Practice & Perfect

===========================================================================

Mutt: I have a terrible headache

Jeff: Why don't you visit my wife in her Chamber?

Mutt: What does she do?

Jeff: She is a practicing doctor

Mutt: Let her become perfect ;-)

**************************************************************************************************************

Everyone has heard the truism: "Practice makes Perfect." Professionals know it and never forget it.

Soon after I joined IIT KGP in 1965, the Telugu Association there invited a famous Kuchipudi dance troupe. Kuchipudi then was unknown outside AP and so the audience were largely the considerable population of Telugus residing in the Campus and the KGP town. I attended it since I am charmed by the delicate hand-movements of this particular style of dance-drama. Its title was: "Usha Parinayam." All of us enjoyed it thoroughly and forgot about it. Then there was this Bihari Teacher Trainee whose AP friend dragged him to the play at the Netajee. The BTT was so beguiled by the beauty of Usha and her performance that he discreetly found out that the troupe was put up in the Staff Club; and arrived there next morning with an expensive bouquet of seasonal flowers. And, on inquiry he was shown his heart-throb Usha, a bald fair middle-aged man with a paunch playing carroms with the striker in one hand and a cigarette in the other. BTT was heart-broken and threw away his floral tribute and started abusing everything Kuchipudi saying such a thing never would be permitted in Bihar where men were bold and bloody men and women sweet and syrupy.

DB told me this story: A famous surgeon in Calcutta was once accused of botching an operation, and that the patient died due to his incompetence. The Court ordered an inquiry committee consisting of surgeons outside WB to go into the case and report. The doubt arose because this surgeon was known to have a violent tremor in his operative right hand. As the committee was watching a similar surgery of his ongoing in the same OT, they found to their utter amazement that the surgeon picked up his scalpel with his shaky hand and in one decisive second his hand turned rock-steady and the surgery was perfect.

And then there was this famous Carnatic flautist T R Mahalingam who never kept his announced time of arrival on the stage. When the adoring audience at last lost their patience and started grumbling, the accompanists of TRM had to go into the green room and carry him in their arms and seat him in front of the mike and place his signature flute in his hands. And then for three or four hours everyone remained in their seats spellbound...it is said that TRM could never perform before public unless he was sozzled good and sound.

***************************************************************************************************************

Well, the adage: "Practice makes Perfect" has to be applied to folks who have a talent in their chosen line. Whole lives have been sacrificed at the altar of the Practice Goddess when people do not know what they are good at. I know the case of the youngest brother of my friend SPS at Vizagh. His other five brothers are extremely talented and became engineers, doctors, professors and excelled in their professions. When this kid appeared for his Matriculation Exam, in his first attempt he scored centum in math and nineties in every subject other than English where he got 20%, ten short of the pass mark. He repeated next year, practicing only English five hours a day and got 10%; and the next year 5%. He abandoned, wisely, any more attempts to matriculate; and started a coaching school in Chess which was his strong suit and made a career of it.

English for him was a blind-spot like math to RKN:

"...Every time I did a sum I turned to the last section of the book (where one found the answers to the problems) with trembling and prayer, but I always found there a different figure from what I had arrived at laboriously. The disappointment reduced me to tears. A sense of hopelessness seized me each time I referred to the answers in the printed book. I sometimes wished I had been born in another world where there would be no mathematics. The whole subject seemed to be devised to defeat and keep me in a perpetual anguish of trial and error. I remember particularly that the sections which made absolutely no sense to me were called 'Practice.' The teacher decreed, 'Find out by Practice' etc and the intelligent boys of the class at once drew three vertical lines and did something or other with them. I never understood what they did with those and why it was called 'Practice.' To this day I have no idea what it is all about..."

***************************************************************************************************************

And then there is this peculiarity of Practice making Perfect:

"...A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. After a few deliveries, one gets tired and then disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or hundred fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time before a new audience. But this on one condition,---that he never lays the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes a loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By and by our hands get callous, and then we no longer feel any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters...."

.....Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

**************************************************************************************************************

I have been a victim of this syndrome articulated by our Autocrat. For decades, I was condemned to teach EM II in the Autumn and QM II in the Spring Semesters to the fourth years at IIT KGP. In the first few years it was ok since I was learning the subjects myself and made lecture notes for future. Then on, come the next session after a full semester's gap and the summer vacation, I used to hate the sight of the good old lecture notes and loathe the repetitive job. And it is obvious that no student can love the subject taught by a teacher who hates it. And the first lecture happened to be important since there were a few lateral entry kids mostly from Calcutta and everything at IIT was new to them and they were just settling down. So, I invented a trick to get over my calluses and their inhibitions. In the first lecture, I used to sit down and after pretending to take attendance, I would start asking questions on the subject. And when one or two kids used to shed their shyness and answer them, I would encourage them saying, "Good! Great!! Wonderful!!". That, sort of, used to act as an ice-breaker; and the second lecture was as good as new to me and they were glued.

Here is Supratim reminiscing:

"..I do remember very clearly (as if it happened yesterday) the way you started off your QM class the first day. After taking the attendance, you started by asking our class of 11 what the strangest thing about QM was. I probably remember it so clearly because I happened to give the answer you were looking for...My answering the first question of your course correctly some 17 years ago had more to do with luck than a profound understanding of QM. Nevertheless, sometimes one needs to feel good about little triumphs..."

And Aniket:

"...Your post titled 'God of Big Things' reminded me of your first lecture in our fourth year. (Incidentally I asked the same question to some of my students today, but that is beside the point.)..."

When I was asked to take a Jumbo First Year Class of 200 or more students, I used to break the ice another way. I used to carry my 'transparencies file' to the class and use the OHP installed there. After the inrush is over and the students asked to settle down, saying "Quiet Please!" in the manner of the Wimbledon Umpires, I would open the file gingerly and pick up the first transparency sheet and drop it nervously on the ground, hands shaking. And, as you know, there are at least four different ways in which you can place the sheet on the reticuled glass top. I would start with the wrong way and they would simper. Then the wronger way and they would laugh. Then the wrongest way and they would howl. And finally the right side up and the ice would be broken.

And then the first sheet would show only the figure of a spring-mass system. And I would say: "Now, draw the free-body diagram, write down the differential equation, solve it by the complex amplitudes method and show me the general solution...I am coming up!"

Then everyone would get busy since nothing like this went on in their other subjects and as I climb up, looking at the first proffered note book and shout into the mike: "Wrong sign!" and like: "The final displacement can't be complex, man!" and so on....they know that this joker is a taskmaster. And then on it was a roller-coaster ride. I never spoke more than five sentences at a stretch but made them do all the work.

Here is Aniket Aga (ECE)...the other crazy Aniket...

"Dear Professor Sastry,

How are you?? I don't know whether you will remember me, but I was in your Physics class at KGP in Spring 2002 - which remains one of the finest classes I have ever participated in. Just by chance, I happened to search Google with your name and came across your blog from which I took your email address. Where are you these days? Hyderabad?

After IIT, I sold my soul to the devil and worked with a management consulting company in Mumbai for 2 yrs. Unlike Faust, however, I was able to recover my soul and I decided not to go for an MBA. Right now, I am pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at Yale University and intend to research controversies over science in India - most probably those surrounding genetically modified crops..."


**************************************************************************************************************

The Ph. D. Octopus

Pratik-sir writes:

Couple of your recent posts reminded me somehow of an essay by William James written in 1903. (Some twenty years back my father brought my attention to this.) It is called The Ph. D. Octopus. I am giving the link below:

http://des.emory.edu/mfp/octopus.html


===========================================================================