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The title of this post is stolen from Satyajit Ray's celebrated book: 'Our Films Their Films'...I didn't read the book, but read exquisite excerpts from it.
Here I narrate lightheartedly the change in culture of the Physics Department of IIT KGP from the first 3 decades (1965-95) to the last one decade (1995-2005) of my existence there. Needless to say, I tender my apologies if it hurts anyone, living or dead.
The first day I entered our HoD, HNB's Office in June 1965 to ask what course was allotted to me, he looked at me top to bottom and bottom to top and said:
"You look too young and too puny to take a Lecture Class. So, this year you take Tutorials and Labs."
That, I think, never happened to anyone who joined after 1995. I mean, the average age of entrants to the faculty was less than 25 during 'our' times. And certainly more than 25 during 'their' times. The first tutorial class I took had only 12 students, while it rose to more than 35 when I quit.
There was a sense of camaraderie then. There was a Departmental Tea Club, where everyone from HNB to gps used to foregather at 9.30 AM and 3.30 PM. And there was MSS pulling everyone's legs by asking questions from books like Flying Circus in Physics till all the rest admitted willy-nilly that none of us knew Physics...that was the ultimate leveler. There was a certain quiet satisfaction that we were all in the ground state.
Rest was fun.
There was SVD who used to smoke in front of all senior professors nonchalantly and dismissed any humbug, and that removed fear from us juniors. And there was VYR who deliberately used to pinch pens, pencils and staplers from the tables of colleagues he visited, and pocketed them, saying how lovely they were. And there was KMK who used to hurriedly gather all the stationery items on his table and push them into his table-drawer and ask VYR when he visited him:
"What can I do for you, Professor?"
"You have already done it"
And there was RGC who advertised on the Notice Board that he was giving a rare seminar talk and when I asked him before his talk what was the subject of his seminar, he said grimly:
"Solid State Physics"
And I found that he talked of his pet topic:
"Perpetual Calendar"
There was STA who was the default Farewell-Speaker who would start and end his speech with cute Urdu couplets. And there was BKM (Mohanty) who would ask him to translate them into poetic Oriya...
SDM was happy if he got his one Independent Paper each year.
And I shared office for 2 decades of fun and laughter with DB after SDM left. DB was happy if he got his one paper per year in JMP. And I was happy if I got my one Note in an educational physics journal like AJP, EJP, Physics Education (GB or Poona). DB's ambition was to write up whatever he knew and learned in Group Theory in the form of a Book. And he achieved it. My ambition was to write a paper or two that would appear in every forthcoming 'reasonably good' text book on the subject (see the crooked double adjective). And I guess I achieved it.
Things started to change towards the end of 1980s. Very serious-minded people with lists of publication longer than my entire collection of reprints joined the Department and I, for one, felt cowed down. RSS told me that one very serious Prof X used to challenge my promotions post-facto (behind my back) asking:
"How many 'serious' papers in 'reputed' American Journals does gps have?"
For which his answer was: "Nil"
And he used to pin up his latest reprints on the Physics Office Notice Board....something HNB would never have allowed...just a culture change...nothing wrong in it...if everyone does it, the Notice Board would be wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling...
Fortunately, a little dame luck was with me. It so happened that Alan M Portis, who was a referee of one of my papers in AJP, signed his name at the bottom of the report instead of at the top. And the Lady Office Assistant at MIT (where the Editor then lived) forgot to efface it. So far so good. After a few years, while scanning the Library for the latest books on EM, I discovered that Alan Portis wrote a bulky 700 page tome on Electromagnetic Fields etc published by John Wiley. Naturally I turned to the Chapter on Cherenkov Radiation and found a section on the topic with a starred footnote that referred to my paper in AJP in such a way as if the entire section was mine...it was not. That made me jump with joy...a poor man's khejurgud rosogolla. And I forgot about it.
A decade later I had to go to Prof X's room to collect info for Annual Report or some such thing and found Portis' bulky tome on his table. And I casually pretended to flip through that book and turned to the relevant page and showed him my name. His face fell and he said with contrition:
"A citation in the BODY of a Berkeley Physics Book! Looks like you may have done little but that little was worth doing"
That was a certificate I enjoyed from a junior faculty.
How DOES a drop of rain matter to an ocean of literature?
Then I came to know that in future it was no use if you publish, say, 200 papers...you have to collect and submit how many 'citations' you got. And apparently, to help you, there are what are called Citation Index Books which also give a 'weightage' to each citation...I really don't know. But I do know that if you can somehow manage to publish a wrong paper, you would certainly get a hundred furious 'citations' whose combined tonnage would stun the Interviewers...
And towards the end of the 1990s there joined, after a long long while, a team of about half a dozen and more youngsters, younger to me by 3 decades, all of them frighteningly more talented than everyone else put together.
I took fright and ran away from departmental teaching and sought refuge in Level 1 and Level 0 courses. But there was no escape from meeting them in the corridor...I used to walk almost hugging the opposite wall and trying to tunnel through it...such was my inferiority complex. One of them has a very charming smile. But, as Shakespeare or some other bloke said:
"One can smile and smile and yet be a tyrant"
He used to ring me up and give me a first-year problem to work out and tell him the answer (which he had done at leisure).
And I was then going to the Barber Shop and there was a long waiting line. Campus barbers were barbarians at that time. In addition to letting cut hair fly all around...it was hot and humid and they switched the fan on...they had this nasty habit of clicking their scissors in air five times after every single cut they made, and that was distracting. That was why the solution to that problem I tried on the Telegraph that was lying there came out all wrong...and I was duly 'rectified' by this smiling young professor.
Fortunately my retirement was soon approaching, and unlike most everyone else, I didn't apply for extension but ran away to Hyderabad by the next flight and never touched Physics again....
=====================================================================
The title of this post is stolen from Satyajit Ray's celebrated book: 'Our Films Their Films'...I didn't read the book, but read exquisite excerpts from it.
Here I narrate lightheartedly the change in culture of the Physics Department of IIT KGP from the first 3 decades (1965-95) to the last one decade (1995-2005) of my existence there. Needless to say, I tender my apologies if it hurts anyone, living or dead.
The first day I entered our HoD, HNB's Office in June 1965 to ask what course was allotted to me, he looked at me top to bottom and bottom to top and said:
"You look too young and too puny to take a Lecture Class. So, this year you take Tutorials and Labs."
That, I think, never happened to anyone who joined after 1995. I mean, the average age of entrants to the faculty was less than 25 during 'our' times. And certainly more than 25 during 'their' times. The first tutorial class I took had only 12 students, while it rose to more than 35 when I quit.
There was a sense of camaraderie then. There was a Departmental Tea Club, where everyone from HNB to gps used to foregather at 9.30 AM and 3.30 PM. And there was MSS pulling everyone's legs by asking questions from books like Flying Circus in Physics till all the rest admitted willy-nilly that none of us knew Physics...that was the ultimate leveler. There was a certain quiet satisfaction that we were all in the ground state.
Rest was fun.
There was SVD who used to smoke in front of all senior professors nonchalantly and dismissed any humbug, and that removed fear from us juniors. And there was VYR who deliberately used to pinch pens, pencils and staplers from the tables of colleagues he visited, and pocketed them, saying how lovely they were. And there was KMK who used to hurriedly gather all the stationery items on his table and push them into his table-drawer and ask VYR when he visited him:
"What can I do for you, Professor?"
"You have already done it"
And there was RGC who advertised on the Notice Board that he was giving a rare seminar talk and when I asked him before his talk what was the subject of his seminar, he said grimly:
"Solid State Physics"
And I found that he talked of his pet topic:
"Perpetual Calendar"
There was STA who was the default Farewell-Speaker who would start and end his speech with cute Urdu couplets. And there was BKM (Mohanty) who would ask him to translate them into poetic Oriya...
SDM was happy if he got his one Independent Paper each year.
And I shared office for 2 decades of fun and laughter with DB after SDM left. DB was happy if he got his one paper per year in JMP. And I was happy if I got my one Note in an educational physics journal like AJP, EJP, Physics Education (GB or Poona). DB's ambition was to write up whatever he knew and learned in Group Theory in the form of a Book. And he achieved it. My ambition was to write a paper or two that would appear in every forthcoming 'reasonably good' text book on the subject (see the crooked double adjective). And I guess I achieved it.
Things started to change towards the end of 1980s. Very serious-minded people with lists of publication longer than my entire collection of reprints joined the Department and I, for one, felt cowed down. RSS told me that one very serious Prof X used to challenge my promotions post-facto (behind my back) asking:
"How many 'serious' papers in 'reputed' American Journals does gps have?"
For which his answer was: "Nil"
And he used to pin up his latest reprints on the Physics Office Notice Board....something HNB would never have allowed...just a culture change...nothing wrong in it...if everyone does it, the Notice Board would be wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling...
Fortunately, a little dame luck was with me. It so happened that Alan M Portis, who was a referee of one of my papers in AJP, signed his name at the bottom of the report instead of at the top. And the Lady Office Assistant at MIT (where the Editor then lived) forgot to efface it. So far so good. After a few years, while scanning the Library for the latest books on EM, I discovered that Alan Portis wrote a bulky 700 page tome on Electromagnetic Fields etc published by John Wiley. Naturally I turned to the Chapter on Cherenkov Radiation and found a section on the topic with a starred footnote that referred to my paper in AJP in such a way as if the entire section was mine...it was not. That made me jump with joy...a poor man's khejurgud rosogolla. And I forgot about it.
A decade later I had to go to Prof X's room to collect info for Annual Report or some such thing and found Portis' bulky tome on his table. And I casually pretended to flip through that book and turned to the relevant page and showed him my name. His face fell and he said with contrition:
"A citation in the BODY of a Berkeley Physics Book! Looks like you may have done little but that little was worth doing"
That was a certificate I enjoyed from a junior faculty.
How DOES a drop of rain matter to an ocean of literature?
Then I came to know that in future it was no use if you publish, say, 200 papers...you have to collect and submit how many 'citations' you got. And apparently, to help you, there are what are called Citation Index Books which also give a 'weightage' to each citation...I really don't know. But I do know that if you can somehow manage to publish a wrong paper, you would certainly get a hundred furious 'citations' whose combined tonnage would stun the Interviewers...
And towards the end of the 1990s there joined, after a long long while, a team of about half a dozen and more youngsters, younger to me by 3 decades, all of them frighteningly more talented than everyone else put together.
I took fright and ran away from departmental teaching and sought refuge in Level 1 and Level 0 courses. But there was no escape from meeting them in the corridor...I used to walk almost hugging the opposite wall and trying to tunnel through it...such was my inferiority complex. One of them has a very charming smile. But, as Shakespeare or some other bloke said:
"One can smile and smile and yet be a tyrant"
He used to ring me up and give me a first-year problem to work out and tell him the answer (which he had done at leisure).
And I was then going to the Barber Shop and there was a long waiting line. Campus barbers were barbarians at that time. In addition to letting cut hair fly all around...it was hot and humid and they switched the fan on...they had this nasty habit of clicking their scissors in air five times after every single cut they made, and that was distracting. That was why the solution to that problem I tried on the Telegraph that was lying there came out all wrong...and I was duly 'rectified' by this smiling young professor.
Fortunately my retirement was soon approaching, and unlike most everyone else, I didn't apply for extension but ran away to Hyderabad by the next flight and never touched Physics again....
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