Degrees of Freedom

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By now about 200 KGPhians must be converging on IIT KGP for their Diamond Jubilee Get-Together. Pratik tells me tomorrow is the D-Day.

I guess most of them, say 180, must be ex-students. And 16 or so ex-faculty. Maybe the rest 4 are like bats...mammals with wings...I mean they were students (BCRoy mostly) and then teachers. This is my surmise...I have no data.

What is attracting all these folks there ranging in age from say 25 to 80?

I have a one-word answer to this million dollar question...Freedom.

All of them must have tasted hitherto unknown freedom in the Campus of KGP.

For UGs it is understandable. For the first time they were flying away from the shackles of home, parents, school masters, coaches, midnight oil, accounting for pocket money at the end of the day or week or month. No one asks them anymore what they would like to have for breakfast, lunch, snack or dinner and in their 'tiffin boxes'. And for the first time they would be mixing with queer 'others' from South, North, West, East, Far East; and would be hearing all sorts of lingos. It would take them some time to break their barriers and shackles and make unthinkable friends like say, Aniket from Cal and Kedar from Bombay. I asked Aniket when their friendship started. He said it was when they entered Phy Labs in their third year and were partners (in phy crime) willy-nilly. Even Supratim, who joined in his 4th year, remembers his lab partner, Santosh, and how the two were brutally ragged by an otherwise nice gent called Prof KVR.

And their haunts like Harrys, Chedis, or Gymkhana...

The same is true with the faculty who joined Phy Dept at KGP. They must have felt an all too unfamiliar oxygenated and exhilarating atmosphere in the Phy Dept. They would have been coming from their parochial Universities where they were told what they have to do and how and who to mix with and who to avoid. Speaking for myself, from birth to age 20, I was made keenly aware that I am a Brahmin and belong to the oppressor caste. I never felt I oppressed anyone...but that is neither here nor there.

As Sunanda K Datta-Ray wrote the other day, there is no caste in Bengal. That one thing was just enough for me to stick on there for all those decades. And when as a young teacher I asked my HoD, Prof HNB, what the Syllabus for my Class of EMT was, he looked at me and said: "You teach what you feel is good for the students and give me the syllabus at the end of the year (there was no Semester System then)."

Just unthinkable in our AU.

Prof AVK, ten years senior to me at AU, joined KGP as a faculty along with me in May 1965. He was teaching at BHU before that. And he told me that he was elated when he got his Appointment Letter as a Permanent Lecturer from KGP. Because, he said, at BHU those days, one starts as a Temporarily Temporary Lecturer, then graduates slowly to Permanently Temporary, and then Temporarily Permanent, and finally, before retirement or death whichever is earlier, as Permanently Permanent...he must have been joking.

But I witnessed (unfortunately) that gag about death. RSS, a virtuous Brahmin with few earthly desires, had but one...he wanted to retire as a (Full) Professor. But he was so good a human being that God loved him young and he was struck down by the Emperor of All Maladies when he was turning 50. And was bedridden and in the last stages of that venerable disease that sees no distinction of age, sex, caste, color or achievements like all those Apples or those famous Diagrams.

And as a very very special case, his Interview was conducted supine at his Qrs. And the next day, he was semi-officially told that he made it...a fortnight before he left leaving not a rack behind as Shakespeare said of all of us. This sort of a personal humanitarian thing, I suppose, is unique and unthinkable in our Univs...I beg to be corrected.

Well, for me, the difference between my AU and KGP was summed up by Maugham who said that in France you can act as you like but you have to think alike, while in Germany it is the other way round.

And I had to attend not only German Classes as my Ph D requirement but also Russian Classes to please My Fair Russian Lady:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-fair-russian-lady.html



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