 Good afternoon and welcome back to this next session. In this session what I want to discuss with you is the general framework of science and engineering education that obtains in the country has also my own opinion on what we ought to do to improve the general quality of education. This is a talk that I have been recently giving at many places. So I apologize in advance to some of the participating teachers if they have already seen some version of this talk earlier. I only hope that this repetition will not be boring but instead will prove useful to re-emphasize certain points that I wish to make. The overview of this session is first the science, engineering and technology education. The second, what are the issues in conventional education? There are many I will discuss only a few and how exactly can we use the modern technology to address some of these at least. I will then try to reiterate what most of us already know namely what do our students want and what do they need. In this context I will discuss the professional pyramid that our students will be climbing in their lives and therefore it will help us to understand what we should adopt as teaching methodologies to enable them to climb up this pyramid better. That is what I would like to mention when I discuss what can we teachers do and how. I will conclude this talk with some unsolicited advice. As you know all of us teachers specialize in giving that and I specialize it in it to a greater extent. First let us talk about a few terms which we almost always take for granted. Science everyone presumably understands what science is. Scientific thinking, science education has been at the basic grounding of all our professional education subsequently. Engineering and technology is also understood but it is understood mostly in the mundane perspective of what engineers and technologists do. I would like to remind all participating teachers that the root words for the terms engineering and technology are actually ingenuity and technique. Genuity means creativity and technique in Greek means art. It is interesting to understand that while engineering and technology is considered a very mundane activity by most of us its origin primarily is in creativity and art. We must therefore keep this in mind. The ingenuity are important in any engineering and technology which itself is based in turn on the basic scientific principles. Applied science and engineering is generally understood to the use of engineering to the use of science principles to design and build equipment, appliances, gadgets what have you which directly and indirectly can be used in larger systems and these larger systems in turn enhance comfort and convenience and increase effectiveness and efficiency. So any professional engineering education whether engineering education, applied science education or management education must keep this in mind. The purpose of this education is to train people to build such gadgets, such methodologies, such appliances and such systems which increase comfort and convenience of the people and more importantly which increase effectiveness and efficiency. What it means is that while we make people's life more comfortable we must do so in an affordable way such that the technology and engineering that we do can be utilized by more and more human beings around the globe. When we consider engineering it will be useful to remember that nature has the best engineering. Consider evolution of life forms itself from amoeba, a single cell life form to a human being supposedly the most evolved life form. What do we observe here? We observe architecture and structure. We observe ability to store energy and convert energy. We eat food. There are chemical reactions that take place which then actually permit our muscles to act that is how we achieve locomation. There is a huge amount of mechanical activity that is possible by the life forms. All of this happens through proper energy conversion and proper structural principles, engineering principles which are used here. What about signaling and messaging? While we talk about computers and computer programming is indeed the theme of this particular workshop it is important to understand that signaling and messaging that happens in life forms is of extraordinary nature. Consider the human life form. If I touch my, if I touch let's say fire with my hand by mistake, my hand automatically withdraws. We know that the muscles are instructed by the brain to withdraw the hand. But how do the muscles know that they have to act? Huge messaging chain actually takes place when my fingers touch some fire. A whole lot of messages pass through the brain. The brain acts on those messages and in turn initiates messages to control the muscular movement. All of this happens automatically and intrinsically. There is a large amount of information processing that happens inside human brains. Consider human eyes or for that matter eyes of any life species. The amount of information that eyes are able to collect through millions of cells that the eyes have and the collection of this information, the correlation of this information, the consolidation of this information which happens in the brain is unparalleled. No computers have come anywhere close to handle that kind of information in that way of parallel processing which the life forms can do. Of course, the fundamental objective of the life forms is growth and self-preservation. And of course, mutation which involves innovation and replication. Any engineering that we do is clearly unable to address these two issues right now. Why do I state all this? I state all of this to emphasize that while we study our engineering from books and while we concentrate on experiments with available gadgets and appliances and equipments and tools, it is perhaps important to look at the nature and understand the engineering that nature has evolved over millions of years. Consider the problem of nitrogen fixation for example. When we produce any nitrogen based commodity, let's say ammonia, whatever. The chemical reactions that we design require huge amount of energy and they work at higher temperatures and pressures. On the other hand, simple plants, the way they fix nitrogen, the way they absorb nitrogen and convert it into compounds from the Mother Earth that they take their food from, they do so at normal temperatures and pressures. We have not understood how exactly this mechanism works. Take a firefly for example. The amount of humiles that the firefly is able to generate so that a firefly is visible in the night as a beautiful flying creature. If we were to produce the same lumens in our own engineering way, the heat that we will generate will kill the firefly but it does not happen. The firefly is alive and it still generates those many lumens. Such engineering wonders are abound everywhere and it is useful to keep that in mind. What about engineering education then? Well, I submit that life forms are natural engineers. In my own house in IIT campus, in the Varanda of my house, every winter two small birds will come in and try to build a nest. They take almost a month to build it. They collect twigs, they collect leaves, they collect all kinds of trash which we would discard and slowly but surely a beautiful nest emerges. Surely the preservation of species is the under-like motivation because the birds wish to put their eggs inside that nest. But if you look at any nest, you will find that it is structurally adequate to support its own weight. You will find that it is architecturally quite beautiful. You will find that the security is immense. No snake can enter that small nest to eat the eggs. You will find that all this engineering is done by those two birds without ever going to any engineering college. Who then teaches these birds engineering? Well, we presume that the engineering skills are passed genetically. Indeed, such skills would be passed genetically to human beings as well. Unfortunately, human species are different because the knowledge has grown so rapidly and this is what distinguishes human species from other species that genetics does not have time to collect that knowledge and pass it on genetically to the next generation as yet. I do not know maybe 10,000 years later, the son or daughter of an engineer will automatically be an engineer. But till such time, the knowledge has to be passed externally. The skills have to be passed externally and that is the reason why, whether it is birds or animals, we do not find any mechanism for external knowledge passing. But humanity being different, human beings have created a separate institution for such external knowledge passing, for such handling of external knowledge. That institution is called a teacher. There are no other species which have teachers, at least not known to us, but human beings have teachers. Why did we create these teachers? We created teachers to act as the fulcrum of handling this external knowledge passing mechanism. What is this institution supposed to do? The institution called a teacher is supposed to capture, store, and disseminate the accumulated knowledge. It is supposed to analyze, correlate, and in fact generate new knowledge through research. It is also supposed to codify and standardize the available knowledge. These are the things that the humanity charged the institution called teacher with, saying, Mr. Teacher, you shall do all of this for us so that our children, as they grow up, can benefit from the accumulated knowledge. Why are you? The humanity can benefit by the extension of the knowledge that you do through research. That is indeed the purpose of the institution called a teacher. In order to support teachers in their endeavor to handle such knowledge, we created support structures. In the earlier days, in India, they were called ashrams. Today they are called universities and colleges. My institute is one of such structures. Your own colleges and the remote centers are such structures. Unfortunately, the nomenclature got confusing somewhere down the line. So for example, the structure which is supposed to support me in doing all of this is called an institution, Indian Institute of Technology. Each of your colleges and university are recognized as an institution. And we, the teachers, are termed as employees of these institutions. Sadly, this nomenclature has had a very bad effect on us as a community of teachers. We have forgotten that we are the institutions. And these are the structures which are supposed to support us in our endeavor to handle knowledge. Instead, we consider ourselves to be paid employees of these institutions. And therefore, limit our activities just as a paid employee will limit the activity in any other commercial organization. I would submit that we must remove this kind of thought from our mind. We must recognize ourselves as what we are, what we have been charged by the humanity to do, and recognize that we are institutions in ourselves. And the so-called institutions are nothing but support structures to permit us to do this task very effectively or as effectively as is possible. My colleague, administrators of the universities and colleges may not agree with this viewpoint. But I submit that every individual teacher in his or her heart and mind must genuinely believe that he or she is the institution charged with the responsibility of acquiring new knowledge, spreading that knowledge, and disseminating that knowledge to each and every human being who seeks that knowledge. In conclusion then, the purpose of a professional education would be to prepare a person for real world, generate understanding of existing knowledge, kindle the spirit of inquiry. This is absolutely, absolutely important. In fact, one point which I have always made is that the current system of syllabus-based examination, a syllabus-based education, and examination-oriented studies has somewhere reduced the spirit of inquiry that we are able to create within our students. It is absolutely vital, as I shall illustrate with some example later on, that the spirit of inquiry is at the grassroots of any educational process. Equally importantly is enabling the problem solving ability. After all, the purpose of education is not merely to ensure that students acquire as much knowledge as exists already. That would be learning by road, which is what is happening. Again, sadly, due to the examination system that we have. However, the purpose of education to prepare our students for the real world means that they will have to solve real world problems. Real world problems are not defined in our syllabus, because every time new problems crop up, a syllabus at most reflects what has happened in the past. Whereas students are going to face the future and therefore the only way to prepare them to face the real world will be to tell them that whatever the syllabus has taught you is only the background. You have to use all of that to solve new problems that you will have to face. That is the reason why problem solving approach is considered vital in any good professional education. Here are some of the problems that we have. I will discuss just one problem of the large class size. When you go back and teach your courses, let us take the subject of computer programming. It will not be uncommon for many of you to handle class sizes ranging from say 50 students to even 400 students. I taught the first course in programming last semester in IIT Bombay. I had 830 students. The classes were conducted in our convocation hall, which thankfully has a capacity of 1200 students. So I can keep on going for a few more years. But you realize that when a large class is being handled, first individual interaction is extremely difficult to ascertain. The individual interaction in such courses happens through laboratories and tutorial sessions. In IIT system, we have teaching assistants who are our postgraduate students and doctoral students. In most other colleges, this task of handling laboratories and tutorials has to be done by the teachers themselves all by the technical support staff that they might have. This limits the amount of interaction that they can have. The fundamental problem, however, facing a teacher, teaching a large class, is that how do I decide the pace of my course? Do I move very rapidly, covering some elementary concepts and going quickly to the advanced concepts? Do I move very slowly? Well, because I have to address students who are at different level of perception, who are at different level of habits of hard working that becomes a difficult problem. I faced this problem when I was a young teacher some 40 years ago. I discussed with my senior colleagues and I was advised that I should use a common pace. I then drew the following diagram. I put all the students as points on a two-dimensional spatial map. One axis represented hard working ability of the student. Another axis represented the grasp of the student. Please understand that while the grasp is naturally correlated to the intrinsic intellectual ability of the student, it does not depend only on that. It also depends upon the level of preparation that student has had in the past. So if the student is well prepared in the background, the grasp will be faster. It also depends upon the motivation level of the student, the concentration level of the student, et cetera. However, it is a fact that different students will have different abilities of hard work and different abilities of grasp. When I plot these students like this, I get a graph where the students would be scattered all across the space. Then I said if I am forcing a common pace as suggested for my lectures, the common pace will address the average of this particular class. This is the average. When I do this graph for the first time, I remember a very senior colleague, Professor Sen Gupta, had advised me on this average pace. I went to him and said, sir, I have a problem with the average pace. He asked me, what is the problem? I said there is no student at that point. So am I teaching nobody in the class? He said this was a very funny question. And I said, no, it is not very funny because if you look at this particular thing, this particular graph, there are so many students. And when I decide on an average pace, I agree with you that my observation may be hypothetical that there is no particular student at that point, but there are students around it. But observe what will happen. The result will be that everybody will move towards that average pace. While this may help people at the lower end to move towards this average, people at the higher end will actually move downwards. People who are capable of doing much more hard work will stop working very hard. People who are capable of grasping much more will stop applying their mind. And they will all wear to the average. Is that what is expected of teaching? I submitted that clue that is not so. I do this line. And I said my objective must be that I bring out the best in every student. No matter how poor that student is in the grasp, no matter how little hard work that student does, I must encourage that student to do more hard work. I must encourage that student to develop gras further. And I must move all the students in the class successfully across this line to the top. This is what would drive every student to bring out the best in oneself. I submit, my friends, that this must be the objective of every teacher. Every student must be on the radar of the teacher. The weaker students who will need additional help can be provided help through extra classes, through additional interaction. The better students, the better performing students can be provided additional incentive by giving them harder problems, by challenging their minds to do something better. This is how one is able to bring out the best in any student. I submit that that should be the objective of all of us teachers and the educational process. I will comment on research and education. Sadly, research and education are considered to completely independent aspects, to the extent that people do not consider research alongside education at all. In fact, many teachers believe that when they study for their degree, they are doing education. And only when they do PhD, they are doing research. It is in this context that I would like to examine, what is PhD? My contention is that PhD is not a degree. At least it is not just a degree. If it is not just a degree, then what is it? Here is my opinion on that. I consider PhD to be a mindset. What is the mindset? A mindset is the way I think when I do my PhD. And the way I think when I'm not doing a PhD. The difference is that the mindset that evolves is what I call a PhD. What is that mindset about? That mindset is about getting a broad perspective of the problem that I'm solving at the research level. The mindset is about spirit of inquiry, because I'm looking at a problem which has not been solved earlier. And therefore, I must have very intrinsic spirit of inquiry to look at what are the possible ways in solving this problem. I must have critical analysis. The ability to do critical analysis develops as one does PhD. And without such critical analysis, you will not be able to say which particular alternative that you are looking at is better than the other alternative. Which particular alternative is workable? Which particular alternative may be thrown out, because it's not workable. So critical analysis is absolutely essential. Succeeded articulation, something that we Indians are traditionally weak in. The written articulation of one's ideas is fundamentally important. Without such an articulation, we will not be able to share whatever we have thought of, whatever we are working on with our colleagues and with the general public. That is the reason why there is so much importance given to writing good papers and publishing them in technical journals. It is not just the act of publishing a paper, but it is the act of proper articulation which is important. And which the mindset process evolving towards PhD should teach us. This is something that I would like to emphasize is important for all of us. But when you do a PhD, you develop that art of succinct articulation. Discussions. Your mind is now ready to discuss things with you. You are no more aloof because you are very keen to find out what others think about your ideas. These discussions help you to crystallize your own idea as well. It helps you to communicate your ideas to others. It helps you to learn from others. It helps you to propagate your ideas to others. Metaculous hard work. No shortcut to that when you are doing PhD. You can't be sloppy, do an experiment, record something on a piece of paper, and lose that paper next day. You have to record all your observations carefully. You have to analyze them carefully. You have to be very, very meticulous in whatever you do. And you have to be very hardworking because there is no substitute for hard work. If ordinarily you sleep for six hours a day, when you are doing research, you are expected to sleep for two hours a day. Regal and discipline. No substitute for that. Your mathematics cannot be sloppy. I will recall one particular instance here. When traditionally, when we have three numerical quantities, a, b, and c, and we want to state that they are unequal, we simply say a not equal to b, not equal to c. There is one book which I saw about 25 years ago which said a not equal to b, not equal to c, not equal to a. That is rigorous. Because a not equal to b, not equal to c, there is not guarantee that c is not equal to a. If we are talking about three unequal quantities, the last one is more rigorous. This is a small example, but it should tell us how rigorous we have to be in whatever we discuss, we analyze, we write, we articulate. That kind of discipline has to be developed. Perseverance. While doing PhD, we will fail many times. Some of the alternatives which we believe will work completely and open up a new channel of knowledge suddenly fail because of some small thing that we have neglected somewhere. We can't give up. We have to start all over again. Think of some other alternative. If a given alternative is proving hard because some additional experiments are to be done, we have to do that. Perseverance is therefore extremely important in developing that mindset for PhD. Synthesis. Ability to analyze is no more good enough. You are advancing knowledge. You have to synthesize various ideas that you have from various places. Design new things. Maybe fabricate new things if you are working in hardcore engineering. Maybe write new programs. Maybe develop new software. Maybe do simulation. You have to do a lot of synthesis activities which are generally not demanded of you in your earlier educational process. That is what developing PhD mindset does to you. Problem solving, very fundamental. You will keep facing large number of problems and you'll have to keep solving those problems and those problems would not have been covered with any syllabus that you have studied earlier. That becomes an important part of your mindset. Innovation. You can't use the existing ways of doing things. You have to innovate things. And there are umpteen examples of such innovation that you find amongst almost all these students who have been pursuing PhD that they will have to actually take recourse to overcome any difficulty that they meet. In fact, innovation is what the entire humanity is looking for whenever people are supposedly doing research and advancing the state of knowledge for humanity. Extending human knowledge is the expectation of such a mindset. And of course, extending one's own knowledge is an equally important expectation. Well, so far what I have described is what can be tentatively called as the PhD mindset. When you achieve all of this, your guide someday says, okay, write your thesis and submit it. We believe that because we have done so much work, we have now written the thesis and we are getting a degree. Our guide generally believes that we have achieved this mindset and therefore incidentally we are writing this thesis. So friends, PhD is all about such mindset. But now I have an important question to all of you. Is this mindset not the objective of education at all levels? What is so great about PhD that only while doing PhD, all these things should be achieved in your mind. Should they not be achieved in your conventional education? Do we not expect a primary school student to understand the basic mathematical tables, the fundamental logical reasoning, the basic art of articulation? Do we not expect a standard student to be able to write correctly and well in his or her own language, a description of any event or any scientific principle? Is that not part of the expectation of that mindset? To a 11th or 12th standard student, do we not expect a mindset which is full of analytical capabilities, correct understanding of mathematical rigor if that student is a student of maths and science? Do we not expect our graduating students who get a BE or MSC or BSC degree to be able to solve problems, to be able to innovate, to be able to synthesize, to be able to persevere, to be able not to give up, to be able to solve difficult problems? All of that mindset I submit is required as a necessary achievement at every educational level. So whether it is primary school teaching, whether it is secondary school teaching, whether it is college teaching, whether it is postgraduate teaching, all of us indirectly are equivalent to those PhD guides who try to imbibe this kind of mindset in a research scholar. All of us are required to do the same thing amongst our primary school students, secondary school students and more importantly, our college students. We are looking at effective teaching to our college undergraduate students because this course, this subject is taught at the undergraduate level. But please remember that your objective as teachers will be exactly the same as the objective of a PhD guide, namely to achieve this extraordinary mindset in every student of yours so that that student becomes a better problem solver, that student becomes a better articulator, that student becomes a better analyst, that student becomes a better designer. That objective has to be there. It is therefore my submission that please do not separate out research and education. Perhaps one of the reasons why most of the universities in the world insist on great researchers being teachers is because they understand that researchers who have achieved this mindset perhaps would be better able to convey that mindset and to create that mindset in their students. However, according to me, that is not necessary. Even a primary school teacher who understand the importance of these things can actually help create such a mindset in a primary school student. Our limited objective friends therefore is to treat this workshop not merely as a mechanism to enhance our knowledge of how to teach, see programming more effectively but to enhance our own mindset to a level where we are able to tell our students that you are going to be the great problem solvers of the future through the art of computer programming that we are learning here. Our endeavor would be to tell our undergraduate first year students that you are no less than a PhD student as far as this basic understanding is concerned, you must achieve this mindset and that must be our objective. This indeed is the objective of the professional career as well when our students go out in the market and when they climb the professional ladder they have to constantly continue to enhance this mindset. You will find actually that most professionals do this automatically. You will find actually that there are professionals in the industry not only in India but everywhere in the world who have actually achieved that mindset. Though they don't hold any formal PhD degree you will find them to be better than many PhD holders in this respect. So this must be remembered. There are professionals who do not have a formal PhD degree yet they have a mindset. Sadly, there are people who have a formal PhD degree but not this mindset. I would submit that all of us teachers must endeavor to acquire this mindset first in ourselves and then endeavor to create this mindset in all of our students that we teach. So what comes in the way? Why do students find themselves unable to achieve this mindset? This is because their attention is focused only on one thing which is the attitude and this attitude is formed by another thing which they are constantly chasing a rat race. This is the rat race for Marx. You and I will be unable to do anything to prevent people from participating in this rat race. This rat race has become the defining factor of the modern society because students get jobs based on the marks that they score. Students get interview calls based on the marks that they score. Students get recognition based on the marks that they score. And this happens right from the first standard. It is therefore unfortunate but true that students are all set to participate in the rat race for Marx. But it is important for us teachers to understand what does this rat race do? This rat race creates a few winners and many losers. The few winners who get admission to better colleges or who get better jobs become overconfident. And many times this overconfidence borders on arrogance. I have seen many arrogant mindset getting into IIT system because they believe they are at the top of the world because they have got high scores in what we call the joint entrance exam. We recognize that that is nonsense. They have got high scores because they were better prepared because they were lucky. Out of four lakh people they could solve the problems in those three hours. That does not mean much. Although it is important that we must recognize their ability and a confidence to able to solve such problems is well placed. However, an overconfidence of any kind in anybody is useless. Particularly when it borders on arrogance it is absolutely detrimental to the students own career. This must be pointed out by us. However, that is not the bigger problem. The bigger problem of large number of losers who develop diffidence and this diffidence could be very detrimental because this diffidence may become despondence. Notice that in your own college when several students fail in the first year in some course such as applied mechanics or computer programming. Please remember most of these students who come to you as engineering or science college students they have done exceedingly well in their schools. They have never failed in their lives. The failure is extremely difficult to digest. They become almost despondent. That is why you see that if a student does not do well in the earlier years subsequent years that student finds it extremely difficult to recover. Although from a fundamental point of view as a talent or as an ability that student does not perhaps lack as much from others as the marks make out. But this is what happens and this is the result of the rat race. I conclude by saying that please advise your students that while they have to participate in the rat race they have no business becoming overconfident or arrogant nor they have any business to lose their confidence and become despondent. They must face the world as it is they must remain confident of themselves on whatever they are doing because any rat race while it will produce a few winner rats and large number of loser rats a rat race will only produce rats it cannot produce human beings. Our objective in life as teachers is to produce great human beings and therefore we must keep convincing our students do not lose hope if you lose marks do not get arrogant if you score too many marks just go ahead with the calm confidence and deal with the issues that will create the kind of mindset that we believe you ought to have when you pursue your career later. In this respect I am reminded of the child's attitude. When a child is faced with a problem how does a child solve it? Let me mention a peculiar problem which has become quite a favorite of mine. Learning a foreign language is considered intellectually difficult activity by grown ups. People who learn German or French spend two or three years doing elementary course and intermediate course and advanced course. I remember several friends of mine who used to go to Maxwell or Bowen to spend six months to learn better German. At the end of three years of such courses, books, studies, examinations, certificates they are able to converse in German a bit slowly. They can understand written German not necessarily the spoken German but they understand that language German, French, Arabic and we call them intelligent people. They are able to learn foreign languages. Yet we don't share the same enthusiasm and praise all human children who learn a foreign language between the age of three years and six years that foreign language is called the mother tongue of a child. Every human child learns that language without going to any school or college without passing any exams without participating in any rat race no books, no degrees, no certificates. How does a child do that? I believe that every human child has these three fundamental factors embedded into the mind and heart as the child takes birth. Curiosity, boldness and perseverance. A child is immensely curious about everything that it sees around it. A child is bold enough to ask any questions including funny questions. A child is never discouraged by the elders to ask questions. In fact, even if you discourage the child will keep asking questions. Look at what we do as teachers or our students when they come to classes. If a student asks too many questions say please don't disturb the class. After some time say please don't ask stupid questions. What we are doing is suppressing the boldness of the child. Not only that, when we submit when we suppress the boldness of a student we also suppress the curiosity. And please remember curiosity is the fundamental resource through which a human being learns. The moment the curiosity stops learning also will stop. So curiosity and boldness is to be preserved and enhance if possible. Perseverance, a child never gives up. A child decides to do a naughty thing you all have noticed. 10 times it will fail, 5 times it will get scolded by mother or father. A child will come back 11, 15 times and do that naughty thing. Whether it is breaking a glass whether it is climbing upon TV whatever, whatever, whatever. Child never gives up. And yet look at what we do when we become students in a regular classroom. In the first few years we are perhaps enthusiastic in looking at various problems and attempting to solve hard problems. Just like a child does. When a child does not understand a new word that she hears the child keeps analyzing, keeps repeating. The child never gives up unless it has understood the meaning of that word and unless it has used it. Whereas when we ask the children or our students to solve some sums sometimes they try but if they don't succeed they give up. In the initial days in the school they give up maybe after three or four attempts. By the time they come to our colleges they have learned to give up after maybe one or two attempts at most. And by the time they graduate they have learned to give up even without trying. That is the great contribution our educational system is able to do today. Unfortunate. And I submit my friends that it is in the hands of our teachers to ensure that they do not lose these beautiful capabilities which they have inherited as human species. Curiosity, boldness and perseverance. Please ensure that your students are encouraged to keep thinking about these natural abilities and keep enhancing them rather than losing them. Academicians in my opinion must develop excitement and passion. And here is what I will refer back to the observation that many of us teachers are perhaps not here as teachers as the final ambition to join academic career in the long run. Perhaps some of us are looking at this career as a short term event. I would submit that whether I am a teacher for one month, one year, one semester or one decade or one life I must ensure that I do my job with excitement and passion because whatever I do in my life unless there is excitement and unless there is passion I may not be able to bring out the best in me. Please remember what we expect in our students to bring out best in them must be true for ourselves. We must endeavor to bring out the best in ourselves and which cannot be done without excitement and passion. It cannot be done without humility and ethics. I will not spend too much time on this but let me tell you that ethics is generally important in any human society and because teachers are an institution in themselves humanity expects much harsher ethics from teachers. Humility is important for all human beings but a teacher must be more humble than others because a teacher is also a role model to most of the students. The way the teacher behaves is often copied just like young children copy from their parents our students tend to copy subconsciously from us teachers. It is therefore very important that in our behavior we maintain humility and we maintain ethics at all costs. We must empower the learner to climb the piece of success. I define the piece of success as a peak on a mountain which is climbed through the path of examinations which is climbed through the path of knowledge which actually should be at the root but people when they pass examinations and face the real world they suddenly realize that they do not have adequate knowledge and they have to learn that knowledge additional knowledge on the field. It is not uncommon for me to see many of our past students coming back from industry and spending time in our library far more than the time that they ever spent when they were students on the campus and that is because they recognize that knowledge is the ultimately important thing in solving problems. When they solve problems and use that knowledge they become successful. That is the next path. Success can be measured as material wealth that one generates. Success is also measured as the professional competencies that one develops and the professional positions that one achieves. So an engineer when he or she goes through the professional pyramid becomes a work manager or vice president or whatever that's a successful achievement. However the last step towards the pinnacle is not just the success but it is the impact that a human being lives on this society and that is why you will find that humanity has always honored people who are conventionally called religious or social leaders far more than the professional leaders and that is because people like Mahatma Gandhi or Jesus Christ or Gautam Buddha leave a far greater impact on human society than ordinary professionals do. It does not mean that ordinary professionals must convert them into a Mahatma or a Gautam Buddha. What it means is that all of us as human beings must be sensitive to the fact that while we are climbing this pinnacle of success we must also contribute and that contribution must leave some visible impact on some part of the society around us because that is the society in which we are growing. Knowledge and personality, vision and values are to be imbibed in our students as well as in ourselves. I submit to you a brief action agenda as to what teachers can do to achieve these. First, be compassionate and considerate. We are not regulators although as teachers we have to execute some regulatory function. We are facilitators and facilitators of human beings, not role numbers. Therefore it is important that we are compassionate and considerate to our students. Some simple things. There are occasions when in an examination some students come up 15 minutes late or half an hour late or one hour late. There are some systems somewhere which say if you are 10 minutes late you will not be admitted to the examination. There must be compelling reasons why a student comes late. A student never comes late by design. In IIT system we teachers have the flexibility of saying no matter how late you are, come and take the exam. Please ensure that wherever such flexibility exists for your students, provide them with that flexibility. They will not only admire you but they will learn better. Punish the mistake but not the person. Very, very important. Lead by example. I can't ask my students to work for 12 hours a day unless I am myself able to work for 14 hours a day. It's exactly the same thing as it happens in army leadership, in business leadership or in educational leadership. We have to lead by example. There is no shortcut to that. Develop showmanship, not like acting in films but please remember that when we teach there are large number of students all observing us. Our body language, our mannerism, our way of emphasizing things all matters a lot and some kind of showmanship is important to be developed. We must respect for deadlines. If a submission is due on a certain date we must develop that respect for that date amongst all of our students. We must innovate constantly. There are ampteen examples of innovations I can keep on citing those and it will require hours of discussion but I will tell you a couple of things which I found in my Bharat Yatra. The one small place in Ulisa I don't remember whether it was Nest in Behrampur or some other place. I met a teacher, I was visiting the labs very nicely made labs by the way in that small undergraduate college and I was asking the teachers what else do they do? So one teacher sheepishly said that he runs a special lab on Sundays. So what do you do on Sundays? He's an electronics teacher and he says they take up a large design problem and they analyze the circuit, they design the circuit, they build the circuit. Every Sunday two, three hours students and the teacher meet in that lab and at the end of that semester they actually develop a tested working circuit. I say it's amazing. Do all students come? The teacher said no sir. Only some 10, 15 students come. I have 60 students in my class. I said no matter. These 15 students are going to make a difference to the world. They are going to make changes because they are thinking outside the syllabus. They are thinking of solving some hard problem. Something that we constantly and naturally do in a IIT system is being attempted at such small places by teachers like you. Why can't we take these as role models? The only sad thing was that teacher sheepishly said sir you are the first one telling me that I am doing something useful. My colleagues all say paga leh syllabus ka bhar ka palata hai. The unfortunate fact is many of us because we have stayed in the educational system of universities for so long we ourselves have become bound by syllabus by an exam system. It is important for us to break those shackles. Open up and say that the system demand that we do this, this, this but we on our own can do this, this, this. Don't forget that there are Saturdays, there are Sundays, there are evenings and there are nights. And if you take one step forward you'll always find 10, 15, 20 students of whichever college you are in who will contribute with equal or greater enthusiasm in whatever endeavors you do. Such are the endeavors which may become role models in your own colleges and in surrounding colleges. I believe that should be an objective that you should keep in mind. I repeat that you must treat ethics as important because without that you cannot go forward in life. Read, think and write is a message that I would like to give all of you. You all of course read, you all of course think but many of you do not write. This again is a national weakness. I submit that you must develop the ability to articulate in written form both for your own sake and for the sake of your students. The notes that you write that text of the questions that you write must be written at least in correct English. It must be understandable by people. Many people say English is not my native language. I will challenge you to write correct Oria or correct Telugu or correct Marathi and I'm sure that if you make mistakes in writing correct English you'll also make mistakes in writing correct Marathi or correct Telugu. That is because you have not paid sufficient attention and you have not disciplined your mind sufficiently to ensure that your written articulation is perfect. If you spend time to think and develop that ability believe me it will help you not only in becoming a better teacher but a far better professional yourselves. Do this as a regular habit is my advice. Integrate education and research. As I have said earlier these two cannot be seen as two separate compartments. They are not. Education and research are two sides of the same coin and a coin cannot be seen perpetually only from one side. It has to be seen from both sides. Set up special discussion clubs. Invite students to attend solving hard problems that have never been solved. Remember always that solving 10 simple problems as I've asked in your examination system might give your students great pleasure and a lot of marks but may not increase their ability. In IIT we believe that solving attempting to solve 10 very difficult problems and not getting a single solution right helps us much better. We had a professor who had once set a question which nobody could solve and when some students went to him saying oh you could not solve it I thought you would. When they asked what is the solution the teacher said I don't know. It is part of an unsolved research problem but I thought this batch is so clever that that batch will be able to solve this problem. Let Professor K. C. Bucherji I was a witness to this conversation. In most other places the teacher would be dubbed as a teacher who sets questions outside the syllabus. There would probably be a strike. In IIT that evening that bunch of students went back to the hostel and celebrated and when their seniors asked him why are you celebrating? They were celebrating with a milkshake in hostel. A milkshake party is given in hostels when the hostel wins an inter-hostel tournament or some big event happens. When seniors asked them why are you celebrating? They said great Professor K. C. Bucherji thinks that we can solve unsolved research problems. Now that my dear friends is the mindset. Believe me your students can have the same mindset. Many of you would have the same mindset. What is important is to encourage such people to come together and have that mindset. Rank journals and conferences as teachers participate in these conferences as teachers submit your papers to journals aim your paper at the next higher level. Please remember what I said just as your students must be encouraged to achieve that PhD level mindset you all must do the same thing. It does not matter whether you are registered formally for a PhD or not. With a BA degree just with the knowledge and with the perseverance you can actually crack some hard research problem and publish your material in any journal or present it in any conference. Do not underrate that activity because research is an equal important component of educational process. Finally if we want our lives to be like the beautiful dew drops this picture was sent to me by a teacher colleague in Delhi when Professor Wag in MGM college. These dew drops I believe you can see that they look so very nice on this. I have an interpretation of the word dew suggested to be by my friend and ex-student Rakesh Mathur when he was giving a talk here. According to me the D stands for dreaming big because our dreams limit our achievements. So we must dream big. We must teach our students to dream big. We must teach our students to enjoy life. E is for enjoying life. Life is so precious. Every moment of life is so precious. You see it never comes back. A moment gone is gone and therefore we must enjoy every moment of our life and we must therefore have fun in every activity. Fun cannot be there only in sports or in cultural events. Fun must be there in studying. Fun must be there in solving problems. Fun must be there in heated animated discussion. Fun must be there in everything. So dream big, enjoy life and the W is for working hard for there is no substitute for hard work. If you wish to create history you have to work hard. Give this message to the students that if they want their lives to be as beautiful as the dew drops, in fact it applies to all of us. I have taken this as the fundamental spirit driving my own life. If I want my life as a teacher to be as beautiful as the dew drops, if I want my students' lives to be as beautiful as these dew drops, then I must inculcate in them the habit of dreaming big, the habit of enjoying life and the habit of working hard and in the true IIT style, I must tell my students that any two out of these three is not an option. So they must solve all three problems. That is a compulsory requirement. Whatever you may do to change your university system, you may succeed or you may not succeed but at least in this endeavor, do tell your students that these three are compulsory activities. Any two out of the three is not permitted. I will not waste your time. I personally believe in this. I personally believe that you are capable of not only making your students' lives as beautiful as dew drops but your own life in the process if you believe in these things. The last unsolicited advice I would give to close this session is to get out of that diffidence mindset. Believe me, we teachers also suffer from diffidence of a different kind. I suffer from diffidence when I see great colleagues of mine having far greater achievements in their own field of research and teaching and I say, oh my God, am I not good enough? But I don't let that diffidence come in my way of saying I will try harder, I will try innovatively, I will do something else and I will become better. Get out of this diffidence and the whole world is there to make our mark on. Our mark as a teacher has to be left indelibly on the minds and hearts of our students because we are charged, remember, as an institution by humanity to create the next generation of great human beings. The next paragraph is not mine. I have stolen it from the saying of a great person. In our mood towards becoming a developed nation to provide an honorable and comfortable life to Indians and to live as equals. These words were used by honorable Dr. Abdul Kalam. What I am very proud of is probably for the first time he used these words when he had come to IIT Bombay decades ago and when he was addressing us. And he said this is what we, he of course subsequently put it in his vision 2020 and many of the books. This is his vision and you will all agree that this is a vision that we all share as Indians. We want to live as equals. We want to develop ourselves and we want to say we will also live as comfortably and as otherably as anybody else. But in order to do that we need people who think differently and therefore we need to emphasize that our students do something different. My request to you my dear friends is that as teachers be the change agent, contribute to quality education and help build the builders of such a nation for all of us. Thank you so much.