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I was talking of the days when my lady classmate and I joined as research scholars in the same lab at our university 50 years ago under different guides. Her guide was a serious experimentalist least interested in teaching.
Mine was a brilliant teacher who had won his D. Phil from Oxford and was reputed to have published independent papers in Theoretical Spectroscopy...a tough subject involving all sorts of quantum mechanical concepts and calculations. But I didn't know that a few years before I joined him, he had a family tragedy and converted to the Radha Soami Satsang Cult of Dayalbagh and became sort of reclusive. He had the only red Lambretta scooter in the whole of our university.
Talking of red Lambretta scooters I am reminded of a series of popular detective novellas that appeared in Telugu in our school days at Muthukur. Since these were frowned upon by our teachers, we used to read them enclosing them in our bulky maths text books. Much later, I came to know that the author of this series stole his stories from Erle Stanley Gardner. So the books had Telugu clones of Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and a male counterpart of Della Street. This last was because no Telugu reader would digest a female secretary to a male detective whose good name was Yugandhar. Since there were not many cars in Andhra those days, the writer of this series endowed his hero, Yugandhar, with a red Lambretta. Not that we saw any red Lambretta in Muthukur.
So I saw my guide from far off, only when he had a class to teach when he would arrive and park his blood-red scooter by the class room, and scoot away after the class was over. All I got for my virtual work under him for two good years was regular fellowship cash on the sixth of every month and a No-Objection Certificate for leaving him to IIT KGP as a teacher...as far as serious research was concerned I followed his example at IIT KGP for 40 years...except that I didn't take any scholar, male or female, under my wings.
On the other hand, the guide of my lady classmate was a permanent presence in our lab day and night sweating it out in our humid seaside university. He was reputed to have lots of 'connections' in Delhi. So he could fetch lots of projects from CSIR, DAE, UGC and such grant-giving government agencies. And he was out to Delhi every other month on such business as these efforts entailed.
One fine morning he called me and my lady classmate to his room...we never called it 'office' since we were not yet that Americanized...our teachers were not yet officers. And he asked both of us to take our seats, something unusual. And said he chose the two of us since we happened to be in the top ranks in our M Sc. And he asked us to go to the Library everyday for an hour or two and read up American school books on Physics...no Indian books please! And make notes on the two topics of Fluids...statics and dynamics. And edit them and deliver our notes to him on the first of every month.
And our wages for this supreme effort, if we satisfy his stiff standards, were a whopping Rs 1000 to each of us, doled out in quarterly installments of Rs 250 over a year. It was understood that we two wouldn't be submitting two independent sets of loose sheets...it should be a joint effort of collaboration with intense discussions between the two of us.
We two looked at each other and at once agreed to do the job since the money was good and the work appeared to be something out of the 'Red Headed League' of Sherlock Holmes, except that it involved a male and a female, both blackheaded, instead of one famous male redhead, Jabez Wilson:
And we returned to our lab and at once split the job, much against the prescribed norms of the holy deal...neither of us liked to 'collaborate and discuss' what we thought were silly topics at the school level. We tossed and she got Fluid Statics and I the Fluid Dynamics. And since our newly-built Library was a mile away from our lab and there was no transport except our two legs each and since she was not all that athletic, I offered to go to the Library and fetch all sorts of American school books and she would do the copying part...her handwriting was way better-looking than mine.
I don't know about her but I suffered a minor heart attack on reading all those things like Bernoulli principle which I never understood much, and its applications like venturi meter, aerofoil, pitch, roll, yaw, Reynold's number and a dozen others. And I tried digging deeper into the topics by consulting college books but to no avail. My tragedy was that the American physics book-writing revolution by Sears, Halliday-Resnick, Feynman, Purcell and other stalwarts hadn't yet touched India by then. All I had were dour books with few diagrams and fewer concepts.
I almost gave it up but I was too poor to afford it.
Every three months the gent who employed us used to fly to Delhi carrying our rubbish and return with grants for the next quarter. And the mystery was finally solved only after I reached IIT KGP. By then I heard that a newfangled thing called NCERT was in the making just then and, as in every such government affair, the task of writing new text books for our kids was delegated to a huge committee, each of whose members was given 'support' for two assistants each.
Thirty years later, when I was inspecting an NCERT physics book of Class VII which I had to buy for my son, I noticed happily that the committee had neither our employer's name (he became late by then) nor our poor efforts at making 'notes' from American books...a new generation had taken over...
One fine morning during my collaboration with my lady classmate in our gigantic effort, her guide saw me carry half a dozen bulky text books in my hand from the Library and stopped me and said, blowing a fluid dynamic fume into the air from his cigarette:
"You are pampering that lady too much"
'Pamper' was a new word to me and I had to run back to the Library to look it up in the Concise Oxford Dictionary...
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I was talking of the days when my lady classmate and I joined as research scholars in the same lab at our university 50 years ago under different guides. Her guide was a serious experimentalist least interested in teaching.
Mine was a brilliant teacher who had won his D. Phil from Oxford and was reputed to have published independent papers in Theoretical Spectroscopy...a tough subject involving all sorts of quantum mechanical concepts and calculations. But I didn't know that a few years before I joined him, he had a family tragedy and converted to the Radha Soami Satsang Cult of Dayalbagh and became sort of reclusive. He had the only red Lambretta scooter in the whole of our university.
Talking of red Lambretta scooters I am reminded of a series of popular detective novellas that appeared in Telugu in our school days at Muthukur. Since these were frowned upon by our teachers, we used to read them enclosing them in our bulky maths text books. Much later, I came to know that the author of this series stole his stories from Erle Stanley Gardner. So the books had Telugu clones of Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and a male counterpart of Della Street. This last was because no Telugu reader would digest a female secretary to a male detective whose good name was Yugandhar. Since there were not many cars in Andhra those days, the writer of this series endowed his hero, Yugandhar, with a red Lambretta. Not that we saw any red Lambretta in Muthukur.
So I saw my guide from far off, only when he had a class to teach when he would arrive and park his blood-red scooter by the class room, and scoot away after the class was over. All I got for my virtual work under him for two good years was regular fellowship cash on the sixth of every month and a No-Objection Certificate for leaving him to IIT KGP as a teacher...as far as serious research was concerned I followed his example at IIT KGP for 40 years...except that I didn't take any scholar, male or female, under my wings.
On the other hand, the guide of my lady classmate was a permanent presence in our lab day and night sweating it out in our humid seaside university. He was reputed to have lots of 'connections' in Delhi. So he could fetch lots of projects from CSIR, DAE, UGC and such grant-giving government agencies. And he was out to Delhi every other month on such business as these efforts entailed.
One fine morning he called me and my lady classmate to his room...we never called it 'office' since we were not yet that Americanized...our teachers were not yet officers. And he asked both of us to take our seats, something unusual. And said he chose the two of us since we happened to be in the top ranks in our M Sc. And he asked us to go to the Library everyday for an hour or two and read up American school books on Physics...no Indian books please! And make notes on the two topics of Fluids...statics and dynamics. And edit them and deliver our notes to him on the first of every month.
And our wages for this supreme effort, if we satisfy his stiff standards, were a whopping Rs 1000 to each of us, doled out in quarterly installments of Rs 250 over a year. It was understood that we two wouldn't be submitting two independent sets of loose sheets...it should be a joint effort of collaboration with intense discussions between the two of us.
We two looked at each other and at once agreed to do the job since the money was good and the work appeared to be something out of the 'Red Headed League' of Sherlock Holmes, except that it involved a male and a female, both blackheaded, instead of one famous male redhead, Jabez Wilson:
And we returned to our lab and at once split the job, much against the prescribed norms of the holy deal...neither of us liked to 'collaborate and discuss' what we thought were silly topics at the school level. We tossed and she got Fluid Statics and I the Fluid Dynamics. And since our newly-built Library was a mile away from our lab and there was no transport except our two legs each and since she was not all that athletic, I offered to go to the Library and fetch all sorts of American school books and she would do the copying part...her handwriting was way better-looking than mine.
I don't know about her but I suffered a minor heart attack on reading all those things like Bernoulli principle which I never understood much, and its applications like venturi meter, aerofoil, pitch, roll, yaw, Reynold's number and a dozen others. And I tried digging deeper into the topics by consulting college books but to no avail. My tragedy was that the American physics book-writing revolution by Sears, Halliday-Resnick, Feynman, Purcell and other stalwarts hadn't yet touched India by then. All I had were dour books with few diagrams and fewer concepts.
I almost gave it up but I was too poor to afford it.
Every three months the gent who employed us used to fly to Delhi carrying our rubbish and return with grants for the next quarter. And the mystery was finally solved only after I reached IIT KGP. By then I heard that a newfangled thing called NCERT was in the making just then and, as in every such government affair, the task of writing new text books for our kids was delegated to a huge committee, each of whose members was given 'support' for two assistants each.
Thirty years later, when I was inspecting an NCERT physics book of Class VII which I had to buy for my son, I noticed happily that the committee had neither our employer's name (he became late by then) nor our poor efforts at making 'notes' from American books...a new generation had taken over...
One fine morning during my collaboration with my lady classmate in our gigantic effort, her guide saw me carry half a dozen bulky text books in my hand from the Library and stopped me and said, blowing a fluid dynamic fume into the air from his cigarette:
"You are pampering that lady too much"
'Pamper' was a new word to me and I had to run back to the Library to look it up in the Concise Oxford Dictionary...
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