Broker Prof!

This incident took place many years ago.  One evening I heard someone knocking on the door of my quarters.  When I opened the door, a student was standing there.  He told me, ‘Sir, I want to talk to you’.  I invited him to my house and offered him a seat.  

‘Sir, I am not able to focus on my studies’

‘Why, what happened to you? Are you finding it difficult to understand the subject?’

‘No sir, I am able to pick up what the teachers are explaining’

‘Then, are you staying away from home for the first time? Are you home sick?’

‘No sir, even for my graduation, I was away from home’

‘Then what is the problem?’

‘Sir, when I take my books to study, her face appears in my mid’

Surprised, I asked ‘Whose face?’

‘Sir, I am in deep love with a girl in my class, but the problem is she doesn’t have the same feelings towards me’ he paused for a moment and continued, ‘Sir, I want your help, will you please talk to her?’

I was taken aback! ‘What do you think of me? I must broker the deal between you and her?’ He didn’t say anything.  I continued, ‘Look, these are very sensitive issues.  You only have to deal with this’. 

After a week, he came to my quarters in the evening.

‘Sir, I feel she has talked about me to her brother, now I feel someone is following me.  I am afraid they will attack me.  Shall I lodge a complaint with the police’. 

‘Are you sure someone is following you?’

‘Sir, I think so’

‘When you are not sure about what you are saying, do you think the police can help?’

He remained silent for some time and left.  I felt bad for that boy.  I could see that he was going though lot of pain. 

Next day evening he came to my quarters again.  He looked more in distress.

‘Sir, I am sure someone is following me.  Do you know who it is?’

‘How do I know?’

Sir, I feel you have sent those people behind me, because you know all my secrets’

I was shocked, I was furious, ‘What nonsense? I have been so considerate to you and now you are leveling allegations against me. I don’t want to talk to you.  Please leave immediately’.  He quietly got up and left. 

After he had gone, I started thinking, I shouldn’t have behaved like that.  First of all, he was in deep pain and my rude behaviour would have only added to his suspicion.  So, I thought I would talk to him the next day.  But he didn’t come to the class next day.  Not just the next day, he remained absent for few more days.  So, I asked his classmates.  Nobody knew his whereabouts.  He didn’t have any close friends in his class.  He was staying in a rented room outside the campus.  One of his classmates went to his room and found the same locked.  The official records in the institute had his postal address, but no telephone number.  (No mobile phones those days).  He didn’t come back for a long time.

About six months later, one morning, when I was entering my office, I found this boy standing there with a smiling face.  I took him to my office and asked him what had happened.  He said, ‘Sir, after I met you on that day, I was feeling extremely depressed.  I didn’t come out of my room for two days.  My elder brother came and took me to my place.  Even there I couldn’t feel relaxed.  Finally, my brother took me to a psychologist.  I went though a series of counselling sessions.  Now I am perfectly alright.  I know nobody was following or trying to attack me.  It was all my illusion.  Sir, I want to join the Institute and complete the course’. 

He had lost one year by that time. So, he joined his juniors and continued his studies.  I found him more jovial and making friendship with many.  He successfully completed the course and moved on.  I have never met him since then, but I was very happy to see that he bounced back to life.  He got the professional help at the right time.

In a recent board meeting, the student representative mentioned about the mental stress that the students undergo and suggested that the Institute should make professional help available.  Not just students, we all go through stress at one point or the other.  The reason may be anything – relationship issues, academic pressure, work pressure, financial problems, and so on.  But getting professional help at the right time is crucial.

Anyway, this remained as a unique experience in my teaching career, where a boy wanted me to broker and negotiate his romantic feelings!

(Note: My sincere appeal to those who know this incident - Please do not reveal his name in your comments)

 

Chow Chow Bath

‘Upma’ is a popular breakfast dish, especially in South India.  It is popular not just for its taste, but also because it can be prepared easily and quickly.  When I joined SIT, I was living alone in the quarters till I got married.  Though I had minimum facilities to cook in my kitchen, I was making only tea and coffee at home.  One day I decided to start cooking in a small way and the obvious choice to start with was upma.  (I am not a great cook, but I can manage.  Of course, post-pandemic, my culinary skills have improved!).  There were no supermarkets those days, so I went to a nearby kirana shop.  Since I didn’t know Kannada, I kept telling the list of things that I wanted to the shopkeeper in English.  He quickly jotted down, packed everything, put them in a big polythene bag and handed over to me.  Back home, I got ready to make upma.  Rava, oil, salt, and everything else was there in the bag, except mustard seeds.  I saw a small yellow color packet which I had not asked for.  I picked it up – it was a pack of custard powder. I don’t know if the problem was with my pronunciation or the shopkeeper’s listening – he had given me ‘custard’ in place of ‘mustard’!

I had a senior colleague who was also living alone at Tumkur, because his family was in another city.  One day he asked me:

‘Ajoy, what do you do during weekends?’

‘Sir, on Sundays I cook, clean my house, wash clothes etc.’

‘Oh, you cook, is it? I can’t cook.  What do you make?’

‘Usually, I make upma for breakfast and sometimes rice and dal for lunch’

I could see that he was impressed.  In order to impress him further, I invited him for breakfast the next Sunday.  On Sunday morning I kept all ingredients ready.  I thought I would cook only after he came, because it is always nice to eat upma when it is hot.  So, when he came, I went to the kitchen.  He too came with me and kept talking to me while I was cooking.  I made some tea as well.  When it was ready, we sat down to eat.  When I started eating, I realised that I had forgotten to add salt to upma.  My plans of impressing him had gone for a toss.  Though he kept saying, it is okay, he never came back to taste my cooking.  Salt is called ‘uppu’ in Malayalam.  So, that day we had ‘Uppilla Upma’!

During my initial days in Tumkur, when I went to a restaurant, among the usual items like idli and dosa, they used to say ‘chow chow bath’.  I didn’t know what it was.  From the way it was pronounced, I thought it was a Chinese dish.  Few days later, I heard someone sitting on the next table ordering chow chow bath.  I waited curiously.  When it was served to him, I was surprised to see that it was a combination of upma and kesari (a sweet dish made of rava).  Upma is more popularly called ‘kara bath’ in this part of Karnataka.  So, one scoop of kara bath and one scoop of kesari bath became chow chow bath.  I don’t know the origin of its name.  There is a vegetable as well as a breed of dog called ‘chow chow’.  But neither of them has any connection to ‘chow chow bath’.  So, if you are not from Karnataka, next time when you are in Bengaluru, if someone offers chow chow bath, you can happily relish its taste.

I feel like having chow chow bath now. What about you?

Mouse on Paintbrush

Prof. D D Trivedi was a senior visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad.  In 1998, I was assisting him in a course on Finance, which mostly dealt with management of working capital.  Since Prof. Trivedi was not very conversant with computers, he used to write the contents for his presentations and give it to me one day in advance and I used to prepare the presentation using PowerPoint.  Prof. Trivedi was about to engage a session for the executives attending a Management Development Programme.  As usual he wrote the contents of his presentation in slips of papers and handed over to me the previous day.  As I was flipping through, I was surprised to see a Sanskrit Shloka written on the last slip.  I asked Prof. Trivedi:

‘Sir, do you want this shloka on the presentation?’

‘Yes’

‘Can I type this shloka in English?’

‘No, I want it in Devanagari script itself’

‘But how do I type Devanagari in PowerPoint?’

‘I don’t know, I want this in my presentation tomorrow. If you don’t know, ask someone who knows and get it done’.

Saying this, Prof. Trivedi walked away.  I stood there without knowing what to do.  (Forget Google Transliteration, it was early 1998 - Google itself was not born!  Today we can do it in a jiffy).  So, I asked a friend who was good at computers.  He told me to write the shloka using a sketch pen on a white sheet, get it scanned and paste it to the presentation.  There was only one scanner in the entire campus, which was kept in the computer lab.  When I reached the computer lab, to my ill luck, the manager told me that the scanner was not in working condition.  My friend suggested another way out.  Though not easy, I decided to try that.

I went to the computer lab and opened a tool called ‘Paintbrush’ in Windows. (In the later versions of Windows, it is called Microsoft Paint).  I started slowly writing the Sanskrit shloka in paintbrush using mouse.  It was not at all easy.  It was also taking lot of time.  I wrote with mouse, (or should I say I drew?), erased, deleted, drew again.  This went on for almost an hour and at the end, I had the Sanskrit Shloka on my presentation!

Next day when Prof. Trivedi started the presentation, I was waiting to see the reaction of the participants when the last slide appeared on the screen.  Finally, when it appeared, the participants were more amused by the slide itself than the meaning of the shloka that Prof. Trivedi was trying to explain!

In professional paintings, one can see the medium mentioned as ‘oil on canvas’, ‘charcoal on paper’ etc.  Similarly, this was my creation – ‘Mouse on Paintbrush’!

Quiz Master (English!)

In an earlier post, I had written about Saraswat Youths’ Association (SYA), a voluntary organisation where I started teaching in 1989.  The same year SYA was celebrating silver jubilee of its formation.  It was decided to organise an inter-school quiz competition as part of the silver jubilee celebrations.  I was studying Pre-Degree (equivalent to plus-two) at that time.  Since I had already conducted few quiz competitions earlier, the responsibility of being the quiz master fell on my shoulders.  We printed the brochure and sent it to all leading schools in and around Kochi.

Abhai Kumar, my cousin, was in-charge of the quiz competition.  Two weeks before the competition, on a Sunday, we gathered at the office of SYA to discuss the modalities of organising the competition.  During the discussion, Abhai said, the quiz has to be conducted in English.  This was a shock to me.  All the quizzes that I had conducted earlier were in Malayalam.  Having studied in a Malayalam medium school, my communication skills in English were very poor.  Had it been an informal discussion with someone in English, I would have still agreed.  But being on the centre stage and hosting a competition for about two hours in English was beyond my imagination. 

I started arguing with Abhai that the programme has to be in Malayalam, but he was in no mood to concede.  On the same day a Carnatic music programme titled ‘Sangeetha Sudha’ was organised on the ground floor of the building.  While the musical notes were touching high octaves on the ground floor, our argument was heating up on the first floor!  At one point, I even told him, ‘If you want the show to be in English, please look for another quiz master’.  Finally, Abhai, who has always been a better negotiator won the argument.  He told me, ‘First you prepare all questions in Malayalam, I will help you translate them to English’. 

On the day of the event, while I was cycling to the venue, one question kept ringing in my mind, ‘Am I going to spoil the show?’.  There was a written round in the beginning to select the best eight teams that would go on the stage and participate in the competition.  When the results of the written round were declared, my anxiety increased, because out of the eight teams that were shortlisted, six came from the leading English medium schools of Kochi.  Pretending to be confident, I started the show.  The competition had ten rounds.  I somehow managed the first round.  The second round also passed.  Slowly my confidence level started moving up.  As I moved from one round to the other, I saw the participating teams as well as the audience enjoying the show.  Finally, when the competition came to an end, I had done a reasonably good job.  Abhai, who was sitting in a corner watching all this, slowly walked up to me, hit on my shoulder, and said, ‘What did you say on that day, look for another quiz master? I knew you would do it!’. 

Life is like that!  At times when we don’t have confidence in our own capabilities, someone comes up showing tremendous confidence in us.  They force us to break our comfort zone and surge ahead.  They take us to the next level.  This is exactly what Abhai did to me.  Today I get many students from semi-urban and rural areas, who lack confidence in communicating in English.  I narrate this story to them and tell them, once you make up your mind, sky is the limit.