Rules of Teaching - 13

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Yesterday I was talking about the tutorial relations between mothers-in-law and their sons-in-law. 

And I quoted a comment I got from a Bengali bhadramahila who calls herself, 'Wanderlust', for inscrutable reasons. Apparently she wanders in the blogosphere from blog to blog like a butterfly flitting and sipping from flower to flower with ease, and then forgetting. This lady rebuked me that I was talking from my own bitter experience as a son-in-law, and I said there is little truth in her insinuation.

Today however I shall talk from experience...not only my own but of dozens of my friends, colleagues and contemporaries as well as my father and his friends. You see, we all belonged to what can be called the 'arranged marriage' generation unlike the 'love marriage' generation of today (not that it really matters...roses smelled the same for centuries).

In general the typical mother-in-law used to treat her son-in-law as an unfortunate intruder...a necessary interloper. 

Even though ours used to be a fairly closed space of South Indian brahmins with very few eligible bachelors who met the stringent requirements of subcaste, gotra and lineage, each family had its own customs and traditions like eating habits, bathing habits, sitting habits, reading habits (if any), and rituals. And every mother-in-law used to feel superior to her son-in-law's traditions and habits.

And then on every mother-in-law felt that they should have waited for a better specimen to arrive before latching on to the current one. It was a gamble in which she always felt an unlucky loser since there was no going back those days.


Her complaints were many and varied:


The chap eats with his arms on the table, starts his meal with pickle instead of the curry, talks with his morsel in his mouth, stretches his palm when the ghee arrives, slurps his sambar, eats not with his fingers but his entire hands, drinks up his rasam with his open palms dripping so that the liquid flows down his arms, eats fast, gets up and goes away in a hurry to wash his hands before her own husband is through with his meal....sings in his bath in a loud raucous voice as if he resents getting wet, leaves his socks as and where he removes them, polishes his shoes with his socks, insists that her timid daughter get on to the carrier of his shaking pushbike after it takes off, sleeps with the table lamp on, and refers to her by name instead of 'your highness' (or its equivalent) prefixed to it...

And when the kid arrives and he visits them to look the thing up he gifts her only a cotton handloom sari instead of the pure silk one that is their custom, dandles the kid with his office hands before cleaning them, feeds it toffees and junk food, spoils the brat, and shouts for her when it dirties itself instead of himself doing the needful...

And so on and so forth...

The son-in-law, on the other hand, tries his best in vain to win a word of appreciation or two during their lifetime. He walks the extra mile and asks his wife the secret of how exactly to please her mom without spending too much precious money on her, tries several things like buying cookery books and placing them in her hand, tries to praise her accomplishments like in music without inviting her to sing, takes her to the next grainy Telugu movie in the Netaji Auditorium and late night Kuchipudi dance programs in the shivering Tagore Open Air Theater...all to no avail.

With such irreconcilable attitudes between the two species, can there ever be true learning or teaching?

The loud answer is:

"Perhaps Never"


...Posted by Ishani

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Rules of Teaching - 12

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We now turn to the rather intricate issue of the possibility of teacher-taught relations between the plethora of in-laws.

Let us first take a typical son-in-law and his mother-in-law (you take yours, I will take mine).

Unfortunately, our great epics are silent on this question.

Neither Sri Ramji nor Ravanji appear to have interacted much with their (respective) moms-in-law, and vice versa. 

Nor for that matter the five Pandavas and the hundred Kauravas and the go-between Karna. 

Nor Sri Krishna or his brother Balaram.

History is also not of much help. None of the kings and princes of England seem to have learned much from their mom-in-laws. This includes the current ones.

Neither did Gandhiji...I read his autobiography which is silent on his mom-in-law who would obviously not have approved some of the treatment he gave to her darling daughter...like asking her to clean latrines...chee chee chee...

Not much of Nehurjee's mom-in-law is known either...not to talk of his latest heir, the dimpled one, who is yet to acquire one...seems to be debating on the pros and cons (cons more than the pros if any).

Nor Churchill nor Lincoln...I haven't watched the movie though.

The only President of the US I know who has shared his White House with his mom-in-law seems to be the current incumbent. And, learned folks attribute his premature graying to precisely this circumstance: 


http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2014/04/onion-tomato-garlic-3_4.html


Long time ago, when I as just a babe in the blogosphere, I posted a serious piece called: "Ask Dr GP":

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/03/ask-dr-gp.html


In this post Dr GP answers a dozen questions from his readers about their various personal problems one of which is:


Dear Dr GP: During our courtship my boy-friend was cheerful and charming till he met my mother the other day. Since then he has turned gloomy.

Dr GP: This is known as “Mom-in-law Genetic Depression”. Try your father on him. He will recover sensing that what your father has endured, he too can, if he tries hard enough.


At that time an unknown Bengali lady used to browse my blogs and she was furious about the answer of Dr GP for the vital question raised above. And she posted this critical comment:

wanderlust said... "Mom In law Genetic depression " -- Q.E.D .. through experience

I didn't respond to this comment then since I didn't wish to enter into a series of personal attacks and counter-attacks with a well-meaning bhadramahila. 

But now I can assure her that every doctor, especially psychiatrists, need not suffer from the disease they are about to cure or attempt to cure.

All dentists don't have to have had toothaches, cavities, and unwisdom teeth for which they underwent root canal, crowns in the jewel, extractions, false teeth, and furious flossing.

Nor do many eminent male gynecologists and obstetricians have to necessarily experience menstrual cycles, abortions, and Caesarian sections.

Nor do great physicists like Wheeler and Gell-Mann have to get sucked into black holes or ride spectator quarks.

And yet, I shouldn't take an overly hypocritical attitude about my own mom-in-law (bless her soul!), and my strenuous attempts at learning from her, more about which I save for tomorrow.

But I can state the result in a nutshell right away. 

I had said earlier that for a benign teacher-student relationship, it is essential that the student should be fearless and teacher shameless. These conditions usually do not obtain in this mom-in-law vs son-in-law relationship which is always rather fraught. The typical mom-in-law is a severe critic by nature. 

Listen to RKN:

...The democratic machinery is kept going through the exercise of the critical faculty. If someone should ask, "How should an opposition function?" the best answer would be, "In the manner of a traditional mother-in-law who watches the performance of household work by a daughter-in-law (or son-in-law as the case maybe) and follows her (or him) about with her comments" (bracketed entities mine). 

...Posted by Ishani

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Rules of Teaching - 11

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We now come to brothers and sisters and ask if there can be any fruitful teacher-student relation between them.

Unfortunately our epics are of no help here. They are all male-dominated. The society then must have been heavily patriarchal and biased against the girl-child. Maybe there was even female infanticide that was cleverly hidden.

Consider the fact that Pandavas were all of 5 but had no sister at all. When Kunti and Madri were offered kids they invariably chose boys...even before they were legally wed like Kunti wanted Karna, a bonny boy whom she abandoned reluctantly. He was later adopted happily by Radha and Suta. It is a thought if they would have equally gladly adopted their foundling if it were a girl. 

So the score there was 6-0.

And the 5 Pandava's begot only a boy each from their common wife, Draupadi...no girl. They were called Upapandavas, a title that I would have resented, like if I were named: Mini-Radhakrishnaiah...ok ok, they did have their individual names: 


Shrutavindhya, Sutasoma, Srutakirti, Satanika and Srutakarma.



Well, each of our great Pandavas had what the Telugu movies of my time charmingly called: 'Second Setups', apart from their common wife Draupadi: Bhim had 2 and Arjuna had all of 3. 

And they all  had sons from them: 


Yaudheya; Ghatothkacha & Sarvaga; Abhimanyu, Babhruvahana & Iravanta;  Niramitra; and Suhotra.



And their cousin, Karna, had 2 wives and altogether NINE sons between them.

No daughters at all:


...Strangely enough, no mention is made of female progeny of the Pandavas, although there MUST have been some...

http://pvravi.blogspot.in/2013/12/the-pandavas-their-matrimonial.html


I am not surprsied; for, Kauravas were all of 100 (century) of brothers with but one feeble excuse of a sister, Duhsala,  whose influence on them seems to be minimal.

Let us now come to Krishna who had an elder brother called Balaram and a much younger sister, Subhadra. The two brothers had a tiff: Balaram wanted his sister to be married to his fond student, Duryodhana, while Krishna wanted her to be the wife of his friend, Arjun. Krishna won as usual. But of course it would have made no mighty difference to Mahabharat either way: Subhadra turned out to be an unwilling student going to sleep when her hubby was narrating to her the tricks and treats of warfare.

We now come to Krishna himself and his kids. I have done some Googling on this and got this fascinating info (a must read):



Krishna married 16, 108 wives as requested by them! Out of 16,108 wives of Krishna, every wife had 10 children who had the same nature of Krishna! Thus, Krishna had totally 1,61,080 Children. Let us see the list of the 80 children born through the first 8 wives! (1) The names of the children of Rukmani: Prathyumnan, Charudeshnan, Sudheshnan, Charudehan, Seecharu, Saaraguptha, Bathracharu, Charuchandharin, Visaru & Charu! (2) The names of the children of Sathyabama are: Banu, Subanu, Swarabanu, Prabanu, Banuman, Chandrabanu, Pragathbanu, Athibanu, Sribanu & Prathibanu! (3) The 10 sons through Krishna’s third wife Jambhavathi: Samban, Sumithra, Prujith, Sadhajith, Sagasrajith, Vijayan,Chitrakethu, Vasuman, Dravidan & Kirathu. Krishna had more attachment with the sons through Jambhavathi. (4) The 10 sons through Krishna’s Fourth wife Sathya, who was the daughter of the king of Nagnajith: Veera, Chandra, Ashvasena, Chitragu, Vegavan, Virusha, Aman, Sangu, Vasu, Kunti. Kunti was very mighty among these ten sons. (5) The 10 sons through Krishna’s fifth wife Kalindhi: Shrutha, Kavi, Vrusha, Veera, Subahu, Bathra, Santhi, Dharsha, Pooranamashu & Somaha. (6) The 10 sons through Krishna’s Sixth wife Lakshmana, who was from the present Tamilnadu & then Madras State: Pragosha, Gathravaan, Simma, Bala, Prabala, Oorthuvaga, mahashakthi, Saga, Oja, & Abarajith. (7) The 10 sons through Krishna’s Seventh wife Mithra Vindha: Viruga, Harsha, Anila, Kiruthra, Varthana, Anandha, Mahamsa, Bhavana, Vahni and Shoothi. (8) The 10 sons through Krishna’s Eighth wife Badhra: Sankramajith, Brugathsena, Soora, Pragarana, Arijith, Jaya, Subathra, Vama, Ayu and Sathyaga. 

However, the grandson and successor of the Lord Krishna was Vajranabh. It was considered that this person was the one who built the Dwarakanath Temple that was called Trilok Sundar today.

http://www.quora.com/Mahabharata/Does-Lord-Krishna-had-any-children-which-later-became-his-successor


The partial list above mentions the tedious names of 80 of Krishna's children (out of 16,800). I guess they were all boys by their names...no girls. 

Hey! Krishna!

Balaram on the other hand has a scanty entry in wiki which mentions no child of his from his only wife, Revati. But the great Telugu movie, Mayabazar, is about the marriage of Abhimanyu with Balaram's sole daughter, Sasirekha...maybe it is all folklore...I have to check Bhagavata Puranam. 


Ramayan is no better.

The King of Ayodhya, Dasarath, went in for only sons when asked a wish for kids after his Putrakameshti Yag (according to my father). So Sri Ramjee had no sister to teach him not to go deep into the forest needlessly...just the other side of Sarayu would do. There are of course rumors in the cyber-world that Dasarath had a secret daughter, but let secrets stay secret.

Let us now turn to Ravanji.

His sister, Surpanakha, became very famous and was the root cause of all Ravanji's troubles in Ramayan. She was said to be very beautiful and hence jealous of Sita. I don't think she was a great teacher to his brother. But why blame sisters? Where did his native intelligence go?

Ravan apparently had another beautiful sister called Kumbhini:


Kumbhini - sister of Ravana and the wife of the demon Madhu, King of Mathura, she was the mother of Lavanasura. She was renowned for her beauty and later retired to the sea for penance.



Sigh! 


Apparently Vali and Sugriv didn't have any sister...not that it would have changed the course of Ramayan either way.

And Hanuman of course was a single child. There are rumors that he married a lady called Suvarchala but didn't consummate it in his pursuit of knowledge:


...Human did marry Suvarchala Devi. At the same time he is also considered as Brahmachari as he did not have any marital relationship with her...

http://qna.rediff.com/questions-and-answers/true-or-false-suvarchala-devi-is-name-of-lord-ha/14589066/answers



This detail of course is vital if Hanumaji were to stand for elections in India...how would he have answered the intricately personal question of his marital status by our CEC in a small box.


All this shows that our epics belittle sisters.

I often wonder what would have been the course of the Mahabharat War if Kaurava's were 100 girls with one brother while Pandava's were 5 sisters and no brother...and Karna too was a girl.

Obviously the 5 girls would have had no chance against the 100 (+1) of their cousins. The war which lasted all of 18 days would be over in 18 seconds...

The sole brother of the Kaurava's 100 sisters would have had nothing to do...except furiously blog like me... 


...Posted by Ishani
  

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Rules of Teaching - 10

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Yesterday I was talking about brothers and how unlikely it is that they teach or learn from one another, with examples from Ramayan.

Today let me talk about Mahabharat and continue our investigations on this topic. As we know, Mahabharat (unlike Ramayan) boasts of no empty idealism and is peopled with characters full of contradictions, very like ourselves. So there are innumerable lessons that can be learned from it (to no avail) and it is therefore called the Panchama Veda (Fifth Veda).

Let us take the Pandavas. 

Each one of them is not only gifted differently but also curiously.

Yudhistir is the embodiment of of Dharma: truth, justice and honesty, and later, much learning during his exile. But he was a sucker for gambling and betting and playing with loaded dice and getting cheated and losing his brothers, wife and kingdom. A frightfully contradictory combo. I don't think he would pull on easily as a member of the modern betting syndicates ruled by Dons living in Dubai and Karachi alternately.

Bhim excels in macework and is given to taking blood-curdling oaths. And is famous for splitting the lower limbs of his foes and hitting them below the belt under the direction of Krishna. He is a famous eater but also a famous cook...an unlikely combo again...all great chefs and cooks I know are poor eaters suffering from chronic indigestion, acidity, and sugar. On the other hand, voracious eaters tend to be bad cooks...they are always in a hurry to eat.

Arjun is a great archer and strategist. He is also, funnily, capable of acting as a eunuch (pardon me...a transgender) excelling in dancing (without clapping as in the sleeper compartments of the Howrah-Madras Mail of my times).

Nakul is a great horseman. He is said to have the curious gift of riding a horse in pouring rain but never getting wet. But he was very proud of his good looks as testified by their common wife, Draupadi, and so can be termed a narcissist to beat all narcissists.

Sahadev is great at tending cows apart from being a great warrior who vowed to kill Shakuni and accomplished it finally. He also was the only one among his brothers to have tasted a bit of his father's flesh (after his, i.e. Pandu's, death as per his, i.e. Pandu's, wish). With the result that he was blessed with a knowledge of the past and future and knew that there would be a war to end all wars and Krishna is indeed God. Naturally, Krishna didn't want him to spoil the fun and cursed Sahadev that he would be incapable of answering any question put to him by anyone except with another question, like:

"Why do you answer each of my questions with a counter-question?"

"Why not?"

(We had a very popular chemistry teacher at IIT KGP by name Sahadev Banerjee whose son was a topper in our physics departmnet. But neither the father nor the son evaded questions from students and teachers, respectively).

And then there is this Karna. He is a great archer rivaling Arjun and could have won the war easily for his acquired masters, but he was addicted to charity. He could never refuse any gift asked by unscrupulous brahmins like me. Unwise charity can be a curse...none of the famous American donors like the buffets and gates is likely to end up dead on the battlefield like our poor Karna born of Kunti as a direct result of their charities.

So we are done with the 5 (or 6) Pandavas with their incongruous traits. Obviously none could learn much from the others or teach them well.

Kauravas, on the other hand, were too many in number...a hugely unwieldy class resembling my Jumbo first year classes at IIT KGP.

Duryodhan is an equal to Bhim in his macework but he was prone to enormous jealousy and wickedness. Also to ask other people's wives to sit on his lap. But he is gifted with the rare boon of the ability to sit hiding in deep water for days together without breathing. But he was also a sucker for insults, which infirmity leads to his ultimate death.

Duhshasan is devoted to his elder brother, but all that he is famous for is to drag other people's unclean wives into public and try to disrobe them...unsuccessfully.

Can these variety of skills be taught and learned from brother to brother?

The answer is a resounding "No"

That brothers can be endowed with unlike gifts is attested by our own famous brothers, RK Narayan and RK Laxman.

The elder one is so famous a writer that many of his readers wonder why he wasn't given the Nobel. 

The younger one is an equally famous cartoonist.

RKN never learned much of cartooning from his chota bhai.

RKL tried to write some novels like his bada bhai but no one wonders why he didn't get a Nobel for his writings...there is unfortunately no Nobel for cartooning.

At IIT KGP we had two famous and popular brothers who were great teachers: Dr Ram Gopal Chatterjee and Dr Braj Gopal Chatterjee. The elder, however, was in Physics and the younger in Chemistry. But they were never seen together...not to talk of learning from each other. RGC was known as Ram-da (SDM used to say that ramda in East Bengali mans a weapon like a sword) while BGC was known as Bhom-da because he had a voice like a veritable Diwali atom bomb.

That about sums up my thesis...with honorable exceptions like the Wright Brothers, Warner Brothers, Marx Brothers and such.

...Posted by Ishani

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Rules of Teaching - 9

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http://www.davegranlund.com/cartoons/wp-content/uploads/arc371.jpg

Let us now investigate if brothers (as opposed to cousins) can have fruitful teacher-student relationships and learn from one another.

The short answer seems to be: 'rather not'

Let us take Ramayan first.

Laxman was devoted to his elder brother but doesn't seem to have learned much from him: he deserted his wife and was separated from her for all of 14 years unlike Sri Ramji (1 + a few thousand later on). And then gave her a high dose of sleeping pills to alleviate her pangs of conjugal separation.   

Their brother Bharat was a different kettle of fish...he rebuked his own mom and refused to rule...like (and unlike) our dimpled Prince.

Much less is known about Shatrughn apart from his high-sounding name. Of course we have a more well-known Shatrughn in our filmy and politics duniya...he too doesn't seem to have learned much from his siblings of whom not much is known except this charming detail:

...Sinha was born in Patna, Bihar to Bhubaneswari Prasad Sinha & Shyama Devi Sinha. He is the youngest of four brothers — Ram, Lakshman, Bharat and himself...He is married to former Miss India Poonam Sinha (née Chandiramani)..

For the record, the original Ramayan chap married a cousin of Sita by name Shrutakeerti...

This detail about our BJP Shatrughn having three elder brothers named Raam, Laxman and Bharat reminds me of my friend and colleague, Late Prof V Radhakrishnan, well known for his vast knowledge and wit. He christened his first son: Sri Raam. And when his second son was born, my friend NP asked him if he was christening his newborn as Laxman. And VR laughed and replied:

"No way boss...the series ends here!"

We now come to the brothers Vali and Sugriv.

Sugriv didn't seem to have learned much from his valiant elder brother, Vali, who banished him. And did something much worse...he got Vali assassinated by supari (contract) killing and then forgot all about the contract for a long while; and then took his brother's wife as his own.

We next have Ravanji who refused to learn from the benign teaching of his younger brother, Vibhishan. Also from the sage advice of his other brother, Kumbhakarn, who was very brave and valorous but addicted to sleeping in the class rooms.

Tomorrow we move on to examples from the Mahabharat on the subject.

For now I have to admit that I have no firsthand info about brothers...I have none, although I am blessed with half a dozen sisters.

At times I wish I had a brother, and at other times, no.

If I did have one, I guess he would have been my mirror image: taking to blogging as profession and teaching as hobby.

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Postscript on Ramayan

We have another famous Sri Ramji talking ill of his namesake:

...Responding to a query, Jethmalani said that Ram was a bad husband as he sent his wife Sita to exile for no specific reason. "Ram was a bad husband. I don't like him at all. Just because some fisherman said something, he sent that poor woman (Sita) to vanvaas (exile). Lakshman was even worse. When Sita was abducted, Ram asked him to go find her as she was abducted under his watch. Lakshman simply excused himself saying she was his sister-in-law and he never looked at her face, so he wouldn't be able to identify her." Jethmalani said to laughter from the audience...

...Posted by Ishani

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Rules of Teaching - 8

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http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/pagoda/6291/rav.jpg

If one is humble enough, and shrewd enough, one can learn a lot from one's enemies who can be the best of teachers.

In our pre-university English text there was this fascinating prose piece which became my favorite. It was titled:

"Rama learns statecraft from Ravana"

The piece, if I remember right, was taken from the English 'Ramayana' written by the eminent writer and statesman, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, and  by the way, one of the earliest winners of Bharat Ratna, a title now open to cricketers and singers and such others. I read that our BJP ex-PM now ailing, and our Congress ex-PM now dead and gone unsung, are popular claimants for this ultimate award.

Anyway, reverting to Ramayana it is said that Hanuman, although he burnt lots of its spires and buildings in pique, as well as Angad who was a visiting peace-emissary of Sri Ramji, were vastly impressed by Sri Lanka and sang its praises to Sri Ramji on their return to the mainland. 

They credited most of Sri Lanka's wealth and beauty to its Ruler, Ravanji (I am sorry if you are offended by the 'ji' I conferred on the demon, Ravan, but the context deserves it...unlike the 'ji' conferred on Osama by our loose cannon Congress G Sec Rajaji, of whom more later).

Apparently, the Sri Lanka of Ravanji didn't have any problems with its Current Account Deficit...its golden beaches and swell resorts and swaying palms and kneading spas attracted hordes of tourists from the rich countries to its east and north and west and earned plenty of dollars...to its south, unfortunately, lay the ice-bound Antarctica, now famous for our manned missions.  

Neither was there trouble with its Fiscal Deficit...Sri Lanka's streets reportedly were paved with gold and all that Ravanji had to do was to just peel it off and mint coins as and when needed.

And its citizens loved their King to distraction and voted him to power repeatedly...once with as many as 5,70,000 votes. 

Ravanji's sister, Surpanakha, was reputed to be one of the beauty queens of her time:


...The Tamil poet Kamban offers a kinder description of Surpanakha than Valmiki's, describing her instead as a very beautiful woman with long, beautiful, fish-shaped eyes (validating her birth name of Minakshi), a slender figure and bewitching personality... 


It is a different matter that she wore long polished nails like many Bollywood actresses of my time.

Ravanji was a kind ruler and there was never any problem of unemployment or hunger or thirst...after all his was a tiny island blessed with two copious monsoons unlike Sri Ramji's Ayodhya which suffers from a truant monsoon all the time.

But monsoons alone do not make for riches and glory...it is the Ruler's statecraft that does it.

So Sri Ramji was very impressed by the spy reports of Hanuman and Angad about the love and affection and efficacy of Ravanji as an ideal ruler. And since he was as yet a Prince, like our dimpled one, Sri Ramji didn't know much of statecraft and was eager to learn it but was dubious if Ravanji would be willing to teach him after all that he had done to him...laying him low with the help of his brother's borrowed secrets.

And then arrived Sage Vasishtha, the Kula Guru of Ayodhya, and encouraged Sri Ramji to walk up to the defeated demon on his deathbed and bow to him and praise him and become his research scholar.

And Sri Ramji did as directed. 

And Ravanji was immensely flattered and gave out all of TEN tips about statecraft, all the ten of which I had to mug up to get that first class.

As Sri Ramji walked into Sri Lanka he was charmed with its beauty. Seeing the sight of Sri Ramji's fervor, Vibhishan offered to make Sri Ramji the King of Sri Lanka. But of course, Sri Ramji was already homesick and was pining to get back to his comparatively barren Ayodhya saying that after all it was his motherland:

"Janani janmabhumischa swargadapi gariyasi"

meaning, one's motherland is better than even heaven.

Unfortunately the Queen and the Prince of our latest Raam-Ravan Battle for Lok Sabha never bothered to learn statecraft from the Ruler of our modern Sri Lanka-allotrope, viz Gujerat. They were content to demonize him as the rakshas who killed his own subjects.

This, in spite of thousands of reports brought back from the migrants of Ayodhya who went to Gujerat out of hunger. They had said Gujerat has 24-hour power and water even in its villages, and everyone there praised and loved their Ruler returning him with mandate after mandate.

But did our dynasty listen? No...it requires, as I said in the beginning, humility and shrewdness to learn from one's enemy, which they didn't obviously have. With the disastrous result that their MPs now sit huddled in a corner of the Lok Sabha like so many chicks in a coop, fighting to be recognized as a viable opposition.

And the Congress Rajaji I mentioned above has openly said that their Prince lacks ruler's instincts and is averse even to leading his dissipated party from the front in the Parliament, not to talk of learning statecraft from his enemies...


...Posted by Ishani   

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Rules of Teaching - 7

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Whether they admit it or not, students do learn from their teachers...if nothing, at least how not to teach.

And whether they admit it or not, teachers too learn from their students...if nothing, at least how to doze with head erect and eyes open.

But if there is a class of students eager to learn and a teacher willing to teach, nothing can be a more happy hour.

That teachers learn from their students has been openly admitted by none other than the greatest physics teacher of my time, Feynman:


...The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don' have to teach. Never....


It is clear from the context that Feynman is talking about his undergraduate students and not research students that he didn't have many. So, it looks Feynman wouldn't have accepted a faculty position at our TIFR. Never.

In order to learn from one's students, a teacher must be shameless and his students fearless. Indeed the business of a teacher is to remove fear of the subject from his students' minds and of himself.

I was indeed fortunate that I was just 21 when I started teaching undergraduates at IIT KGP in 1965 and my students were just 3 or 4 years younger to me. Pretty soon I learned not to feel shy with them, and they, not to fear me at all. Word spreads in a small campus, and shamelessness becomes a habit, going right into the post-retirement blogging phase.

That a student from whom you want to learn mustn't fear you, and that you shouldn't shy away from him, is clear from another Feynman quote:


...I also met Niels Bohr. His name was Nicholas Baker in those days, and he came to Los Alamos with Jim Baker, his son, whose real name was Aage Bohr. They came from Denmark, and they were very famous physicists, as you know. Even to the big shot guys, Bohr was a great god.

We were at a meeting once, the first time he came, and everybody wanted to see the great Bohr. So there were a lot of people there, and we were discussing the problems of the bomb. I was back in a corner somewhere. He came and went, and all I could see of him was from between people's heads...

...Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, "Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He's the only guy who's not afraid of me, and will say when I've got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we're not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr Bohr. Get that guy and we'll talk with him first."...


No student of mine at KGP was ever afraid of me, I guess. After the class, a few would regularly troop into my office to get clarifications from me but didn't know that I was clarifying for myself most of the time. And quite a few used to land up at odd times in my Qrs and sit down and fire their questions at me. And that way everyday was a viva for me.

One fine Sunday morning when my wife and I were planning to go shopping to Gole Bazaar, Vibhat Nair walked in and sat down with a glum face. And I asked him what the matter was and he said:

"Give me without math and equations the answer to my query: In classical electrodynamics, I read that a charge circulating would emit em radiation of the same frequency as its own circular motion. But we know that protons in a synchrotron go round at low radio frequencies but they emit hard X-rays. How do they do it?"

That query was new to me and I told him I have no offhand hand-waving answer to that and asked him for a day's time. 

The next day I happened to see him near our locker-stand and stopped him and asked him for a paper and gave him my answer with no equations at all but just a simple diagram. And I can never forget the understanding twinkle in his face. And that query together with a few more of Alabhya Singh and mine own gave me an article titled "Radiation from circular orbits: some conceptual questions" in an educational journal that I am happy with:


http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9120/30/1/003


And here is the story of how I learned a lot quickly from my students in the fourth year lab at KGP in the mid-1990s:

During the early 1960s we had fantastic state-of-the-art electronics labs in our UG labs at our Andhra University in Vizagh. We had to handle all those glowing vacuum tubes like diodes, triodes, tetrodes, pentodes, hexodes, VR tubes, thyratrons, klystrons and magnetrons. And do experiments building audio amplifiers, radio amplifiers, video amplifiers, IF amplifiers, oscillators, mixers, converters, modulators, demodulators; and build on our own a complete superhet radio receiver, calibrate it, and receive music from AIR and Radio Ceylone; and then go on to wave guides in the microwave lab and measure real and imaginary parts of the dielectric constant of benzene and make Cole-Cole plots and such hi-fi things.

And in my interview for joining at IIT KGP as a faculty, Professor HN Bose asked me questions on these (guided by me) and took me in at once...the UG labs at IIT KGP then had primitive experiments in their fourth year lab with few teachers willing to sit there, and I was pushed into that lab class from the very beginning (and retired from there).

So in the beginning it was child's play for me to look after the students in that lab and most of the time I was reading up QM and EM and GR books for my own benefit, sitting quietly in one of the four gang of teachers' chairs there, interrupted by periodic trips to the canteen; and doing my Ph D in theory with SDM.

And my seniors were lab-in-charges and they gradually replaced vacuum tubes with transistors and then chips in about 3 decades. But I still used to feel that 4th year students could do more electronics experiments and learn and enjoy. 

All of a sudden, in 1995, our new HoD, Prof MLM, felt that I was doing very little for the department and the first thing he did was to make me lab-in-charge of the fourth year lab, a coveted post...it adds to one's CV I was told...

And so the first thing I had to do was to get to know all the experiments that the students were then doing, as quickly as possible. And, instead of asking my predecessor, I decided to sit with one pair of students each day for all of 3 hours and pretend to take their lab viva...and in about a month I covered all the extant experiments thoroughly...learning from my students all the time without, perhaps, their knowing it. 

And then I replaced all the single beam oscilloscopes with double-beam ones, soldering irons with bread boards, old signal generators with latest ones and introduced many new experiments with chips, and all in all I felt happy.

In the very next semester, I was kicked upstairs into a new position created for me called: 'Guide & Adviser of the 4th Year Lab'; and my ex-student, Prof SKR, was made its lab-in-charge. And I learned much more from him, and for the next decade till my retirement we two formed a team like that mother-in-law cum daughter-in-law team in a TV ad for Surf Excel, or some such, of that time. 

Prof SKR (HoD) was here in my Hyderabad home last summer for a couple of hours to look me up and nostalgize..

Great time I had learning from my students at KGP...I thank them all hereby...


...Posted by Ishani   

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