Prejudice - 4

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It must be around 1988.

There was this Junk Infrared Spectrometer Room housing a makeshift nascent Computer Lab in the Ground Floor of the Phy Dept @ IIT KGP.

It sounds like a joke now, but there were only two first generation IBM PCs seated on a Hot & Dusty Old Table, one of the two always out of order. They had no hard drive, only slots for 2 huge floppy diskettes (ten times the size of biscuits), one for reading and the other for copying...

On a Wednesday Afternoon free from Classes, I was there with my brilliant but quiet Project Student, TRR, who went to USC, LA next Fall. I was demonstrating to him the two diskettes of Edwin Taylor's brand-new Spacetime Software, the topic of his Project (on which we wrote a Paper later in AJP, 1990).

You can't imagine how slow the computer speed was: to draw just one hyperbola it took an entire minute. So, my Demo to him was taking a sweet one hour.

Midway through our Wednesday Afternoon Privacy (when all students were supposed to be in their Halls of Residence doing whatever they do there in their leisure hours), the door creaked open and a young lad (BB) barged in without a "May I come in, Sir!", the default etiquette expected of UG students by most Professors.

The reason was two-fold:

First, BB expected that on a Wednesday Afternoon Professors would be at home doing whatever they do there in their leisure hours.

Second, I hardly looked to him like a Senior Professor with 25 odd years of 'Service with a Smile': I was shorter, thinner, much less fair, less spectacl'r, no more grayer, and much less well-dressed...BB told me later that his neat and clean outfit was talked about wherever he went in the World...his dad used to tell him that this is the least one can do as a mark of self-respect. As a rule I found Punjabis well-dressed and keep their Drawing Rooms so gorgeous and spruce with potted plants that I never dared enter them a second time. On the other hand, Visitors to our Drawing Room feel instantly relaxed and say it is very 'homely', a euphemism for 'dirty'; so homely that I have to launch them like ships from the Vizagh Port Dockyards {;-}

BB took me to be an FRS (Frustrated Research Scholar) whiling away my ample leisure there with an Accomplice.

With a flourish of familiarity and intimate knowledge of PCs (he was from Delhi Public School where he was made to write Programs for Reflection and Refraction in BASIC), he inserted his floppy diskette into its slot on the other PC and pressed all its buttons with aplomb...only to discover that his Monitor was as unresponsive as Balaam's Ass.

He then turned to TRR who was working and said: "I want to test with your Monitor"

TRR looked at me and I said: "Let him!"

He tested and found that it was not his Monitor that was the culprit but his CPU that was as dead as the Dodo.

He then turned to me and asked abruptly: "How much more time you guys will take?"

That got my goat

I was instantly prejudiced against this kid and said coolly: "A couple of hours".

He gave me a dirty look through his shiny specs and left in a huff.

And TRR & me left in another ten minutes.

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DB & myself had a Policy of not nailing our Name Plates on our Double Room C - 239 (a thing that newcomers would get to do first). We wanted ourselves to be undisturbed from our Gossip & Smoke Sessions by unwanted 'Peers'.

Our students however knew they were always welcome...they could walk in without knocking. And they knew who was which: gps facing the door and DB glancing it, smoking like a chimney.

A couple of days after my Close Encounter of the First Kind with BB, there was the gentlest and most discreet knock at our door, and I said: "Come in!"

A gentle push and there was this young BB looking squarely at me and then at DB.

He asked: "Professor Shastry?" praying that it was the other goon.

I could hardly help saying: "This is He!"

He looked shell-shocked and it was I who recovered first and said in my usual style with students: "Avoo! Baitho!" showing him the broken chair beside me:

"Two old chairs, and half a candle,
One old jug without a handle,
These were all our worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all our worldly goods"

Then he said he was in his Second Year, and his Teacher Prof STA asked him to meet Professor Shastry to get some doubts cleared in Electrodynamics (that being the subject I was teaching for Donkey's Years).

And before I could speak, he took out businesslike from his backpack a crisp new Volume of Landau & Lifshitz covered with brown wrapper, opened Page 152, and asked how Equation 25 follows from Equation 24.

One of those thousands of Impromptu Vivas a Teacher has to face at IIT (...but it is their students who bitch about the handful of Prepared Grand Vivas they have to face).

He left as coolly as he entered after his job was through.

And from then on for the rest of the semester BB would be waiting at our door after his Classes to clear his innumerable doubts in various books.

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There is a certain type of intimacy that develops automatically in that God-forsaken Campus between any student-teacher combo meeting that frequently for over 4 years.

We soon got to know each other: this is what I got to know of BB:

1. He doesn't read Newspapers or watch TV (except Cricket).

2. Neither novels nor story books.

3. He coaches school kids for IIT JEE during his Vacations @ Delhi and buys Physics Books with the money he made (a sort of vicious circle).

4. He bought the Full Set of expensive Volumes of LL, hoping (Haa!) to read them all.

5. In the serial public ragging of each Fresher in their Intro on Stage, when quizzed by our cute Final Year Impresario: "What is your Ambition in Life?", he deadpanned: "To become the Greatest Physicist of All Time!"; and continued to look as cool as a cucumber when there were whistles, catcalls, jeers and paper-rockets flung at him.

6. He likes Labs (!) and gained entry to the Research Labs of all Professors and helps their Scholars and manages to handle their costly equipment. When I wondered how the forbidding-looking Exptl Profs allow a novice like him to enter their gold-plated Labs, he replied: "You have only to ASK!" (much like Feynman boasted he was advised in some other context).

7. He avoids his Hall and Hallmates as far as possible and likes to spend time in the Department or Central Library.

8. Although he is handsome and can switch on his charming smile, he doesn't look like that geek SRK in that stupid movie where he has a mooch and specs and serenades a rickshaw-borne Love prancing like a racy horse...BB is above such trivial 'pursuits'.

9. He spent every Winter and Summer Vacation from his Second Year in either TIFR (Bombay) or II Sc (Bangalore) or IUCAA (Pune) and such weird places.

10. He is one of the few students who didn't register for Training & Placement and never attended Campus Interviews for IT jobs. But when I asked him to meet the Prof-in-Charge after his Final Year to keep himself profitably busy for a couple of months in his home town, he so impressed Prof Bhaskaran who told me that he took a special interest in arranging a 2-month Survey Job for a Delhi-based Company.

.....and so on and so forth.

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When BB once said he was going to Bangalore for his Summer Training, I gave him a Box of Cadbury Chocolates to be delivered to my cute nieces (4 and 6).....the younger of the two figures in my story: http//:gpsastry.bluffmaster.com.

He agreed and after his return told me his Story:

As he approached their Apartment Complex, he saw dozens of kids playing, and asked one of them at random which one was my sister's Apartment. The kid asked him to follow her and led him 3 floors up, showed him the door and ran down to resume her play.

And, as he was sipping the hot Tea my sister prepared for him, the door bell rang, and in came that very same cute girl of 4, saying: "Hi!" to him, and ran indoors for her bath etc as he sat stunned: BB didn't know how smart and cool gps's nieces could be!

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When I next met my concerned B-i-L (I have 7) he told me his version of BB.

This B-i-L is a General Manager (as opposed to our Specialist Manager BB who managed to get duplicate keys of all Research Labs in the Phy Dept by switching on his consummate charm).

B-i-L: I tried to put your student at ease while your sister was making Tea; and tried Politics

gps: What happened?

B-i-L: He said he wasn't interested in Politics. Then I tried Economics and Business. He said he wasn't interested. Then Films, then English Novels, then Poetry, then Oil, Gas & Petroleum... but failed

gps: What did he talk about?

B-i-L: Absolutely NOTHING! He coolly sipped his Tea refusing biscuits, and after his cup got emptied he stood up, said BYE, picked up his backpack, smiled at my younger daughter and sprinted like the devil downstairs!!!

gps: What do you make of him?

B-i-L: An absolute dud...will come to no good with that sort of abysmal lack of General Knowledge

I got wild

These folks outside IITs don't know that students who enter them are far ahead of the Gaussian Peak and expect everyone to be like them.

And I got furious at his abysmal Prejudice and said:

"Watch my words...In 3 years BB will be at Princeton (B-i-L did hear of Princeton; naturally!)"

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And he WAS!

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Prof BND (who happened to be BB's Project Guide in Experimental Surface Physics), once told me:

"Sir, if any Brahmin happens to speak nothing but Truth for 12 years, then on, whatever he utters will come true!"

And I am a Half-Brahmin who spoke nothing but Half-Truths (guls) for 12 X 2X 2 = 48 years and so Beware! Whatever I say will come Half-True for the rest of my Half-Life!

Ask Prof BND if you don't trust my guls!!!

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