenware thing in his house or the other thing that was then popular in the Third Floor of Block D of a certain Hall of Residence, but a lousy abbreviation for Potentiometer.
He would then grimace since the only Potentiometer he knew was the ten-wire meter-long Pot with so many screws that won't fit in a circuit chassis.
To be continued in viva la kgpia! - 5
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