 I am going to speak to you today on a topic which is I believe very relevant to all of us and that topic is how do we build a nation where dreams of Indians come true. I am specifically going to talk about a journey to an exciting academic career which is the cornerstone of our lives as teachers here. I would say not just teachers, but even budding teachers and budding professionals including those who are doing their ME or Ph.D. degrees at their respective places. I will be uploading all these slides later and the video lecture will also be kept on the moodle subsequently. However, there is one specific request I have, I have prepared a two page write up as summary of the points of this lecture which will be uploaded on the moodle, but I would appreciate if during the tea time the coordinators could take printouts of this two page write up and distribute it amongst the participants. Believe me I have been told that this kind of summary sheets are very useful for people to recapitulate some of the points. Do not be frightened by 105 slides that you see here. This for example is the busiest slide of the whole lot. All other slides will contain very little material. I would like you to listen to me and think about what I say rather than reading slides. So I begin by recapitulating the dreams of young Indians and when I say young Indians I do not have only young students in mind, but everybody who is young at heart including me for example, Professor Sukhatme who is who is much older to me in age and yet he is younger than many of us. I remember another person who is very old in age, Professor Jimmy Isaac who is probably older than all of us and yet he is perhaps the youngest of the lot. So when I say dreams of young Indians I am talking about dreams of all of us, but primarily of course dreams of the youth. I have tried to put myself to the shoes of the youth and thought of what could be the dreams. I was quite surprised to find that what I am thinking today was exactly what my thoughts were when I myself was a young student studying in a college. So all our youth require a degree and a good job that is a good dream to have that is a common dream. Everybody wants a good career path again no problems on this dream. Everybody wants to become successful, common sense perhaps and everybody wants to lead a happy life. You will notice that these are all oxymorons for example, I have not come across anyone who by design wishes to lead an unhappy life so this is this is the you will also agree that these would be dreams that would be dream by the youth across the world. Every human being would have these dreams and every human being would be working throughout the life to achieve these dreams. But if we are talking about building India where such dreams come true it would be useful to reflect upon how must our India be as a nation as a society. First and foremost a prosperous nation. Let me emphatically state that there is no merit in poverty people remain poor only because they cannot dream big and they cannot act vigorously and they cannot act methodically. The methods differ depending upon the era in which a society lives. Today is an era of knowledge economy which means that the wealth generation engines of any nation will depend heavily on the amount of knowledge that percolates, the amount of knowledge that gets generated and the amount of knowledge that gets used. All of this is more and more into the hands of professionals such as engineers and scientists and that means that if we have to build a prosperous nation all of us as teachers and all our students will have to do a bit more than the rest of the country so that the entire nation is ready to offer realization of such dreams. We need life of love and harmony. You know this requires two things one is of course a good legal system fortunately we have a good legal system although people say that law and justice sometimes behave like distant cousins in India. So for example cases take years to get a get a result positive or negative whichever way we are building those systems all. The second facet is the people themselves and their mindsets. Please remember that the kind of diversity that India has is practically unparalleled. We are not just one of the biggest countries China is in fact bigger than us but China is far less diverse than us. We have all major religions of the world we have all major ethnicities of the world we have many major languages and we have n number of divisions such as caste and this and that and so on. As an added attraction we specialize in fighting over any one of these differences. So for example somebody speaks Telugu I speak Marathi we will fight over that somebody belongs to another religion I will fight over that and sometimes these fights become murky. We have therefore a far greater problem to build this kind of disparities together and move ahead as a nation. This problem is not faced by any other country in the world we are facing that problem. In fact I call India as a mini model of the world in this respect of diversity and if we succeed in the model that we use to succeed could perhaps become the models for the rest of the world to follow but it is very very important to have a life of love and harmony. The nation must be full of opportunity it must give an opportunity to anybody and everybody to do exactly what one desires to do. Somebody wants to become an entrepreneur somebody wants to become a research scientist somebody wants to just do a good job somebody wants to live comfortably all of these must be provided for by a nation sadly we are unable to create opportunities for all. So equitability in the opportunities is very very critical we are moving towards that but we will have miles to go yet it is in this broader context of the dreams and the requirement for their realization that I speak of teaching and learning today to you. There are topics which are very close to our heart because we are all teachers and learners. Let us analyze teaching in general in the universe we are not the only live living species in this world there are animal species there is a plantation the life exists in variety of forms but human beings have something special about them consider other animal species consider birds who teaches birds to build a nest I do not know how many of you have seen a nest very closely in the veranda of my house birds will typically come before monsoon season and they will build a nice nest. I found that once a snake was trying to enter the nest and was unable to do so so they built a secure nest they built structurally a sound nest it does not fall down and yet the small kid birds which are born inside that nest grow to a level where they can then be pushed out learn to fly and go out they do not attend birds do not attend civil engineering classes birds do not attend anything else and yet they build such nest most probably the knowledge of building nest passes genetically to them. Perhaps there is some learning where the young birds see and copy the other birds building nest but that must be a very limited thing unfortunately the human knowledge grows non-genetically because human beings generate knowledge extremely fast if we were like birds then it would have been nice for example if I am a good java programmer or a database expert my son at the age of three years would start writing a square scripts of complex queries rather than struggling to learn his own native term that does not happen in order to handle this hugely growing knowledge and hugely accumulated knowledge handle means what to pass it on to the next generation of human beings humans created an institution that institution is called a teacher. So there are no teachers in other species except of course in nice books some of you might have read Jonathan Livingstone seagull for example now that is an example of a hypothetical teacher teaching seagulls how to start with a level flight but a teacher is a unique institution to humanity teachers are given the responsibility of not just passing on the knowledge to the new generation but consolidating knowledge and codifying it and also to generate new knowledge in the process. In order to help this institution called a teacher humanity created support structures these support structures were variously named in the old times. So you will notice if you read the history temples, mosques, churches ashrams as we call them they were all support structures to permit the teachers to perform their functions today the support structures are called colleges, universities, departments and whatever. However what has happened is something very peculiar you will notice that today the support structures such as colleges and universities are called institutions and the original institution of a teacher is now seen as an employed person in one of these institutions. There is a certain difference between me working with the responsibility of an institution as a teacher versus me working as an employer of some other institution. My commitment is of a different kind my enthusiasm is of a different kind the realization of the great responsibility put on me by the humanity just does not exist very often if I am working as an employee of an institution. We speak of autonomy of academic institutions the autonomy of an academic institution is only measured in terms of the autonomy that that institution gives to her teachers. You know one of the reasons why we are so proud of the IIT system the autonomy of a teacher is so well preserved here indeed it gives a chance to every teacher to learn to behave like an institution it is expected of a teacher because the entire freedom that is given to a teacher. I wish that this kind of autonomy is practiced more and more in all other colleges and is actually valued by the teachers for what that autonomy means a teacher is always needed in the life of people when we are young we of course have teachers in the schools and colleges but consider when you are still younger somewhere between the age of 0 and 6 years who are the teachers parents and elders are the teachers a young child emulates the behavior of the parents a young child learns from the parents and therefore parents and the elders including elder brothers and sisters are your teachers. Then of course you come to schools and colleges where you come across normal teachers but once you pass out who are your teachers it is stupid to assume that I do not require a teacher in rest of my life even at the age of 64 years I do require teachers who are these teachers well in the early era of our career senior colleagues are our teachers and I will tell you all of your teachers the amount of advice and the amount of good practices that you get from your senior colleague teachers is invaluable they are your teachers although they do not call themselves your teachers because you are their colleagues but that is an enormous amount of learning that happens and therefore they remain your teachers friends are also your teachers and teachers of course are teachers. So, today we are going to talk about teachers you and me you all are better informed today I am comparing teachers of today as of as as opposed to teachers of yester years well there is a continuum. So, it is extremely difficult to say all teachers and young teachers generically but it is possible to consider let us say people who became teachers somewhere between 30 to 50 years ago versus teachers who became teachers in last 15 or 20 years you would agree that a majority of the participants in this workshop are people who became teachers between last year and say 20 years of time of course, there are several senior colleagues but they will also relate to what I am trying to say. So, how do I analyze teachers today today's teachers are better informed I hope you will appreciate the fact that 50 years ago when we were students and we were collecting information from the world the sources of information were very limited newspapers and radio there was no television. In fact the major source of information was all India radio and the major source of entertainment was Binaka Gitmal I do not know how many of you remember those old as compared to that today's teachers are far better informed they are highly ambitious it is not that we were not ambitious in our times but the ambitions have acquired multiple dimensions. Teachers in the old times were ambitious to the same extent that the society was ambitious at that time look at India 50 years ago and look at India today 50 years ago when we won our freedom we are nearly trying to say that look first of all how do we guarantee our continued existence peacefully. Then we are worried about feeding our population today's India is different wealth generation has acquired the due recognition that it deserves today India is growing in leaps and bounds and therefore, the dreams and aspirations are bigger and greater. So, there is absolutely no question no doubt and nothing wrong in being highly ambitious most of our teachers therefore, are also highly ambitious they are also intensely competitive because to come to where they are they have to struggle very hard to go through the grilling process which has brought them to this stage. Let me recall that when I was seeking admission to an engineering college of course, there were very few engineering colleges then but very few sought admission to those colleges the requirement was that you should get a first class degree first class marks in your higher secondary. Anybody who got a first class generally got admission to an engineering college of course, depending upon your marks you got admission to either this college or that college or whatever. And I remember very proudly that I had scored a lot of marks I think 80 percent marks or something of course, today I do not dare tell 80 percent as my marks where everybody laughs at them I think I would be considered a lagga or with those kind of marks. So, you have come through very intense competition you have struggled to get admission to science or engineering streams you have struggled to do well because without a first class you cannot become a teacher through such intense competition you have come to become a teacher here again within the teaching profession you continue to be competitive in order to go further in your own career or your achievements commensurate with these three extraordinary things that you have come to this stage where as I said you are better informed you are very ambitious and you have come through intense competition. Accordingly then your achievement should be extraordinary please reflect whether your achievements are extraordinary as compared to let us say teachers whose achievements you all know from yesterday you will find that your achievements are not commensurate with your own abilities with your own hard work that you have done so far. I wish to analyze with you some of the reasons why these achievements appear to be less than what you believe they ought to be or what we all believe they ought to be as a teacher as a researcher. So, you all teach you all do research do you think you teach as well as you ought to or as well as you can or as well as you want to do you think that you are able to conduct research as well as you wish to or as well as you can I think the answer would be no in fact the answer is no always for anyone who tries to analyze one's achievements, but it is a bigger no for a large majority of our colleagues in India today. It is important to analyze why such a feeling comes into us why is it that we believe that we have not achieved or we are not able to achieve what we wish to achieve. There are multiple reasons mostly people think of these reasons in terms of either the non availability of infrastructure or non availability of facilities or whatever whatever whatever of course they are all genuine problems. I am going to however consider only one problem which I see as a major issue which prevents us from achieving what we ought to achieve and that has absolutely nothing to do with anything which is worldly. It has nothing to do with infrastructure it has nothing to do with facility it has nothing to do with money of course all all the teachers particularly the teachers in science and engineering complaint that they are far less paid than what they deserve to be paid. I believe the government has addressed this little bit in the last pay commission, but you know these pay commissions come one in ten years and by the time ten years pass you are again at the bottom of the pyramid in terms of the money that you want. So, whatever it is my analysis says that none of these things are important my analysis says that the most important thing which stops us from achieving is the attitude. The majority of my lecture today is revolving around this aspect of attitude. All of us know of course that a positive attitude permits us to succeed gives us a greater chance to succeed and a negative attitude could clobber up our own advancement that is well known. But what I want to analyze is one particular aspect of this attitude how is this attitude set? This attitude is set by the rat race for marks you and I should argue that look we are teachers we do not compete in the rat race for marks, but we make other students compete in the rat race for marks because we are teachers. Sadly I am not talking about what you do today or what we do today I am talking about what we did for a majority of our early life remember at the age of five or six we entered the school. Since then till we pass the school till we pass the college we were constantly being reminded that we shall be measured only by the marks that we score in the exams and that is what has set the rat race. You see today the impact of that rat race for example people want to compete for admission to the well known institutions such as IIT. There are several young students capable students who live aside everything in life including their school go to some coaching class for one year or two year and just prepare for that competitive exam why? So that they should score better marks than others so that they will succeed in the rat race. What is the impact of any rat race? A rat race creates few winners, but it creates many losers well that is again well known, but what is the impact of it? Those few winners acquire over confidence oh I have won this race so I am I am better than others so I am more confident. Sadly sometimes this over confidence borders on arrogance I know everything I do not need to learn in. Many of you would have come across such over confident and arrogant students when they join the first year particularly in well known institutions and particularly those who get the branch of their choice for example. We come across them every year as many of you would know we have been fortunate in attracting more than 70 or 75 people of the top 100 ranks to IIT and my department compressor department get the majority of them. And you should see I used to teach CS 101 the first year programming course for last three years and I could see the kind of over confidence and arrogance so very visible. Believe me we have to spend almost one full semester to pulp that arrogance down to earth because an arrogance will always cloud the learning abilities of any human being. This is the problem with over confidence and arrogance fortunately this problem is limited to a few winners of the rat race what about the losers? The losers acquire diffidence oh may be I am not that good. Sometimes the diffidence borders on despondence and if losers become despondent then they sometimes get into huge kinds of problems psychological problems you would have heard of people committing suicide. You would have heard of people getting into mental pressures all of this happens because they have lost some rat race here or some rat race there. In real life a majority of us have participated in such rat races and we have won some rat races and lost some rat races. Analyze a student who is getting admitted to your college for example that student might have wanted to join IIT Bombay Compressor's department that student might have worked her for two years did not succeed well that student has lost one rat race. However that student succeeded in cracking some other competitive example or doing very well in his spell standard whatever and got into another good institution getting compressor that student is a winner rat in that rat race. Effectively what I am trying to say is most of us win somewhere and lose somewhere and therefore we carry in our mind a very complex attitude of some over confidence and arrogance and a lot of diffidence and despondency and rest of our life I submit continues to be affected by this attitude which is so well formed over so many years. What I suggest is we must have a confident attitude quote unquote confident this is the only way we can unleash our potential and as teachers this is the only way we can unleash the potential of our students there is no other way how do you build the right kind of confidence how do you build the right kind of approach in furthering your career your happiness your achievements is the matter that I would like to spend time sometime discussing with you. What I have listed here are some cardinal principles which I have discovered as important over last 40 years there is nothing sacrosanct about them most of them are well known but we often forget their importance in our life there are many others of course and I am not the first person to initiate them you would have read them at many places but I would like to identify and articulate some of them because I do believe that they are more important relative to several others particularly in the career of teachers the first cardinal principle for teachers is to acquire knowledge. Now this is a nonsense you would say that is because acquiring knowledge is the prime responsibility of a teacher anyway you cannot teach well unless you have acquired knowledge and since new knowledge keeps getting generated a first piece this is obviously a full time work for most of us but I would like to point out here that when you acquire knowledge you do not necessarily work to acquire knowledge of all domains of course it is not possible to understand each and every domain perfectly but it is necessary to appreciate and understand the basic knowledge in all domains we build silos in our mind we need to destroy those silos how are those silos built we have interesting situations we have for example chemical engineering civil engineering mechanical engineering electrical engineering computer science already we see that students studying one branch do not pay much attention to the other branches science and engineering is separated commerce science and engineering is further separated we have created these silos and we ourselves are affected with these silos we forget that the purpose of creating so many silos or nomenclature to handle effectively the growing body of knowledge was growing so fast that you could not encompass all of it many of you will recall that historically there was in fact no engineering there were alchemists and philosophers who did maths who did chemistry who did engineering everything slowly these different things came up but the net result and this is not today by the way I will give you one instance since my friend Prasad Gaitonday is sitting here about 1983-84 the first PCs came into being early PCs were horizontally laid boxes so they would sit on your table one day suddenly we found a vertical model most of the PCs that you see today are vertical model but this first one was very interesting what somebody had done is taken the four resting pieces below that horizontal piece and fitted them opposite and just under the law the first such PC came to my lab it was given to some of our students and they were working on it when I went there they had opened it up and I saw that and I was horrified and I asked those students do not you see there is something very wrong with this PC so one fellow circle saloon says no sir it has been working fine for last two days so I said where is the center of gravity of this machine the fellow said beg your pardon sir I said center of gravity you see the heaviest piece in a PC is the power supply sadly the way this inversion was done the power supply was sitting on that top it should have been at the bottom of any any piece of equipment the other fellow was smart he said sir the power supply should not be here the power supply should be at the bottom then I said what about the heat flow both became very curious what heat flow I said there is a fan it is supposed to take the hot air out it is supposed to circulate air then they started looking at it what was happening is that there was a fan of course in its original place now there were these carts PCBs which were jutting out like this and the PCB at the bottom end would automatically obstruct any flow of air because the because the fan was kept at this point so they had inverted it like this which was rather safe either the fan should have been in the center or there should have been multiple fans or whatever but these are the thoughts which occurred to me why because I had done a 5 year engineering course in which first two and half years were spent in all of us learning the basics of multiple engineering discipline so we had to compulsorily learn several subjects of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and civil engineering no matter what particular branch you were stamped ultimately I believe that we were stronger in terms of our knowledge of engineering then but this observation by these students were very remarkable they they they still kept thinking and they say what is heat flow what is heat flow I said you do not know heat flow then someone said ah but that is a mechanical engineering problem and it burned my heart a budding engineer a professional has come to the computer science department is a smart person is actually admitting that there is going to be a part of knowledge with which he or she would not be concerned because that belongs to a field called mechanical engineering. I shared it with professor Gaitondi and he was so upset that I remember he offered an m tech project subsequently where he put a p c put it in a perspex kind of thing so that people could see it he put as many as 14 thermocouples and he made his students measure the the temperatures at various places and studied heat flow and at the end he came to me and says for that you want to design better computers this is how it should be done of course you would require expertise in heat transfer to do this kind of experimentation but do not you think that a computer science student must understand that these kind of experimentation is required to do a good design that is the point I am trying to make you have to destroy silos in your mind so that people could become good professionals I have listed here four examples from day to day life you would have all seen a firefly I do not know what it is called in different languages we called it jugno in Hindi, kazooi in marathi as you know can you tell us what is it called in Malayalam no you do not know okay fine but all of us enjoy that beautiful firefly so in the late evenings you know you will find a large number of these flying from one point to another and beautiful light emission will occur as they move what is my engineering question to you have you tried to think about how much of heat will have to be generated and dissipated to generate those many lumens which that firefly generates by conventional techniques if you use the old Edison kind of bulb the firefly would die every time it produces an impulse of lumens and yet the fireflies do not die what is the secret of this kind of energy conversion nitrogen fixing is another problem since many of the engineering teachers might have forgotten their basic chemistry and they might not have done chemical engineering but nitrogen is an essential ingredient for plant life we generate a whole lot of nitrous compounds such as urea and so on all our processes which actually capture this nitrogen and provide nitrogen in an absorbable form require chemical reactions which work at high temperatures and high pressures and yet the entire plant life in this world automatically collects nitrogen at normal temperatures and at normal pressures from the environment what are those reactions how does that is called nitrogen fixing so how do plants do that well I do not think we ever bother to look at it coconut tree what is so great about coconut tree nothing much except that is a very very tall tree the coconuts are hanging at a very great height of course when we get them they have a beautiful sweet water which we enjoy drinking problem that I am posing is how does that water go to that height all of you as engineering teachers or science teachers can calculate the amount of energy that is required to pump that much water coconut trees unfortunately do not come with attached pumps but somehow nature pumps all that water up of course you can talk of capillary and you can talk of only small amount going up or whatever it does not matter which way smaller big the liquid goes from bottom because that is the source of liquid to inside the coconut have we ever bothered to see how these things work I now come to an ultimate example of engineering the human body how many of you are familiar with the mechanisms that the human body possesses which has evolved by the nature over millions of years and you will find every bit of engineering of every discipline silo that you have in mind take degrees of freedom have you ever calculated the degrees of freedom that just your hand and fingers have try to imagine constructing a machine which will so easily have such degrees of freedom we have robots and such thing but nothing can match this consider structure consider architecture in fact my friend professor Gupta who is in a complex civil engineer claims that human body is the best form of architecture and structure except he says one place where the God goofed up he says that was in the design of knee joints because the knee joints give up in human being of course he later on clarified that according to him the God did not goof up because God meant a human being to walk on all force the human being started walking on only two legs and that caused a problem because the design was never meant to support walking on two legs we talk of information processing do you know how information is processed in the human body when you touch let say a fire which is lit somewhere by accident instantly your hand is taken back what happens your hand is not intelligent the intelligence is in your brain here so what happens when you touch a fire is that some sensors here capture that heat transmit that information do you know how that information is transmitted it is transmitted by small electric voltages which are generated chemically the synaptic junctions of the nerves which carry this message have the most peculiar and intricate message passing mechanism at every juncture at every junction a chemical gets created whenever a message is to be passed that chemical raises the potential when the pulse is passed simultaneously another chemical is created which destroys the first one otherwise the electronic electrical level will always remain at heart and this does not happen at one junction it happens at thousands upon thousands of junctions all the way up to the message passing right up to the brain afterwards the message takes a decision that oh my god there is some problem some danger and the hand has to be withdrawn so counter messages are generated from the brain go all the way this time to actuate the muscles to withdraw the hand and all of this happens instant we are talking about computers have you ever wondered about what should be this mechanism of message transfer how does it work consider the amount of data we talk of megabytes gigabytes and now terabytes do you know the amount of information that is collected by the small retinal cells cone cells and red cells and the millions of them by the way so the information on incoming photons is collected it does not go all the way to brain as it is it is getting consolidated it is getting analyzed as it passes at some junctions and finally what goes to your mind is a processed piece of information which is further processed by the way and this happens instance by instance by instance by we talk of memory in computers none of us have actually figured out what is the mechanism of human brain to remember thing all of you will recall that if you go and reflect upon any past incidents you not only can logically construct the sequence in which that incidents happen but you can actually recreate the images that you saw while that incidents was how exactly the brain stores those images nobody knows why I recite all of these you will now agree with some reflection that all of these represent great pieces of science and engineering in nature and yet none of us have ever studied that do you know why all of these get categorized as biological or life sciences or or or that that kind of stream that is a silo that is not in our syllabus and something which is not in our syllabus is not customary to learn it when we are students the same attitude continues when I become a teacher if I am teaching chemical engineering or mechanical engineering or computer science or information system since that silo does not belong here I will not teach what is not in the syllabus sadly this is the price people of holistic thinking and a holistic approach to a whole lot of interesting problems and a whole lot of interesting solutions which the nature has created but we are unable to look at them we are not willing to look at them. So, my first cardinal principle was acquisition of knowledge but across different silos silos are important it is not possible to start teaching accounting systems in a course on heat transfer that will be wrong you will require expertise in these different segments of the silos necessarily but ensure that your students go beyond these silos to understand the broader aspects of a problem in its solution. The second point I would like to state is that you need to master the skills methods and techniques in this very workshop you would have seen several methods and techniques which let us say professor Narona explained to you and mind you these are all elementary techniques because this was an introductory course several of you have worked in the afternoon sessions on let us say using Sylab solving some of the problems. How many of you have decided that after going back you will work at least for 8 to 10 hours more to understand these things to a better extent to a deeper extent that is what is mastering the methods and techniques and I am not talking about just this method of this technique I am talking in general about any method or any technique articulation that is also you know part of the skill set a lot has been talked about articulation I will only say that Indian tradition often creates a problem for us our tradition of knowledge exchange has been largely verbal. So, we speak a lot we read much less and we rarely write this is a problem which afflicts the entire society and we have to come over it because in the modern era of knowledge economy unless your written articulation is very good you will not be able to effectively put forward your views for exchange idea with a large number of other experts. The third requirement is to be meticulous you know we say devil is in the details I say be the god of little things remember any complex activity that you do will require a large number of little things to be done in a coordinated fashion you forget one small little thing and the whole edifice may come down crumbling particularly as engineers and scientists we have to learn to be very very meticulous work hard common sense you will say I would like to say work harder all of us have defined our working pattern we all believe we work hard when we are students we worked hard when we are teaching a course we do work hard, but do we work hard enough please remember that being meticulous and working hard are intrinsically related they are only 24 hours in a day you cannot work for more than 24 hours you cannot in fact work for 24 hours, but the harder you work the harder problems you will be able to solve we were fortunate that when we were young teachers we were groomed by people who work so hard as to border on madness I remember Professor J. R. Isaac who would be there practically every night in the department and would continuously tell us to work work and work and work and work and I finally asked him one day Jimmy what is your expectation from us the reason I was prompted to ask this question was slightly different two of my colleagues Professor Sarada and Professor Dhamniray were not showing up for several nights in succession and one day Professor Isaac asked me for that what is wrong with these two people why are they not here I said Jimmy have a heart they just got married recently and you know what he said what has married got to do with work I was shocked and then probably he also realized what he is saying then he kept quiet for a few seconds and then says you know Fatah you must tell all teachers here and their spouses you tell their spouses that the teachers are primarily meant for the computer science department occasionally they will come home this was of course not an acceptable strategy some of us still idiotically follow that but such was the great mentor and teacher that we had that is when I asked him what is your expectation from us as teachers you know what he said he said you must be able to work for three days and three nights continuously at least once a week I do not know what twice a week would be and I said are you mad he says no we have to be mad and then he gave me the reason he says we are said to be hundred and fifty years behind the developers they are as smart as we are the only way you can catch up with them is work harder than they do they work for eight hours you work for 24 hours you will catch up with them with three times the speed I am not suggesting that you all become as mad as I am or as some of my colleagues are but I am suggesting try to manage your time well try to reduce the amount of time that you spend in sleeping sleeping is important but you can reduce that time with some effort that is how you can do hard work and that is how you can solve hard problems hard problems is another thing which we we have practically stopped solving and again the rat race is responsible you know when I joined the first year of engineering I remember me and a friend of mine Parkour were sitting and trying to solve all problems at the end of a physics book it was a good book and it was difficult to solve some of those problems when we went to a teacher with one problem that we could not solve that teacher sadly told us oh this problem is not important from the examination point fortunately we found a couple other professors who spent time with us and taught us how to solve those problems but when we realized after passing the first year with good marks it was not necessary to solve all those problems in second year and third year we started solving problems number one two three four five seven eleven twenty one and that was the end of if you see today students they arrive at this beautiful analysis much earlier in the schools and colleges itself they would not spend too much time in solving hard problems because they are not solvable I will just spend two minutes in giving you an example of what I mean by hard problems imagine you are playing a match of badminton with me I suppose all of you would have played badminton at least know about badminton you do not know how I play so you start playing a three game match let us say you start playing and suddenly realize that this fellow is very lazy in physical moments obviously because my role model is Ganpati so I stay at one place if a shuttle comes my way I will handle it otherwise I let it fall so you win very easily actually defeat me the love game then we play the second game which also you win and you go back home extremely delighted you know you beat to pulp an IIT professor fine you are very happy what has happened to your game the first game of course you played naturally but when you realize that part of is not moving around the second game you probably slowed down you did permit a couple of shots to come on your head from me you won but you have came deteriorated imagine now if you are playing against the world champion exactly the same thing in reverse is likely to happen in the first game you will lose in the second game also you will lose and you will go back home dejected but you realize that in the second game you would have played better than what you would have played in the first game because you are facing a difficult task why I spent so much time in giving this example is that the same principle holds if what I said earlier is true what I am saying now is also true solving 10 simple problems successfully and getting correct solutions to all those 10 problems will give you a lot of pleasure and happiness but hardly any new knowledge attempting to solve 10 difficult problems even though you do not get a single solution correctly will leave you dejected but will also give you a far better amount of knowledge and that is why solving hard problems or attempting to solve hard problems is so very important another difference between IIT and other places there is no difference otherwise by the way human beings are human beings at same place there are different places but this place has an ethos of attempting to solve hard problems I am tempted to give you one more example at the cost of 2 minutes this happened when I had just become a teacher when one day a friend of mine who was still a student a final year student we both were students when I was doing M Tech he was doing his B Tech I used to be the coach of the IIT chess team and he was on the chess team so one day after terminal exam he came with a question paper in his hand the question paper was on electric fields and it was the paper the course was being taught by late professor K. C. Mukherjee a renowned teacher of IIT bomb and he came and says Deepak how do you solve this question 3 I read that question 3 immediately figured out that I could not solve it and I returned the paper I said I am a computer science professor now he countered saying you have a electrical engineering degree then I admitted I cannot solve the question but since I was a teacher and of course K. C. Mukherjee was very accessible I said why do not you go and ask the professor so both of us went to his office and the moment he saw me dangling that paper he started smiling and then he says so question 3 then I also sheepishly sighed and I said yes yes sir question 3 he would not say anything else then my friend asked him sir what is the solution and he says I do not know and both of us were shocked so great professor K. C. Mukherjee said he does not know the answer then he turns to me he says father this is part of a problem which has remained unsolved for 10 years but you know this batch is so smart that I thought someone will solve the problem so that is why I gave we understood that and we came out but the matter does not end here please remember if this thing had happened in my own college where I did my under graduation probably the class would have gone on strike syllabus ka bar ka sabal puja not permitted we forget that what is syllabus what is syllabus is perhaps a reflection of what is in the past and we have given a syllabus merely to understand how we have to proceed generally to acquire knowledge which will be useful in future that night in hostel 4 there was a milkshake party thrown by the students who were attending that course and the general secretary asked why are you parting they said because the great professor Mukherjee thinks that we can solve unsolved research problem that is the difference in the ethos I would like all of you to remember and create such an ethos nurture such an ethos because attempting to solve difficult problems teaches you far more than solving simple problem successfully learn to commit you cannot be fanciful you if you see a situation either within your organization in your department in your course you see a weak student who needs help you have to commit that whatever it takes you will find 2 hours in a week to sit with him or a group of such weak students to help them understand things better you see some very bright students in your class you know that left to themselves they will all get a grades and whatever and pass out but you also know that they are capable of doing something more if you commit that you will collect them together in let us say a weekly discussion or a fortnightly discussion and challenge them with harder problems then that will bring out the best in them which is what is so important because those are the few people who might make a lot of difference to the whole nation in future and once you make a commitment learn to honor the commitments respect deadlines a deadline is a deadline the grade has to be submitted on certain date at such and such time that is it it has to be submitted them another thing which we are very proud of here our results are never delayed they are umpteen stories which I can tell you about how we struggle to get the results in time plus a guy from day smiling because he knows the literally three days and three nights that we all work together submitting grades in time is considered sacrosanth here and that is not violated no matter how senior you are if you miss the boat you are called personally by the director that is one small interview in which the director does not offer you a cup of tea and tells you very certainly where you get off the grades have to be submitted in time I am talking in general about any deadline face failures squarely failures will occur in life you know life is not all hunky dory in fact sometimes we believe that the failures are occurring more often that is not true there will be successes there will be failure whenever you fail in anything whatever I don't get promotion that is a failure I take it to my heart the hurt may be irreparable but the frustration that results from a failure is curable and I submit that the failure the frustration resulting from the failure must be cured as rapidly as possible because the frustration will hang on to my neck like a millstone for days and months and years together not permitting me to do well in what I would have otherwise done well here is a fact formula to control frustration and to recover speed over time the frustration builds and remains in your mind for a long time it may take days months and years for that frustration to come down generally the scale at the bottom of the time scale is logarithmic scale so it will go on up to years perhaps starting with few days the fact formula for recovery suggests that your recovery should be exponential so what we may say 1 minus e to the power minus 80 kind of response remember when you recover and bring down the frustration very quickly you have far more time left to approach the rest of your life with great positive thinking be a trusted friend it is not easy to be a trusted friend it is easy to be a goodie goodie friend a trusted friend is not one who keeps saying wow wow or great a trusted friend is one who will be the first one to tell you further what you have done is wrong further this is not the right thing to do because only trusted friends will tell me my mistake a trusted friend is one who stands by me in the times of my difficulty but corrects me on every possible opportunity you have to be one not only to your colleagues but particularly to your students please remember that your students look upon you as a mentor just as they looked upon their parents in their early days of life avoid g and j factors what are the g and j factors or factor factors the g stands for greed and j stands for jealousy we are all ambitious people but there is a danger that ambition might turn into greed if and when that happens it might destroy the entire ethical framework that the society and we have created over the years of our growth remember ethics is something which is peculiar to humanity it is the cultural set of values which we imbibe from the society and which help us decide what is good and what is bad ambition is good but when it turns into greed it might destroy the ethical value there are a whole lot of examples of ethical behavior we see those around us I had given an interview sometime ago last year on ethics on the campus on the moodle when I put up this summary shade I will also put the pdf file of that issue that issue also contains a very nice article on sitala you might enjoy reading it in the same way when we find somebody doing something very good something very well natural tendency of our mind is to admire ah good that person has done it well if that person is an avarice climber whom I do not know at all I have pure admiration if that person is my neighbor then I have lot of admiration but a tinge of jealousy if that person is my competitor in my own institution then admiration morphs into jealousy very quickly when that happens it destroys the peace of your mind and it destroys your ability to work positively in rest of your life one can speak on just these two issues for hours but I will just conclude here by saying that do not permit greed and jealousy take hold of you because that will consume a whole lot of positive things that you can otherwise do enjoy giving and giving is not just money but enjoy giving your time enjoy giving your advice some of you if you have read my blog many people are curious to find out why I have written that I say in my my c v on the net it says my hobbies are giving unsolicited advice to unsuspecting individuals and groups of people I enjoy doing that because in return I also get a whole lot of advice and that is free of cost your concern concern cannot be make believe you know as teachers you would have a whole lot of associates you saw a large number of people working here their teams there technically I lead them but unless they see that I am concerned about them do you think they will work with that much of commitment and that much of effort I do not think I work myself because I see the concern for me in the eyes of my friends and mentors here that is what prepares me to work hard so please give people your time your heart your concern last point is emulate what is good now what is good has been stated in books what is good is a code by role models we search for role models everywhere else but here again I have a phatac hypothesis the phatac hypothesis says that select randomly any ten teachers so that is the sample space. The analysis that we do on this sample space is we prepare two lists list one contains all the good qualities that I see in individual so somebody is very meticulous somebody does things perfectly in time somebody is very articulate somebody systematic whatever all the good things then you prepare the second list in this second list you list all the undesirable qualities that you see in the same ten people so then you say that fellow loses his temper very far phatac never comes in time this is bad with this person whatever whatever whatever you prepare this second list my humble submission and hypothesis is still not a theorem because I cannot prove it but the hypothesis still has no counter example the hypothesis says that the first list will tell you about a perfect teacher the second list will tell you about the most undesirable teacher. Now since these lists are made from the ten people that I know is it not possible for me to emulate the right things from the right people so what to learn from whom is in our hands I will give you just a couple of examples of what I did when I was a young teacher I identified people who had such specific quality so one teacher for Salimai for example was well known for his timeliness 830 theorem 925 QED nothing artificial about the problem I attended his lectures many times there was another teacher whose logical arguments were perfect I was lucky to have my own guru whose board work was known to be perfect there was another teacher for some Bedford sadly he passed few days ago God bless his soul but when I became a teacher I had noticed one extraordinary thing in him namely the decent behavior with students so I sat in some of his classes to how he handles such unruly question one particular class I remember one fellow asked some question Bedford answered it then after some time he asked the same question in some other way frankly in my opinion it was a stupid question but Bedford still answered it third time five minutes before the end of the class he asked it again and I was boiling with rage but great professor Bedford says you have a point however if you see it like this and again patiently explained at the end of the class as I was walking with him I said Bedford why did you tolerate him for such long he was asking an idiotic question then he stopped and looked at me and said but father he did not know that he was asking an idiotic question he is not an idiot he is a smart fellow he was asking a question because his mind was confused and had I told him that the question was idiotic he would have probably stopped asking questions in subsequent classes and then his learning would have stopped what a great lesson just decent behavior patients with your students can do so many wonderful things I have initiated 11th point this should have been number 12 but this is point 0 because this probably is the most important point of my submission today that is resetting your attitude why because your attitude has been formed by the rat race in which you have participated and remember what I said earlier each rat race has same effect whether it is for marks or later in our lives as it exists now it is for wealth for recognition academic or otherwise every rat race has exactly the same result a rat race will produce some winner rats and many loser rats but only rats and that is the point I wish to make we must never forget that we are human beings and that our life cannot be determined by the rat race for this or that or that what is the right attitude then the rat race requires that we compare ourselves with others comparison with others will eventually stink the only right question to ask after you participate in any activity and whether you will lose or win does not matter the right comparison is always with one step and with oneself you ask this question could I have done it better any past for example this is a question I will ask immediately at the end of this workshop and as all of you can guess I will find umpteen things which I could have done that believe me every year every month every week whenever I undertake some activity at the end of that activity no matter the whether the world has given me kudos for great achievements or I shouted at me I analyze that activity and say could I have done it better and I have never found the answer to be no I always found the answer to be yes if you do that you will be spared of the anonymity of the results of the rat race namely over confidence or under confidence but you will be able to contribute a lot better in whatever you do I give an example of learning a foreign language because that is what takes a long time and we all believe that it is a difficult task. So, people who learn a foreign language and start speaking it with some fluency we call them very intelligent people we believe that not all people are capable of learning a foreign language yet we forget that every human child learns a foreign language between the age of two years and six years and that is later on called the mother tongue of a child no school no college no certification no exams no mark no rat race and yet every human child can speak one's own mother according to be the reason behind the success of a child is the child's attitude you would have seen a large number of children just analyze their behavior in the raw attitude that that behavior display a child is full of curiosity a child is full of boldness it will ask questions perpetually what is this what is that what is that sometimes we we we smile at the child as the child grows we teach him not to ask stupid question a child perseveres have you ever seen a child which gives up on whatever it decides to do particularly the naughty thing I have not come across any child child is always persevering always nothing do we when we grow up as I said I solve hard problems in the first standard second standard maybe by head standard I stop solving a hard problem in college I stop solving hard problems at all and finally the child has tremendous passion child is excited about everything don't you think that these four traits are so critical and that these four traits actually we are all born with but somewhere in the journey perhaps because the rat race we lost track of some of these attributes and that perhaps is the reason for the mess that we are in the only thing a child does not have is humility and ethics because these are not natural traits these are traits which are grown by the human culture as I said and these have to be implanted so my zero th cardinal principle is rediscover the child in you and build a great human excitement and passion humility and ethics and vision and values I think these are the components which make our life into an extraordinary life you know we always compare people oh Einstein was great so and so was great we are not that great we are ordinary mortals please remember that extraordinary people of course will generally do extraordinary things but we are good human beings only if as ordinary human beings we can do extraordinary work so the challenge that we face both for our says and for our students particularly is how to make an ordinary student perform extraordinary work and for that I have to do it myself to begin with if you follow all of this you can make your life as beautiful as dew drops all of your familiar with you this is a this is a picture which was sent to me by my colleague teacher when I had given a similar lecture from Delhi you can see the dew drops here they look beautiful any morning you will see them and you are fascinated by them how do you make our life as beautiful as dew drops well for that I have concocted a new meaning for every letter of the word dew D stands for dreaming big because if you do not dream big your achievements will remain smaller remember your dreams will always limit your achievements think of big things and somehow the world will come together if you are if your commitment is serious and sincere world will come together to help you this workshop that you have attended is an example of a big dream that IIT Bombay had dreamed and who made it successful not his team here but 168 remote center administrators the experts in those places and 8200 of you who have worked for 15 days 10 days fully from morning till evening since all of us dream big we could have a big achievement E stands for enjoying life you must enjoy everything that you do including the fights that you have or arguments that you have including the movie that you see including a debate that you have over the global warming or whatever it is you must of course equally enjoy the work that you do and that is because each moment of life is so precious it never comes back so you must spend every moment in enjoy so enjoy life is my second important message and W is for working hard I have spoken already enough on this so dream big enjoy life and work hard because without working hard you cannot create history you can become history without doing anything but if you have to create history you have to work hard dream big enjoy life work hard you can take these as an assignment containing three questions it is an IIT style assignment so any two out of these three is not an option I have added this slide after I made a friend after I made a student who had passed out some five years ago and inquired about someone whom I had advised similarly and that fellow loved and he says sir he is doing very well he is enjoying life so the only thing he had done in past three years was it seems only enjoy life he had forgotten about work hard and so on so do not do that dream big enjoy life and work hard please do not forget that the students represent the leading age of our demographic advantage and our demographic advantage will be wiped out in twenty years you and I have to work very very hard to give them something extraordinary to do and we can do that only if we girdle ourselves to do something extraordinary and it is doable we may be ordinary people we are ordinary people we are not Einstein but we can show the world that we can each one of us can do extraordinary things in my concluding slide which is unfortunately again a busy slide because I did not want to break it into different paragraphs the first paragraph where I have said in our mood towards becoming a developed nation to provide an honorable and comfortable life to Indians and to live as equals these are not my words I must admit these were spoken by great doctor Abdul Kalab many of you would have read these words in his books what I am proud to say is that he first uttered these words in IIT Bombay many many years ago when he was honored with a doctorate of honor scouser and he said those things and how meaningful they are we do not have any fight or struggle with anybody else in this world but we want to live as equals and that is why we want to become a developed nation but a developed nation can result which will fulfill our dreams only if the teachers do their job properly why because teachers have a special role in providing quality education and quality research they have to do it themselves and they have to train others in doing it so my humble request to all of you be the change agent as a great teacher and help build such a nation for all of you God bless you thank you so much.