17 Academic matters and life in IIT Madras

After   three sequential summer schools and a delay of an year dueto leave not being granted  from REC, I joined  I.I.T.Madras as a regular student  in July 1972. As  M Tech  & PhD students were accommodated in Krishna and Kavery hostels, Sri.V. George  and myself were  in Krishna hostel.  We were both on loss of pay leave and had to live on a subsistence allowance of Rs.300/ available as stipend. The institute fees, hostel mess charges and other expenses were to be met from this amount. As my family, two little children and wife were in our native place, once in a while we wanted to go home. Hardly Rs.20-30  will be   available as balance every month  but  even the train fare  to  our place  was almost Rs.50/ at that time. Bringing the family to  Madras  was impossible as no family accommodation was available for  regular institute students and  renting a house outside the campus in the nearby villages  like Vellachery or Tharamani was  very expensive. Moreover, our children were too small and bringing was likely to affect our studies as well. The only way was to make an occasional visit home. Fortunately, my wife’s  father  and mother were   very happy to provide shelter for   their eldest daughter and the tiny little grandchildren.   I used to visit them once in 3 months’  during a week end with the savings  from the stipend during these  months. Often, I used to travel Trivandrum mail  to Changanassery on a Friday night and return by the same train on Sunday afternoon. Returning to Madras Central station in the early morning I used to catch 21A or 21B  to Adayar and reach the campus in time for the morning class on Monday.

Second year  M Tech was in two semesters. We, who were admitted to second year direct, had to take 4 courses and two laboratories in the first semester. Fortunately, all these were under my specialization Control Systems.  Some of the teachers who had been teaching us during the summer schools were back to teach us and used to confuse us as they did during the summer school. Since the library was good, we could use the books to study the subjects without much difficulty.

At that time, the Electrical Sciences  Department  were offering   courses with  specialization in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The head of the Department was one Prof.P.Venkata Rao. During those times, certain department in I.I.T.Madras were  dominated  by   Telugu people, Electrical  Sciences and Physics were prominent in this. Those who were not Telugu speaking had to form groups just for their survival. Prof. Rao  was a very senior person and was very powerful. His specialization was also Control Systems. During the summer school he  taught us a subject  called Sampled Data Systems, the pre-cursor of the  modern Digital  Control Systems. An extended version of the same was offered as an elective during our first semester (third semester for regular M.Tech). He used  to pretend to be very systematic in teaching coming to the class with a long foot  rule , divide  the  glass  board into several vertical partitions and start writing from the extreme left progressively to the right.   Almost all types of colour chalks will be brought to the class by his peon and he will be using almost all of these  liberally. In spite of all  these showmanship he used to repeat the same mistake in the class as he did during our summer school. Since he was known to be very powerful and equally harsh, we used to keep quiet in his class.

Our experience as a student in I.I.T.Madras was  not encouraging as  there too few   good teachers. My generalobservation is that in general teaching in I.I.T.s  is not as good as in our ordinary engineering colleges evennthough the faculty  may be good in research and do lot of consultancy work.  Excellent teachers like Prof.V.G.K.Murhty and Prof M K Achuthan and Antony Reddy were exceptions, but  none of these were on our Control group. There two stalwarts in  Control group, Prof.B. Ramaswamy and Prof V Sheshadri. Prof Ramaswamy was leading the Telugu group and Prof. Sheshadry  the  Tamil group. These two groups were really at war and students had to  tread carefully not to be  caught into either of these. Ramaswamy was an interesting character to look at as he had a big tummy and a small head and made a funny sight when driving his Lambretta scooter to the institute. He used to have a plug of hair in his head. He reminded us of the character Bumble in Charles Dickens’s novel. He never had any hesitation in showing his hatred to non-Telugu   people. He was very conservative in   giving marks for the subject he taught.  Prof. Sheshadry on the other hand was a gentleman but teaching was equally bad. He was teaching us “Optimal Control” and used to carry a very big book to the class, copy a few equations from the book to the glass board and used to say “Let us see how he (author) got it”. He will try to explain how this was derived, but rarely could complete that within  the class hour and leave it as it is at the end of the class. Fortunately, he was  liberal in the evaluation of answer papers and we used to get good marks from him. We  had 4 regular  students with us and an army major Gopal on deputation. This major was a Punjabi, nice gentleman, very much   bothered about the grades he used to get for the examinations. He used to cry when he got low grades as he said his children will make fun of  him and so also junior officers if they happened to know. Often, I had a tough time consoling him.  The regular boys were all Tamilians and due to the significant difference in age, they never used to mingle with two of us.

Half way through the first semester, we had to start out thesis work by choosing the guide and topic of research. I chose ‘Stability  of Nonlinear Systems’ as a topic and one George T Manohar (GT) was willing to guide me. He was a good teacher but had not done his PhD.  There was a rumour that GT started  his PhD research with Prof. Rao, but half way through  he took away the topic of research and gave it to a Telugu   staff member who ultimately  married Prof. Rao’s daughter. G T  Manohar was an orthodox  Christian and used to teach  nicely and was satisfied  by guiding a few M Tech students. G T was acceptable  to me as a guide and since  he belonged to the Sheshadry group, I was expecting some trouble in working in the Analogue Computer laboratory under the control of Ramaswamy. Fortunately I did not have any difficulty in doing my laboratory work. With proper suggestions from my guide I could get good results for my thesis work by end of March and he allowed me to re-join REC  and  come back during April-May to complete the  thesis  writing part. With his encouragement, we could publish three papers in the journal of IETE, one of which was published before our viva voce examination.