Professor Srinivasan retires

Well not yet, but will do so in less than a week from today.  To my mind that will mark the passing of a generation at the institute.  

Personally I will miss him.  And the reason for that is best captured in what I wrote in the souvenir that the department published on the occasion.  Since these posts are now more than just my hangout, and are the legacy I hope to leave for my sons, it is only appropriate that I record it here.
 

This is a personal note.  You played a big part in deciding how I would spend the longest spell in my working life.  And that also meant some of the more significant years of my personal life, where many important and pleasant things happened.  I am grateful to you for that.  Equally you helped me settle down in my role as a teacher – I hesitate to call myself an academician - that I came totally unprepared for.  Many years later, I continue to harvest the fruits of your initial help and guidance as a teacher here.  In short, you have been a big part of our lives as a family.  Thanking you would not suffice.  For now that is all I am able to say though!

Sabari and family…

I am here at IIMB thanks to him in large measure.  He also helped me at crucial moments such as when I was nearly asked to leave the place in the most unexpected, and in my opinion the most unjustified, manner as a victim of what I think was petty and cheap institutional politics that eventually led to my leaving the institute for a while.

My family life has been tightly coupled to my being at IIMB, to use an engineering metaphor.  Stated differently, my family life would have been considerably different if I had worked anywhere else, including any other academic institution.  And that is why I signed off that message as a family.

The farewell that the department organised for Professor S was unprecedented in many ways.  The people who attended it spanned his entire academic life, right from his days as a doctoral student.  It was a fitting tribute to the different ways in which he had touched the lives of numerous people at various stages in his life.

In my own relatively unremarkable spell at the institute I have been witness to his several remarkable academic contributions.  The outline we teach today for the core finance course, a highly competitive and respectable outline by any standard, was developed by him.  The pedagogic material that we use was also largely put together by him.  The exams we set today are influenced by the exams he used to set.

Our philosophy as teachers, which puts the students' learning at the centre of the discourse, draws on the conversations that we used to have when he was the senior most amongst us as instructors. 

I can go on and on. And I should perhaps devote a separate post just to do that.  

But I wish to record here certain other thoughts that cross my mind on this somewhat emotionally charged occasion.  And that has to do with the legacy that we will or ought to leave behind when our professional life draws to a close.

Professor S towers above nearly everyone else that I have known in my academic life in that regard.  I have heard about the legacy left behind by various others, whom I shall not name, lest I should be accused of making odious comparisons.  His legacy stands taller than all of that.

And then I ask myself what I would leave behind eventually when I call it a day less than three years from now.  Would I have made a difference to my colleagues?  Certainly not - except to those that would experience relief at my departure.  

Do I leave anything behind for the world of teaching, research or writing?  Definitely not.  Would I at least have made a difference to the cohorts of students that I have taught?  Not even that.  A few of my students have noted how I destroyed their interest in finance.  One of them even write about his frustration in his fictional description of life on the IIMB campus!

That leads me to an even broader, larger philosophical question:  Does it really matter if we leave behind a legacy or not.  

I think of the effort people put into buying immortality through various means.  Wealthy individuals gift large sums of money to create research centres or halls or other infrastructure that will be named after them.  So much so that the American educational system has turned exploiting this desire into a veritable market for immortality.

When I was all of twelve years old I was struck by this strange desire when I was reading a biography of CV Raman, that quickly turned into a resolution:  The only life that was worth living was one that would make one as eternally famous as C V Raman.  

My limited scholarship at that age did not inform me that there were others even bigger than him perhaps like Newton, Einstein and many others.  Then on whenever I evaluated the worthwhileness of anything that I took up I would ask myself if it would make me as famous as CV Raman.  

Soon it turned out to be a great cop out route.  Whenever I failed in anything I would console myself that after all it may not have made me as famous and immortal as C V Raman.  

That quest was further buttressed by generous layers of toppings such as the half-baked smattering of an understanding that I acquired of Hindu philosophy which seemed to suggest that any worldly achievement was after all illusory.  It was Maya.  And the real deal was the pursuit of self- realisation.  

That was an even more powerful cop out because it did not merely set a high bar like the CV Raman bar.  It almost said that none of worldly these bars even mattered in this other-worldly paradigm.

Forty seven years later today, as I complete one more year of worldly existence, I know that I have led a purposeless, pointless life, hiding behind these excuses of irrelevance.  I now know that the C V Raman benchmark was nothing but an inglorious excuse for not having achieved anything in life.  I have realised that for some years now. 

Professor Srinivasan's legacy may not be as intellectually seminal as the Raman effect that explains the scattering of light or quantum theory.  And viewed in the backdrop of Maya, it may be all too evanescent.  But in the real world that we all live in, work and struggle he has touched many a life in a positive way.

And that is all that I can see that I see, perceive, understand and appreciate as an ordinary mortal creature.  And that is all that matters I guess.  That is all that is relevant.

Nanni....Namaskaram...