Life Before Xerox - 10

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IIT KGP was rather a weird place when I joined it in 1965 as a junior teacher of physics.

Part of this weirdness was because it was the first and only IIT when it was launched in 1950 in Esplanade East, Calcutta under the title: Eastern Higher Technical Institute. The intention was to build a clone of MIT. 

But like Tagore said:

"Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection", 

its arms were stretching to touch Heaven alright, but its legs were tied down to boulders on the ground. Meaning, IIT KGP was under the direct control of the Ministry of Education and its bureaucracy. I recall there was even an IAS officer posted as its Registrar for some years.

A word about this ministry. In my childhood it was known as the Ministry of Education, and even I knew what education was. After a few decades, it turned into the Ministry of Education & Youth Affairs (correct me if I am wrong). And this addition of 'affairs' to its logo and motto and agenda was quite inexplicable to me...I was a youth but never had any affairs to boast much of...the few that were there came to nothing.

After quite a while, the caterpillar turned into a colorful butterfly under the guise of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD for you).  The current motto reads:

"Education is the true alchemy that can bring India its next golden age.  Our motto is unambiguous: All for knowledge, and knowledge for all."

I can visualize clearly the face of the hammy babu who wrote these golden words and exulted like a hen cackling over its latest egg.

Possibly the chappie doesn't know that the word 'resource' has developed wings and means now nothing like what I learned in my school. Resource and resources of our country then meant things like iron, coal and petrol. Father also taught me that a chap with resource is smart, clever, blessed with presence of mind, occasional deceit, and outright cheating, like you know who...

Of course the ministry is talking about 'human' resources that eliminates cows, pigs and peacocks.

My son tells me that the current software jargon is:

"How many resources work under you?"

meaning how many arms, legs, and, if possible, heads.

The one lesson the British taught their ICS officers is never to trust wily Indians...they are all cheats and thieves...possibly the Brits were right.

And while they left India, the ICS chaps taught the same lesson to our IAS officers.

So at IIT KGP, which was directly under sundry IAS chaps (it still is for matters of pay and pension), we then had this ingrained mistrust of the administration towards the employees, and teachers of IIT KGP as well.

We had no semester system then but only the good old annual one. We had the Quarterly Exams, the Half-Yearly Exams and the Annual Exams taken (or given) by the same teacher teaching the same class for the entire year. So, as soon as I started delivering my introductory lectures on Electricity & Magnetism on June I5, I was asked to submit my question paper for the Quarterly exams 3 months away.

For, the question papers had to be got printed at a secret Calcutta Press. IIT KGP had its own Printing Press but the admin chaps didn't trust the 'resources' who handled as important a thing as the Quarterly Exam of gps. The Cal press needed their manuscripts right away...they had to get up the galley proofs, get them corrected by Raam-da, and then Page proofs, to be got corrected by Bhim-da,  and that explained all the hurry.

And the fact that the admin didn't trust the teachers was made evident by a thing called 'false-scripting' (aka coding). All exams were internal, and like at MIT, the teacher's marking was final...but the teacher may play favorites. So all answer scripts came with a top page at the bottom portion of which the student wrote his name and roll number. This bit of the top page was tearable by an iron foot scale. And the student was sternly warned that his script will be dumped in the bin if he writes his name anywhere else inside the script. 

After tearing the flap, a coder (often it was me) would go to the exam section who would supply him with mysterious code numbers like "EMF 153" to be written on the space provided on the upper part of the relevant answer-script. It is later decoded. 

You get it, no? 

So, when the script comes to me for marking, I see only the code but not the name and roll number of my student...even if my class strength is 10 and I know the buffoonery like the back of my palm...I had seen their handwriting in their lab note books, sessionals, class notes and so on...

Things changed only when a new Director was appointed to KGP from a younger IIT like Kanpur whose motto was, I was told:

"IIT Kanpur is an Institute of the teachers, by the teachers, and for the teachers"

This may be calumny but I was told by a post-graduate student at Kanpur that on the day of one of their exams they had all gathered in their exam hall but their teacher didn't turn up with his question paper. They waited for ten minutes and walked into the teacher's office where they found him evaluating a triple integral. And when told by his students that they were waiting for their question paper, their teacher said:

"Oh, is that so? Just get back to your exam hall and I am coming in two minutes"

And he did come in 2 minutes and wrote his Question # 1 on the blackboard, asked the students to start attempting it, and vanished. And re-arrived after 15 minutes with Question # 2 which he wrote below Question # 1. And so on. The last question arrived half an hour before the quit-time....

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