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India is a crazy country and I love it for that.
Of late there has been a lot of fun...a Bharat Ratna being asked to return his Ratna title forthwith...and the Ratna saying no to the demand.
The gentleman involved is not a politico but a professor.
Professor H. N. Bose, the great man who recruited me to IIT KGP as an Associate Lecturer in Physics in 1965...I don't know why...told me once that the highest honor a teacher can get is a professorship...meaning not a Dean or a Deputy Director or even a Director.
When I retired and tried settling down in Hyderabad, we happened to rent into a residential complex whose occupants were all retired judges, engineers, managers and such august personalities.
The evening I was coming out of our gate for some shopping, I was accosted by a good old gent, senior to me by a decade as it turned out. He looked at me and abruptly asked:
"Can you follow English?"
to which I naturally demurred.
And he introduced himself saying:
"I am a Chief Engineer...not a Cheap Engineer like these chaps nowadays"
I kept quiet and after incessant probing I had to reveal that I am a retired professor from an IIT and my wife is an MD and my son is an alumnus of IIT KGP working as a Project Manager in an IT firm.
That pleased him and he mellowed down and there flourished a friendship of sorts between us.
One day he suddenly asked me how I write my name.
And I was taken aback and said: "G. P. Sastry"
And he said:
"Everyone who retired here as teachers write their names: 'Professor so and such', although they worked in junior colleges all their lives."
I had no answer to that.
And then I recalled that when I joined IIT KGP there was a Netaji Auditorium, a Bhatnagar Auditorium and a Raman Auditorium. And a Nehru Hall, an Azad Hall, a Vidyasagar Hall, a Sarojini Naidu Hall and several landmarks like that without any honorifics.
And then there sprung up a Vinod Gupta School, a G. S. Sanyal School and a dozen like them named for their donors or their mentors.
There was just one eyesore which lay right on my way to the perpetual canteen. And whenever I saw it I shuddered.
It was named, prominently, on a wooden board:
"Professor S. N. Bose Auditorium"
And I always felt it ought to have just read:
"S. N. Bose Auditorium"
Somehow the title "Professor" looked demeaning our physicist who is more famous for his Bosons.
RKN would surely call it a vandalism.
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India is a crazy country and I love it for that.
Of late there has been a lot of fun...a Bharat Ratna being asked to return his Ratna title forthwith...and the Ratna saying no to the demand.
The gentleman involved is not a politico but a professor.
Professor H. N. Bose, the great man who recruited me to IIT KGP as an Associate Lecturer in Physics in 1965...I don't know why...told me once that the highest honor a teacher can get is a professorship...meaning not a Dean or a Deputy Director or even a Director.
When I retired and tried settling down in Hyderabad, we happened to rent into a residential complex whose occupants were all retired judges, engineers, managers and such august personalities.
The evening I was coming out of our gate for some shopping, I was accosted by a good old gent, senior to me by a decade as it turned out. He looked at me and abruptly asked:
"Can you follow English?"
to which I naturally demurred.
And he introduced himself saying:
"I am a Chief Engineer...not a Cheap Engineer like these chaps nowadays"
I kept quiet and after incessant probing I had to reveal that I am a retired professor from an IIT and my wife is an MD and my son is an alumnus of IIT KGP working as a Project Manager in an IT firm.
That pleased him and he mellowed down and there flourished a friendship of sorts between us.
One day he suddenly asked me how I write my name.
And I was taken aback and said: "G. P. Sastry"
And he said:
"Everyone who retired here as teachers write their names: 'Professor so and such', although they worked in junior colleges all their lives."
I had no answer to that.
And then I recalled that when I joined IIT KGP there was a Netaji Auditorium, a Bhatnagar Auditorium and a Raman Auditorium. And a Nehru Hall, an Azad Hall, a Vidyasagar Hall, a Sarojini Naidu Hall and several landmarks like that without any honorifics.
And then there sprung up a Vinod Gupta School, a G. S. Sanyal School and a dozen like them named for their donors or their mentors.
There was just one eyesore which lay right on my way to the perpetual canteen. And whenever I saw it I shuddered.
It was named, prominently, on a wooden board:
"Professor S. N. Bose Auditorium"
And I always felt it ought to have just read:
"S. N. Bose Auditorium"
Somehow the title "Professor" looked demeaning our physicist who is more famous for his Bosons.
RKN would surely call it a vandalism.
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