Don’t Study Hard, Study Smart
An average IIT professor is not an IITian. Yet he teaches the brightest minds on earth.
That may sound strange, but it is largely true. IIT graduates generally move on to better-paying job or head for American Universities for their Masters. It is uncommon for an IIT BTech graduate to stay back and do an MTech from the same IIT. Most of those who come for their MTech are, in fact, non-IITians—perhaps attracted, quite understandably, by the IIT label.
In common parlance, therefore, when you say that someone is an IITian, what you usually mean is that the person did his or her BTech from an IIT.
Which makes one wonder: why do IIT students hold their professors in such high esteem? And why do many of us continue to remember and revere them decades after we have left the campus?
The answer, I think, is that an institution of excellence is not created by one brilliant individual, however brilliant he may be. It is created by the collective effect of teachers, students, hostels, study groups, discussions, quizzes, examinations—and the sheer intellectual energy generated when a bunch of bright youngsters are thrown together. Bright youngsters compete. They argue. They compare marks. The selflessly exchange notes. They try to outdo each other. And, quite often without realising it, they push each other towards excellence.
The professors are the catalysts. They don’t merely teach you what is in the textbook. The good ones make you wonder why the textbook says what it says.
Enter Professor Ghosh
We had a Chemistry professor called Prof. Ghosh.
Prof. Ghosh always wore an enigmatic smile. Nobody quite knew what was going on behind that smile. He also had a rather peculiar way of teaching Chemistry.
He taught us a strange combination of Chemistry and Physics. For instance, what was the Schrödinger equation doing in a Chemistry class?
We had no idea. Prof. Ghosh, apparently, did.
He would spend hours on subjects which, to us, looked distinctly non-Chemistry. And the sequence in which he taught them seemed to have been invented entirely by him. It certainly wasn’t in any textbook. This presented us with a serious problem.
So we did what IIT students do when confronted with a difficult academic problem: we searched the library. We went through shelf after shelf in the enormous IIT library, looking for a book that followed Prof. Ghosh’s sequence, logic and mysterious method of teaching.
Nothing.
Finally, we cornered him and asked him the obvious question: “Sir, which book do you follow?”
He smiled. That smile became slightly more enigmatic. “I follow my own style,” he said. “Sometimes, I refer to some German books on Chemistry.”
That was the end of our quest. Learning German sufficiently well to understand Prof. Ghosh was clearly beyond our capabilities. And there was another disturbing thought. What if he suddenly decided to refer to Italian books?
Prof. Ghosh continued smiling. We continued to suffer.
And, We All Failed the Exam
Then came the mid-semester examination. Prof. Ghosh set a question paper which could only have been designed by someone who had either forgotten what he had taught us — or remembered it far too well.
Fifteen of us failed. That meant less than 20 marks out of 50. I got a 16.
There was only one student in the class who passed. He now works at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I suppose that tells you something about the Prof. Or, about that friend of ours.
We, meanwhile, were in a state of panic. Those were the days before relative grading and the CGPA system. At IIT Kharagpur, if you failed, you failed. There was no statistical adjustment to ensure that the distribution of misery remained academically acceptable.
The entire class, therefore, went in a delegation to Prof. Ghosh. We pleaded with him to do something. But the results had already been published, so there wasn’t much he could do. We explained that at this rate most of us would fail the semester and would have to repeat the year.
He listened patiently. Then came the smile. “If you fail, you fail. Come back to my class for a repeat.”
That was it. We returned to our hostels, thoroughly devastated.
Then came the end-semester examination. And Prof. Ghosh did something completely unexpected.
He passed us all
Not by much. He gave each of us just enough marks to ensure that our aggregate reached 40 percent. The Los Alamos guy got some more.
We had been rescued.
When we went to thank him, his expression was exactly the same. The enigmatic smile had not changed by a millimetre. Then he said:
“You are all studying to be scientists. You must work better than your engineering friends.”
There was something about that sentence that stayed with me.
Prof. Ghosh wasn’t really teaching us Chemistry. At least, not only Chemistry. He was teaching us to think.
He was teaching us that the answer to a problem may not necessarily be in the book we have been prescribed. That sometimes you have to look elsewhere. That difficult questions are not necessarily unfair questions. And that if you want to become a scientist, you cannot be satisfied merely with learning what somebody else has already discovered.
Looking back, that was probably one of the great learning from an IIT education.
Nobody was particularly interested in making life easy for us. The idea was to stimulate the mind. Sometimes, perhaps, stimulate it a little too much. And that is how we learnt one of the most useful lessons of our IIT years:
Don’t study hard. Study smart. Preferably smart enough to get 40 percent.
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