 Good afternoon, colleague teachers. I am sorry for interjecting myself, but in the midst of thermodynamics, I thought I should share with you some of the ideas related to teaching. I had shared these in a slightly longer format in a keynote that I had given at the ISD annual event at Pfeff-Koslam College long time ago, last year I think December perhaps. Since then, I have been sharing some of these thoughts with many teachers like you and I thought it would be nice to do that here. The theme that I am picking up is what was stated by our Chief Guest, Professor Sukhatme and endorsed again by Professor Khakkar, our director that teaching is something special that you need to have passion for teaching and then you need to have a method in teaching. I am going to very briefly describe to you a few points perhaps the background philosophy that I have about teaching, something about teaching engineering, how it has to be broad based rather than focus specifically only on one subject or the other and of course, some other common sense things. So, please bear me out. This is likely to be larger than a half an hour session which was planned. I might take about 45 minutes. The title of this talk is Building India Where Dreams Come True. I will not bore you with what you already know. The Indian demography says that a large number of Indians are in the age of learning. The population below 19 which means all prospective students are greater than 320 million in our country and we the teachers are the responsibility of building their future and thereby building India. If you look at the way you can build a nation is basically by contributing significantly in your own primary domain. So, we are all teachers. We contribute in teaching. We are all teachers in engineering. So, we contribute significantly by doing a good job of teaching engineering students or science students whatever be the domain. I will talk about education and research. So, first by the way my contention is that education and research are artificially separated by us. There are two sides of the same coin. So, please bear with me when I expand on this theme. First, let me talk about education. We define education by dividing it in science, engineering, technology, management. In engineering we further say mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. Observe that thermodynamics is rarely considered an important subject by students of say computer science which is sad because any engineer must actually understand the fundamental concepts of engineering independent of the branch in which they specialize. Unfortunately, it does not happen anymore. The idea is to enable each learner to solve problems. That is the fundamental aspect of engineering education. We prepare problem solvers. We do not just prepare mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, civil engineers but we prepare problem solvers and we expect them to solve problems innovatively. That innovation will come when people apply their mind. Look at the problem in various dimensions. Think of different ways of solving the problem, etcetera. For this, venturing beyond boundaries is absolutely a must. As I said, the basic theme of my dialogue with you is to suggest that even if you are mechanical engineering teacher and even if you are teaching thermodynamics, do keep your eyes open to find out what is happening in other branches because a real life problem is not bounded by the tags that we attach. I do not think you have ever come across a real life problem which says I am an electrical engineering problem or I am a mechanical engineering problem. Real life has a very funny habit. It says I am a problem solving. Now, if you require mechanical engineering be it, you can do it well. But if it requires partly knowledge of electrical engineering, partly knowledge of economics, it is better that you understand those dimensions as well. Either you learn those things and apply them to solve the problem or you take help of someone else who understands those things and helps you solve the problem. That is why major engineering problems today are often solved as a teamwork. Predominantly, people coming from a discipline with which that problem concerned, but also people from other disciplines who help you solve that larger problem. Let me comment on knowledge, teaching, learning and research very briefly. Engineering knowledge, do we look beyond what we study in books or what we see in labs or what we see in industry? Just to give an example, I have constructed four sample problems as to how engineering operates in nature. Nitrogen fixing, firefly, firefly is not a problem but I will relate the problem. Let me talk about nitrogen fixing. All of you are aware that nitrogen is vitally required by all living organisms. We actually create nitrogen compounds by using very heavy chemical reactions. Heavy in the sense, they are energy consuming, they generally work at high temperatures and pressures. But when plants require nitrogen, they obtain nitrogen from their environment that is called nitrogen fixing and they do it at normal temperatures and pressures. Have you ever wondered how that happens? Take a firefly, jugnu. You would have seen fireflies in the evenings, in flocks, they move around and they emit luminescence. You can see some bright sparks coming out. Have you ever wondered that if you were to create those many lumens by your known technology, how much of heat you will have to generate? The firefly would die in the process but firefly does not die. So, the bioluminescence, have we ever wondered about it? Take a coconut tree. What is so special about a coconut tree? Nothing. It has nice coconuts at the top and coconuts contain very sweet and nutritious water. The point that I want you to wonder about is how does that sweet water reach so much distance? You would know that if you have to pump water at that height, what kind of energy you will be required to put, what kind of mechanisms you will have to create. In fact, the ordinary pumps you know cannot pump water beyond a certain height. You have to have a separate mechanism to pump water at extraordinarily large height. How does a coconut tree do it? Well, you may guess it does it by some capillary action, whatever, whatever, whatever. It assembles, you know, drops and drops and drops to create that, whatever it is. But have we ever wondered how it does it? Take human body. Human body is the best example of engineering in nature. We talk of degrees of freedom. Have we ever wondered that if I have a hand, you know, how many degrees of freedom do I get when I move my fingers around? In my own field, when we talk of messaging and message analysis or computers, let's say, have we ever wondered how a message passes to the brain when my hand accidentally touches fire? Almost instantly the hand is withdrawn. But what is happening internally is that the messages are passing across axioms of my nervous system. Through some chemical reactions that take place, the message goes to the brain and ultimately the brain issues other signals, which then activates my muscles, which withdraw the hand. All of this happens instantly. It does not happen purely electronically. It happens through transitions of chemical processes. You take the amount of data that is processed by human brain. About 50 percent of the data emanates from the eyes, visual signals. Do you know the number of cone cells and rod cells that capture visible pixels from the rest of the world? And as the signals go to the brain, they are actually consolidated on the path. They are thresholded on the path. All of this is happening inside a human body. Unfortunately, we never wonder about these things ourselves. We never ask our students to wonder about these things because these plumbly fall under a category of knowledge which we have named as life sciences and biology. And since that is not in the engineering syllabus, we will not worry about this. That is the point I wanted to make, that knowledge is universal. Artificial boundaries have been created primarily to help us deal with growing body of knowledge effectively. And that is why we slice the knowledge. It is mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. But it is absolutely vital that to teach our students to be great problem solvers, they be aware of all dimensions of knowledge wherever it exists. Let me come to teaching. Who teaches births to build a nest? We presume that birds learn to teach a nest by biological transfer, genetic transfer of knowledge. That is partly true. Part of it they learn by observing their parents or something like that. But that is it. Human species are the only species who recognize that knowledge passing cannot be dependent only on the genetic mechanisms because the human knowledge creation and growth is happening extraordinarily rapidly. And that is why humans created an institution. That institution is called a teacher. No other species have an institution called a teacher. Human beings have it. To help a teacher in exercising the responsibilities given to the teacher, what are the responsibilities given? Codify existing knowledge, disseminate existing knowledge and help create new knowledge. These are the responsibilities of a teacher. We roughly say codification to be equivalent of writing books and putting knowledge in a concise form. We typically say dissemination for us means teaching students in classes and writing research papers. And creation we usually associate with research. This is the modern terminology. But these are the basic objectives that have been entrusted to a teacher. To help a teacher do these jobs properly, we create support structures. What are the support structures? Traditionally these used to be temples, churches, mosques, mother's house. Now we have schools, colleges and so on. Unfortunately what has happened is that these support structures like college, university, etcetera are now called institutions. And the original institution of a teacher is now a paid employee of these institutions. I feel this is sad. This is not just a nomenclature change. If I am a paid employee, my behavior and my accountability is different. I know I will tend to work for defined office hours. I know I will tend to do only as much as I have been instructed to do because somebody is paying me to do this work. But if I think I am an institution, my behavior will be completely different. My accountability will be completely different. I will regard myself as on duty 24 hours because I am an institution. I have been charged with this responsibly. Why do you think teachers are respected in all societies is because implicitly the society believes that a teacher is to be respected because of the special nature of work and special nature of commitment that the teacher shows. I would request you to rise to the level of an institution. Each one of you can do that. I urge you to think about doing it. The problems that we face today are many. We have rigid syllabus. We have exam oriented approach by the students. We have large size of the classes. This is not the time and place to discuss the solutions. But some innovative approaches could be tried. I had taken a one year sabbatical leave in around 2001-2002 concerned with the quality of education in engineering and I had gone around the country visiting places particularly some of the smaller colleges. And I found teachers like us in fact had constrained with far greater difficult situations had even in their small places found some innovations. I specifically mentioned a lab which is run on which used to be run on Sunday. This is very common in IIT kind of system. But a small place in Orissa I found a teacher doing it. And I said what do you do? He was an electronics teacher and he said we decide to tackle a problem. We call the students on Sunday morning and we spent all Sundays in a semester constructing a solution. So we design a circuit. We build that circuit. We test that circuit. I said it is amazing. The students like it he said sir only about 15 to 20 students come. The point is those 15 to 20 students would make a difference. And I said you are doing a great job. You know what he told me? He said unfortunately some in the college management some of his own colleagues believe that he is wasting his time. I said no you are doing something extraordinary because you are willing to put in extra time on your own. This is something by the way which happens in all the good institutions across the world including those in India. All IITs do it most of the night. Many of good colleges from which you come to it namely teachers take initiative, permit the students to work in the labs in the evenings on Saturday Sundays. Many times they themselves join. This is what is expected of a teacher. Use teaching assistants. IIT system does it but other colleges don't. I suggest think about using the final year students of your own undergraduate courses as teaching assistants. Believe me they are very enthusiastic. They understand what is the problem with the younger students and they are able to assist very well. Wherever this has been tried we have been doing this for ages but wherever this has been tried it has succeeded. The normal wisdom is you use only master students as teaching assistants that is not necessary. Undergraduate students can also be do. In fact last year when I taught the first year programming course two of my teaching assistants who were acknowledged incidentally as the best teaching assistants were not even senior undergraduates. They were second year students who had done the same course as the previous year. They were of course the top performing student but they came forward in help. Such things could be done. Let me briefly talk about research and education now. So research invariably implies in our minds of PhD. Many of you would be pursuing PhD degrees. In my opinion PhD is not just PhD degree. PhD is actually a mindset. What does that mindset represent? Here is a list. A broad problem solving perspective. So what is the problem you are solving? What is what are the dimensions of that problem? Who all people have attempted to solve that problem in the past? We call it by the name literature serve but it is effectively to gain a broader perspective of the problem and attempted solutions. Spirit of inquiry. Perpetually asking is there something that somebody has tried? That is why literature survey is not just reading a list of papers which my guide has given but searching, finding out and that can be done only if you are tremendously curious you are endowed with spirit of inquiry. When you do PhD you develop a mindset which is full of such spirit of inquiry. Critical analysis. Ability to critically analyze all alternatives. Ability to formulate things with great rigor and with discipline. I will give you one example. Typically if you have three variables in a mathematical equation A, B and C and if you want to say they are distinct we generally say A not equal to B not equal to C. I found in one book many years ago, decades ago in fact this statement made A not equal to B not equal to C not equal to A. The last one is essential to establish that A and C are also distinct. Now this is rigor and this rigor must be practiced and imbibed in everything that we do. Succinct articulation. There is absolutely no doubt that you cannot be an effective teacher unless your articulation both spoken and written is succinct and very well formed. That is why when you write emails don't just press return after typing a paragraph without having reread that entire paragraph and examine whether there are any spelling mistakes, whether there are grammatical mistakes. People say that English is not our native language and therefore we make mistakes that is hog wash. Those who claim that English is not their native tongue and therefore they cannot write English correctly. I request you to write in your own mother tongue and then get it examined by an expert. You will find you make the same mistakes there. The problem is with the mindset you are not disciplined your mind to apply it very, very properly and methodically to write correctly. If you write correctly in Uriah or Telugu or Tamil believe me you will be writing correctly in English also because that is a question of mind's discipline. Metaculous and hard work. There is no substitute for hard work in life. Synthesis, analyzing something is relatively simpler but attempting to put things together particularly some of those things which are new ideas is a difficult problem and the mindset must be capable of applying itself to assemble things, assemble components and make something new and that is why the mindset must include the ability to synthesize. Experimentation, you cannot do anything without experimentation and then problem solving and innovative thing. Is that all? No, there are a few more things. Recovering from failures. There will be failures. Failures are always painful. They hurt may remain for a long time. I will humbly suggest that pain is inevitable. Anytime you fail whether in life or in engineering or whatever job you are doing you will feel the pain but the hurt must not linger too long in your mind because if it does it will affect your psychology to go any further and when you learn to control that hurt to forget that hurt and get on with life you will learn the next important part of that mindset called perseverance. Perseverance is a property where the mind does not give up. No matter how many times you fail, you keep trying, keep trying, keep trying till you solve the problem. That is how you extend human knowledge. That is how you extend your own knowledge and that is how you solve world's problems. Now, if you agree that a PhD should represent this mindset then I have a simple question. Is it not the objective and essence of education at all levels? Is it not the essence of every professional career developing such a mindset? For example, would you not like a fifth standard school student to be able to articulate correctly and succinctly? Would you not like a 10th standard science student to understand mathematics and apply its rigor appropriately? Do you not expect a third year, fourth year engineering student to be able to innovatively solve problems? You do. In fact, this mindset development is the very objective and purpose of the entire education. So, why have we generally separated it out and assigned to PhD? In my opinion, it's a continuous journey and which goes even beyond PhD all our lives. Just as you as teachers will find that you are perpetually learning something, you are perpetually further strengthening this mindset even at the age of 63, I am still doing it. PhD merely means a formal recognition by a university system which says, we believe that you have achieved this mindset. Now, go back and sharpen it further on your own, but this activity must start from first standard in the school. What is the context of saying all of this today is because when you teach your engineering students, please tell them research is not something separate. Research and education is same parcel and this research mindset is what you have to imbibe, you have to develop even when you are studying first year engineering, second year engineering, third year engineering. That's the message I would like you to carry. What comes in the way? Why is it that our students are not able to do this? In my humble opinion, it is a attitude problem, an attitude set amongst the students by the rat race for Marx. You would have seen Marx decide everything in their lives. Admissions are decided by Marx, calls for interviews in the final year are decided by Marx and so on. But remember that every rat race will create a few winners, but many losers and what happens psychologically could be disastrous. The winners acquire over confidence and sometimes this over confidence borders on arrogance. I have seen many in 40 years because everybody who is a great achiever comes to IIT system and they believe they know the word and it takes almost six months to tell them that look you don't know the word, nobody knows the word. So, don't be arrogant. On the other hand, people who lose out in the rat race, they acquire diffidence and this diffidence sometimes borders on despondence. Oh, I got only 50 percent mark. I am no good. I will not be able to do anything in life. This is nonsense. Every human being should have proper amount of confidence, neither over confidence, certainly not arrogance and not despondence or not a feeling of deficiency at all. Why? Because fundamentally I believe that all human beings are capable to solve reasonably complex problems in life. I will give you an example of setting the attitude right, but let me mention that each rat race has the same effect, creating some winner and creating some losers. Whether it is for marks, whether it is for wealth, whether it is for fame, each rat race will create some winner rats and many loser rats, but only rats. We are not rats. We are human beings and as human beings, we should refuse to be guided by what the world says by relative ranking. I get 40 percent and somebody has got 90 percent, does not mean that I am bad. It may only mean that in that particular examination based on the study that I was able to do, based on my previous understanding, I could score those many marks. That is it. My basic abilities are not compromised in any way. Comparison stings. Anytime I compare with someone else, I am actually entering into a rat race. What is the right comparison? Compare with yourself. Ask always, what best can I do? Anytime you are looking at a problem and have solved it, later on go back and introspect. Could I have done it better? You are not saying whether somebody else would have done it better. Could I have done it better is the right question to us. Comparison with self, I would humbly suggest is possibly the best thing to do. I give an example of learning a foreign language which is considered a rather difficult and challenging logical problem to solve. Those people who do it, we call them intelligent people and yet we forget that every human child including you and me, you might have got 90 percent marks. I would have got 40 percent marks. Both of us learned a foreign language at the age of three years, which is now called our mother tongue. We did that without any degrees, without any school, without any teacher telling me that you got only so many marks. How does a child do these things? What is the child's attitude? And here is what you will notice if you reflect on how a child behaves. A child has tremendous curiosity. A child has great boldness to ask any kind of questions. We grown up, you know, shy away from asking questions. Please remember that when we ask a question, we are asking that question actually to ourselves. It is reflecting the curiosity. When I stop asking questions in a class, I am stopping asking questions to myself and I am therefore killing my curiosity. Look at the other characteristic of a child. Perseverance. When a child decides to do something, whether it is naughty or what, would a child give up after failure or snow? Three times, four times, ten times, the child will ultimately get what the child decides to do. And that perseverance is there in a three or four year old child. What happens to us? Why do we give up on difficult problems? If you see your students and if you recall your own students' days, you will find that when you join engineering, in the first year, you would have spent a lot of time in trying to solve a variety of problems. Then you would have cracked the examination system and said, I will solve only these many problems. Occasionally, you will come across a difficult problem. Maybe you will try two or three times. By the time you reach third year, you will try it only once. And by the time you graduate, you would have learned to completely give away without trying any hard problem. That is the problem. That is why I need perseverance. Excitement. Excitement is an absolute remarkable attitude of a human being as reflected in a child. We sometimes forget the excitement as we grow up. We tend to do things in a very mundane fashion. I would think that that should be avoided. In my humble opinion, education must have excitement and passion. This is the word that was Sukhatmi also used. If I do it as a job, believe me, I will never do it as a good job. And I do not care by the way what others tell me about my working, whether I am a good teacher or a bad teacher. As I said earlier, why should I care of what others say? I should care only what my students feel. And more importantly, I should care about what I myself feel. Am I comfortable with the way I have executed my job of a teacher? That is the question I should ask. And if I find out I should do something more, then I think this is what you should do something more. You must bring excitement and passion in each and every activity of teaching that you do simultaneously because this is what you borrow from your childhood. When you were a child, you had all of this. Perhaps you have suppressed some of it as you were growing up. Rick will discover that. However, something that a child does not have but which only human society has namely a state of values which are supposed to be guiding principles for human behavior in a society. You must imbibe that yourself and you must help students imbibe those. The education must therefore also have humility and ethics. Never ever imagine that you know everything in anything. There is too much knowledge in the world and there are too many people who know much more than you do. This is true about every human being, ethics. Ethics must be practiced diligently. Please remember teacher is often the role model for every student after his or her own parents. And therefore, the responsibility of a teacher is enormous. That is why a teacher is called an institution. If a teacher does not behave ethically, then that could be the most disastrous for the human society and it would be more disastrous for the teacher himself or herself. You will not be able to see yourself in the mirror in your own eyes if you have compromised yourself anyway in any ethical standard. I will conclude by defining an action agenda. Of course, there are two hundred things that one can list as to what a teacher should do. I have only tried to identify a few, not necessarily the most important of the actions that a teacher must take, but a few things which I find ought to be uppermost in our mind and they are not. For example, punishing the guilt, but not the guilty. In general, we punish the student also for the mistake that the student makes. It is extremely difficult to separate out. The way you can separate it out is you give the punishment, but also include a chance for that student to improve and become better. That is why I say punish the guilt, but not the guilty and that must be a part and parcel of a teacher's ethos. Compassion and concern for your students, please remember now of course in the modern world things are in university, colleges, so many teachers, etcetera, but traditionally the Indian society believes that parents entrust their child to the care of a teacher and for the limited period that you are engaged with a student, whether it is for one subject or whatever, please remember this. The child or the student has been given in your care for that duration and you must therefore show the same compassion and concern for that student that you will show to your own child. There is no difference because that person must be treated as if he or she is your own child. Respect for deadlines. You set up deadlines, do not compromise with them, but let students know ahead that these are the deadlines. If you are supposed to return corrected answer books on a certain day, then let that be an equally important deadline for you. You cannot refer to me. In IIT system, which I frequently refer to in my own institution, the deadline for submitting final grades after the exam is over is 96 hours for small courses and 7 days for large courses. If the grade is not submitted, the director calls you personally and you get a dressing down. I have had one such unfortunate occasion in my life, but that is how seriously we must all take deadlines and lead by example. If you expect your students to work late nights in the labs, at least some of those nights you have to be present yourself. If you expect them to come on Saturdays, Sundays and work, you have to do it yourself. If you expect them to write correct English, whatever you write must be absolutely correct in the first place. You cannot expect the students to follow you unless you are willing to lead by example. Treat ethics as important as I have already stated. I will not elaborate this. There are introspection that every one of us must do, examine whether any behavior of ours can be considered unethical and I am not talking about rest of the society considering it ethical or unethical. I am talking about I myself considering it ethical or unethical and if I myself consider that is something wrong, I must not do it. Read, think, discuss and write. Integrate education with research. Give people hard problems. Ask them to be curious. Ask them to read more. Why they should read only one textbook? Ask them to read twenty textbooks. Ask them to read differently and since it is not possible for each student to read twenty textbooks, ask twenty different students to read twenty textbooks and have a discussion session for half an hour in a week. You will find variety of interesting things coming out of such methodology. Attempts solving difficult problems. You know when you solve ten very simple problems successfully and get correct answers, you feel very happy. You have solved ten problems. Please note that you get pleasure but your knowledge is not enhanced. On the other hand, consider the following. You attempt solving ten extremely difficult problems and you do not get a solution for a single problem correctly. What will happen? You will feel very frustrated but please remember that that is where you have gained knowledge because you have applied your mind. You have tried to solve a hard problem. Even if you have not been able to get the solution correctly, we again talk of systems practiced in most good institutions. The problems that are given in the exams are usually hard problems, not simple problems. The problems that are given in tutorials are hard problems. You must tell your students that in real life you are going to face hard problems, learn that now and in whichever discipline you are teaching, this should be attempted. All this will make your life as beautiful as dew drops. I hope you have all seen dew drops. This is a picture which was sent to me by a colleague teacher, Dr. Vagh, who teaches in Delhi. When I spoke on this matter on a similar example many years ago, you see those dew drops here. In the early morning winters, you see them. They are as beautiful as anything else can be beautiful. So, if you want to make your life as beautiful as dew drops, please think about the meaning of the word dew which I have interpreted slightly differently. For me, D stands for dreaming big because our dreams always limit our achievements. For me, the E in D E W stands for enjoying life. This is the point. When I say excitement and passion, I must enjoy life. Life is very precious. Time goes only in one direction. Every moment goes away and never comes back. Since every moment is precious, you must enjoy every moment. It does not matter what you are doing. You are teaching. Of course, you must enjoy and be very passionate about it. But if you are discussing some political problem or some social problem with a colleague, you must enjoy that discussion. If you are seeing a movie, you must enjoy that. You must enjoy every moment in life. That is what I mean by E meant for enjoying. W, for me, stands for working hard. You cannot create history without working hard. So, dream big, enjoy life and work hard. Then your life will be as beautiful as dew drops. Just remember these three assignments, if you may call them, that they are done in IIT style, meaning any two of these three is not an option. You have to do all the three. This is my last slide, where I wish to state that it is the diffidence in our mind, which creates problems in our achieving big things. Get rid of that diffidence and I think the world is ours to make a mark on. The next paragraph are not my words. They were spoken by great Dr. Abdul Kalam. These have been incorporated in fact in his books. But I am very proud to say that first time he said these, when many, many years ago he had come to IIT Bombay to receive an honorary doctorate degree, when he said that we are trying to move towards becoming a developed nation. And our idea is to provide an honorable and comfortable life to Indians and to live as equals in this world. All this cannot be done unless 320 million young Indians for waiting to be educated are educated well. And because the economy is knowledge economy, now most people who will create wealth in future, who will create that solutions for comfortable life are going to be engineers, scientists and technicians. And that is why you my dear friends are going to be the change agents. So please be those change agents, contribute and help build such a nation for all of us. Thank you very much. God bless you.