Reminiscences

Reminiscences

1991 7 July 25-26 Reminiscences (422) When I was a student of Engineering at Banaras Hindu University in 1954, an incident took place which is worthy of mention. My teacher, Dr. Pran Nath, was giving a lecture on the Laplace transform. During his lecture, he narrated an interesting story connected with this subject. It concerned Professor M. Sen Gupta, the then Principal of the Engineering College of the Hindu University.

Professor Gupta had received his higher education at Glasgow University, where he was a topper. One day , a Professor of Glasgow University was solving an electrical problem on the blackboard in the class room. The question of a differential equation came up. The Glasgow Professor solved it by employing the usual method, which took up much time and the whole of the blackboard. On seeing this, Mr. Gupta said to his professor: “Here the Laplace transform can be applied, which will solve this question far more quickly and in much less space. When the Professor applied this as suggested to him by his student, the question was solved in just two lines, although the methods were different, the solution was the same. The Professor said: “When we have a method to solve this question in so much less time and space, then it is certainly wrong to employ the former lengthy method. Then the Professor rubbed his solution off the blackboard and, replacing it with Professor Gupta’s method, he said: ‘this is the only method.’

Another such incident happened in 1964 when the Indian University of Education started its ‘Summer School for Teachers’ programme in collaboration with the Education Division of the American Government. There were three visiting American Professors besides the Indian Professors. At that time I was working as a senior Lecturer in Chandauli Polytechnic, and I had attended the summer school at Chandigarh in that capacity. (This was the first course, which was held from June 15 to July 24 in 1964).

One day the American Professor Matchel put a question to the class: ‘Who are creative?’ Different people gave different answers. One said, ‘Poet’. The Professor could not understand because of the way the Indian teacher pronounced it. He kept saying 6+

‘What? What?! Only when he was given the spelling of the word, ‘did he finally understand it. (Indians pronounce it as ‘poet’, but Americans pronounce it as ‘pait’.) The reaction of the American professor has a great lesson for us. He said: “You are right, I am wrong, because I am in your country.”

-A.M. Khan

Deputy Director of Education

Faizabad