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It is second nature with old folks to grumble about everything new and brag about their good old times!
The other day I was reading an article in the Op-Ed page of DC by Jayant Narlikar in which he was wistfully bemoaning that the future of libraries as we know them is at stake...books and periodicals will soon be replaced by computers and online journals.
Narlikar is 5 years older to me and I can understand.
I myself watched the Central Library at IIT KGP expanding and blowing up from a 2-story affair in 1965, when I joined, to a ten-story two-building Colossus in 2005 when I retired. But then it stopped I guess. By then it was already less of a teeming place for reading and brooding and more of a desert except for a month before the end-sem exams when students would go there with their own note books to mug them up and consult with their classmates.
The lament of our generation about the advance of civilization, which Father would surely agree with, can be summed up as:
"The higher the tech, the lower the touch"
In 1960, when I was at our Kovur home for my summer vacation, it was my hobby to rent a pushbike once in a while and cross the river Pennar and travel to Nellore 5 km away just to meet up with my Literary Uncle (who was then working in the Post office there) and my Auntie. There were no phones then and so no prior appointment for my trips. I knew that Auntie would always be at home and Uncle would be home for his lunch. As soon as Auntie saw me get down from my rented bike, she would be all smiles and welcome me and offer a glass of freshly made hot coffee. And we two would talk for an hour and more about everything under the sun, mostly family gossip, and stories.
When Uncle arrived, he would be glad to see me and would ask me to join in his lunch which of course I would do just for company. And we would talk about the latest books we read, do the cross-word puzzle in the latest issue of the popular magazine, 'Navvulu Puvvulu' ('Laughs and Laurels'), and try the prize contest of coming up with rhymed captions for the front and back inner page pictures. And another hour would pass in fun and laughter and camaraderie.
In 2007, forty-seven years later, this Uncle and Auntie rang me up from Hyderabad and told me that they were visiting their grandson and his family in Adarsh Nagar and could we meet up for a session of Auld Lang Syne. I took down the address in my pocket note book and wanted to take my wife along with me in my good old Maruti Matchbox. And I gave the address to my son when he returned from his office. Within five minutes he gave me a printout of the road map from our Khairatabad home to their Adarsh Nagar home, downloaded from what he called Google Maps (GPS was yet to arrive in our car).
And with my wife doing the navigation we reached our destination without the need of using our cell phones. And I marveled at the hi-tech without which we would have been lost in the lanes and bylanes and alleys of Hyderabad.
As we entered their drawing room, I could sense that Uncle and Auntie themselves were feeling like visiting guests in their new ambiance. They were of course very happy to see us and asked us to be seated comfortably.
The TV in the drawing room was blaring out the cricket commentary of a one-day thriller, loud music was streaming in from the hi-fi system of the neighboring apartment, the kid in the house was busy on her computer, the hostess was away at her office, and we could hardly exchange any gossip or talk of the good old times or books we read or wrote. After an hour of this, we imbibed our lovely lemonade and uploaded our sumptuous snacks and we split...
I know I am bitching. But there it is!
Narlikar's complaint of libraries was also true of our physics labs at IIT KGP.
In 1966 when I was teaching my first year optics classes for freshmen, I was excited by the topic of the measurement of the speed of light...of how Galileo attempted to measure it with a lamp with a shutter in his hand and another in the hand of his assistant at the other end of the road, and failed. And how Romer succeeded in measuring it for the first time by ingenious observations of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter and how Bradley improved it by measurements of the astronomical stellar aberrations. And how Fizeau brought it down to earth with his toothed wheel and mirror on two neighboring hills, and how Foucault reduced it to his huge laboratory and how Michelson put his final seal on the accuracy of the speed of light in his dark room.
In 1995 there was a huge funding of the UG labs at IIT KGP to modernize them. And our HoD was at a loss how to spend all that money within a couple of months. So he ordered the latest German kit on the measurement of the speed of light in the first year lab. It cost a fortune, viz Rs 1,00,000, happily.
I was then the Guide and Supervisor of the 4th year lab and our HoD asked me to open the box that arrived from Germany and set it up under my 'supervision' in our 4th year lab before shifting it to the first year lab. I agreed because I was excited and curious. The box was not of a size that filled Foucault's lab but was just the size of a modern wall-mounted TV. Nor did it need a dark room.
It took just an hour for us to learn and set it up...it was fantastic...it needed just a 2-meter optical bench with a mirror at one end, and a black box at the other out of which a (modulated) narrow orange laser beam emerged and got reflected by the mirror. All it needed as an accessory was a double beam oscilloscope. I was amazed and thrilled by the hi-tech electronic gadgetry involved, of which I could see nothing...it was all enclosed and sealed hermetically.
The upshot of the whole thing was that we could only set up one experiment with it in the first year lab. The 'experiment' itself took fifteen minutes to do, and the calculation another fifteen minutes. The thing was over in half an hour and the students were happy to be let go but unhappy to have learned practically nothing. And we teachers were helpless...so was our HoD...Rs 1,00,000 to engage the students for an hour at most...while the Rs 1000-worth viscometer took our students all of 3 hours to do taking twenty odd readings and soiling their hands with castor oil. Calculations took another hour and viva half an hour...there was a terrific integral to be evaluated...
Great 'Touch and Feel'...
*************************************************************************************************************
It is second nature with old folks to grumble about everything new and brag about their good old times!
The other day I was reading an article in the Op-Ed page of DC by Jayant Narlikar in which he was wistfully bemoaning that the future of libraries as we know them is at stake...books and periodicals will soon be replaced by computers and online journals.
Narlikar is 5 years older to me and I can understand.
I myself watched the Central Library at IIT KGP expanding and blowing up from a 2-story affair in 1965, when I joined, to a ten-story two-building Colossus in 2005 when I retired. But then it stopped I guess. By then it was already less of a teeming place for reading and brooding and more of a desert except for a month before the end-sem exams when students would go there with their own note books to mug them up and consult with their classmates.
The lament of our generation about the advance of civilization, which Father would surely agree with, can be summed up as:
"The higher the tech, the lower the touch"
In 1960, when I was at our Kovur home for my summer vacation, it was my hobby to rent a pushbike once in a while and cross the river Pennar and travel to Nellore 5 km away just to meet up with my Literary Uncle (who was then working in the Post office there) and my Auntie. There were no phones then and so no prior appointment for my trips. I knew that Auntie would always be at home and Uncle would be home for his lunch. As soon as Auntie saw me get down from my rented bike, she would be all smiles and welcome me and offer a glass of freshly made hot coffee. And we two would talk for an hour and more about everything under the sun, mostly family gossip, and stories.
When Uncle arrived, he would be glad to see me and would ask me to join in his lunch which of course I would do just for company. And we would talk about the latest books we read, do the cross-word puzzle in the latest issue of the popular magazine, 'Navvulu Puvvulu' ('Laughs and Laurels'), and try the prize contest of coming up with rhymed captions for the front and back inner page pictures. And another hour would pass in fun and laughter and camaraderie.
In 2007, forty-seven years later, this Uncle and Auntie rang me up from Hyderabad and told me that they were visiting their grandson and his family in Adarsh Nagar and could we meet up for a session of Auld Lang Syne. I took down the address in my pocket note book and wanted to take my wife along with me in my good old Maruti Matchbox. And I gave the address to my son when he returned from his office. Within five minutes he gave me a printout of the road map from our Khairatabad home to their Adarsh Nagar home, downloaded from what he called Google Maps (GPS was yet to arrive in our car).
And with my wife doing the navigation we reached our destination without the need of using our cell phones. And I marveled at the hi-tech without which we would have been lost in the lanes and bylanes and alleys of Hyderabad.
As we entered their drawing room, I could sense that Uncle and Auntie themselves were feeling like visiting guests in their new ambiance. They were of course very happy to see us and asked us to be seated comfortably.
The TV in the drawing room was blaring out the cricket commentary of a one-day thriller, loud music was streaming in from the hi-fi system of the neighboring apartment, the kid in the house was busy on her computer, the hostess was away at her office, and we could hardly exchange any gossip or talk of the good old times or books we read or wrote. After an hour of this, we imbibed our lovely lemonade and uploaded our sumptuous snacks and we split...
I know I am bitching. But there it is!
Narlikar's complaint of libraries was also true of our physics labs at IIT KGP.
In 1966 when I was teaching my first year optics classes for freshmen, I was excited by the topic of the measurement of the speed of light...of how Galileo attempted to measure it with a lamp with a shutter in his hand and another in the hand of his assistant at the other end of the road, and failed. And how Romer succeeded in measuring it for the first time by ingenious observations of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter and how Bradley improved it by measurements of the astronomical stellar aberrations. And how Fizeau brought it down to earth with his toothed wheel and mirror on two neighboring hills, and how Foucault reduced it to his huge laboratory and how Michelson put his final seal on the accuracy of the speed of light in his dark room.
In 1995 there was a huge funding of the UG labs at IIT KGP to modernize them. And our HoD was at a loss how to spend all that money within a couple of months. So he ordered the latest German kit on the measurement of the speed of light in the first year lab. It cost a fortune, viz Rs 1,00,000, happily.
I was then the Guide and Supervisor of the 4th year lab and our HoD asked me to open the box that arrived from Germany and set it up under my 'supervision' in our 4th year lab before shifting it to the first year lab. I agreed because I was excited and curious. The box was not of a size that filled Foucault's lab but was just the size of a modern wall-mounted TV. Nor did it need a dark room.
It took just an hour for us to learn and set it up...it was fantastic...it needed just a 2-meter optical bench with a mirror at one end, and a black box at the other out of which a (modulated) narrow orange laser beam emerged and got reflected by the mirror. All it needed as an accessory was a double beam oscilloscope. I was amazed and thrilled by the hi-tech electronic gadgetry involved, of which I could see nothing...it was all enclosed and sealed hermetically.
The upshot of the whole thing was that we could only set up one experiment with it in the first year lab. The 'experiment' itself took fifteen minutes to do, and the calculation another fifteen minutes. The thing was over in half an hour and the students were happy to be let go but unhappy to have learned practically nothing. And we teachers were helpless...so was our HoD...Rs 1,00,000 to engage the students for an hour at most...while the Rs 1000-worth viscometer took our students all of 3 hours to do taking twenty odd readings and soiling their hands with castor oil. Calculations took another hour and viva half an hour...there was a terrific integral to be evaluated...
Great 'Touch and Feel'...
...Posted by Ishani
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