Twenty years on...Lessons from IIMB

You know what Galbraith said about academics Professor Vaidyanathan asked me as he welcomed me into IIMB as a colleague.  "In industry people kill each other over billions of dollars.  In academia we fight over dollars and cents." He had been my teacher twenty years earlier.  

In the years that followed at IIMB I would often recall those welcoming lines.  The causeway of sorts connecting the faculty lounge to a sit out across the corridor where he spoke those lines was the location of many memorable conversations, some pleasant and some not so pleasant, in the years that followed.

IIMB taught me many a valuable lesson. 

The position of the teacher in today's classroom

I thought of writing this post in the backdrop of a recent flurry of activity on my Linkedin account which I have since discontinued.  I shut the account down as part of my process of winding down my networked existence and retreating into a life of greater solitude.

Not that I sat in the middle of a massive network with several thousand people following me.  When I shut the account down I just had some 1700 people in my network at the end of more than a full decade of being a member of the network.

The flow of messages, posts, comments and replies to comments was triggered by my response to a message.  My response essentially stated that I had a poster in my office that stared down at me every time I looked up from my desk.  The poster simply said:  You are a lousy teacher.

The poster is a Word print out that I have made.  Similar to a couple of other posters I have that have messages that I wish to be reminded of, this one too is meant to remind me of how I am as a teacher.  Before I leave my desk for a class, I look at the poster for a few seconds, take a deep breath and remind myself of many shortcomings as a teacher and utter a silent prayer to the Lord to help me get better as a teacher.

The prayer does not seem to have helped me improve.  Instead it helps me by merely reminding me to acknowledge that all that I could do is to merely try.  Much of prayer is meant to do that I think -   although there have been the occasional miracles in my life that I believe may have been answers to my prayers.

The mention of the poster set off a few responses from my former students who are in my Linkedin account who generously protested and said many things about how in their opinion I was a good teacher.  The fact is that they are the exceptions among the hundreds of students that have sat in my class, the vast majority of whom have a different opinion, quite likely diametrically opposite to those of the kind-hearted minority.

In general the majority of students influences popular perceptions of one as a teacher. To make matters more interesting in my case that majority does not have a homogeneous opinion about me.  It ranges from indifference towards my performance as a teacher, to downright anger for a variety of reasons.  

Between these two ends of the spectrum the numerical score that informs public opinion about me as a teacher usually takes a nosedive.  If I am extraordinarily lucky the rating hovers around the mean for the cohort of teachers in that term leaving me like the "living dead" or sideways deal in a venture investor's portfolio.

The reason I have that poster is to remind myself that, in terms of the feedback, at the end of eighteen years of teaching, I am nowhere close to being a star.

In my early years, at the end of every course I would open the feedback with as much trepidation as those students of mine who were hoping not to fail my course even though they realised there was a high chance they might.  The feedback sheet would leave me utterly humbled when I opened it.  

Then I would  read the comments section in the feedback.  That is even more humbling.  There would be comments about my monotone voice, my lack of humour, the long and convoluted English sentences I spoke and so on.  There would be comments about my not having used enough illustrations, having spent too much time on theory and so on.  

There would also be the occasional ones that would make me laugh at myself in a tragicomic way.  There was for example one comment that said I shouted in the class that they could almost see smoke coming out of my ears.  There was another one about how my blue shirt and black trouser that I wore in every class made them wonder if I ever washed my clothes.

The more charitable ones among the angry would concede an element of doubt that may be I knew the subject but I did not do a good job of explaining it.  The less charitable ones would pronounce that I did not know the subject and that I should not be permitted to teach.

The moment of crowning glory was when a student published a book on campus life in IIMB in which he said that I had single handedly destroyed his interest in finance.  When I read that I realised why I had seen him right at the last desk, with an impassive look throughout the course.

All of that are not the main reasons that one considers oneself a lousy teacher.  The more important reason that the feedback matters is that in many institutions the teaching feedback has a large role to play in the career development of a teacher in the modern education system.  

Which is why my 19 year old nephew, who is a student of science in a leading institution of eminence in science education in Bangalore, recently told me one day how he had done a good deed by giving a high rating to a terrible teacher who had appealed to the class for a generous rating on the last day of his course.

It is not so much what the students think of one as a teacher that defines one's happiness or satisfaction. It is the opinion that the people who matter in the institution form about one as a teacher, based on what the students believe or reflect in the feedback form.

That makes for a depressing realisation every time one finishes teaching a course.  Like the proverbial experimental monkey that avoids touching the bananas that give an electric shock one stops opening the feedback form.  Instead one waits to hear the unexciting news when the leadership team of the institution delivers the bad news about the feedback for some official reason or the other.

Dont get me wrong.  I am not against teacher ratings.  The only academic experience I have is of teaching in one single business school all my life, which is among India's best and most competitive.  Students struggle to get in there.  They pay an awful lot of money to be educated.  It is but fair if they expect that the teachers they learn from perform well.  (Apologies for the intended pun in the verb.)  Those that do not measure need to pull up their socks.  And those that cannot need to rethink their options.

Does that mean teacher ratings should matter less where education is more affordable?  I do not know.  I am reminded of my conversation with my landlord as I was about to join the place where I teach now.  He was a professor of physics at IIT Delhi.  He said to me as I returned the keys to the house, "So welcome to the noble profession."  I replied to him that I would be teaching in a business school, not in a college of science, humanities or arts, unlike him.  He asked me how it differed.  I could not articulate my response back then.  With nearly two decades of teaching experience, if I were to meet him today I would say to him that I see myself more as a service provider of sorts, than the teacher in a traditional sense.   The price of education it appears has a bearing on what is expected of the educator.

Every time I look at the poster in my office, just as it reminds me of the long path I still have to travel to evolve as a teacher, an even more powerful feeling of guilt engulfs me.  More than forty years ago as a fiery student leader I accosted Dr Michael, my Physics teacher.  I said to him that he was not discharging his duty as a teacher by not covering the portions on time.  That academic year my college had worked for 40 days, thanks to frequent student unrest, often for no good reason.

Dr Michael was a soft spoken, kind hearted gentleman and a good teacher too.  I could see the embarassment and sadness on his face as I levelled that unkind charge.  With genuine remorse he said to me and the other the students who had gathered around: I have failed you all as teacher.  I will request the Head of the Department to find a better teacher for you for the rest of the course.  

We never saw him again in our class.

This was in a government college.  The fees we paid was a pittance.  Yet I had displayed an unbecoming sense of entitlement. 

I have stopped looking at my feedback form in the past seven or eight years. Yet year on year there is one particular occasion where my feedback for the courses I taught during that year stares at me for a brief while, no matter if I wish to see it or not.  My heart sinks unfailingly at that moment when I have to see my ratings.  I think of the poster in my office.  And then I am reminded of Dr.  Michael.  I ask myself if my annual angst is karma or nemesis at work.  

No matter what it is, I silently ask Dr. Michael for forgiveness.  For, today as a teacher who experiences the pain of unflattering ratings from my students I realise how Dr. Michael must have felt the day my classmates and I had attacked him, in spite of all the effort he had put in to cover portions in the few days that the college was allowed to function by my agitating comrades and their unscrupulous political masters.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Twenty Years On...

It was twenty years ago to this day that I drove into IIMB to start a new phase in my life.  It was not just the start of a new career.  

It was Kannada Rajyotsava day.  As my black ambassador, as old as myself back then, rolled through the streets of the campus, directionlessly because I did not know the way, it may have been a curious sight to the few residents who may have been looking at the streets.  

Cars were relatively few on the campus in those days.  Television had invaded the Indian home deeply enough by then, which meant that there were not too many of them looking out at the street.

Twenty years is a long time in any one's life.  It has been a third of my life in this world and close to half of all the years that I have worked.   Yet it has flown by so quickly that it does not feel that long.  I have to think of the many things that have happened in my life and in that of people close to me to get a sense of how long it has been.

This has been the longest I have worked in a single institution or organisation all my life.  It has also been the longest spell with few transitions in terms of level or positions.  Academe in any case does not have too many levels.  It is relatively flat in terms of hierarchy.  What it lacks in terms of hierarchy it makes up for in terms of a finely stacked intellectual pecking order.   

Academic journals and citations allow you to draw up that pecking order. It starts with the name of the  journal.  And there is the question of whether you solo or co-authored. And if that was not sufficient there is the question of whether you are first named among the list of co-authors, whether you are the corresponding author or not.  There is a similar elaborate set of measures that help calibrate citations.  Not all citations are equally valuable.

So on that pleasant evening, as dusk was falling on the quiet campus, barring the shouts of children savouring the last minutes of play for the evening, we finally found that place that was tucked away on a short street, where a few residences sat together in a small pocket of sorts.  

My wife, my Dad and I set foot in that place, right foot first in true South Indian tradition, with the Lord's name on our lips, into what would be our home for the next twelve years.  The place where we would go through many moments of joy, anxiety, expectations, disappointment, envy, smugness and every other shade of emotion that makes up this kaleidoscope that human life is.

Looking back, I feel I had strayed into academia, quite like an innocent child wanders into an interesting place, not knowing what to expect or how to deal with it.  I had somehow developed a fancy for an academic life.  And I was lucky enough to find an open door to walk in through.  Or, was I?

I had nursed the desire over many years.  Throughout that process I had no inkling of what it meant to be an academician.  I had no idea of what academics did.  How they spent their average working day.  What made them tick, to borrow a metaphor from the organisational behaviour.  How did they measure success? 

I would be on a never ending quest to figure out answers to these questions through the years that were to follow at IIMB.  Twenty years on I continue to seek those answers.  Some answers came in the form of happy discoveries.  Some as harsh realisations, by which time it was too late to set the clock back. 

That is the strange thing about life.  Happy moments are like a fix.  You do not ask yourself how you landed there.  You just savour the moment, expecting that it will be there forever.  The sad and the harsh ones are like the day after the hallucination has worn off.  Makes you want to run away.  To roll the clock back to those halcyon moments that just passed by.  To ask yourself how did you let yourself into this dull post-high ache.

Twenty years on, as I write this post now, I am in that post-high moment of asking myself how I landed myself where I am.  In perhaps a not so appropriate analogy I feel like the character that Gene Wilder plays in the movie Woman In Red.  (You can read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_Red_(1984_film).

Academia to me was the like the Woman in Red.  I knew nothing about it.  But I somehow was smitten enough to think it held the keys to my kingdom of fulfillment.  Before I realised it I had jumped through several hoops, transformed almost entirely the man I had been and travelled a long way towards my object of desire.  

And here I was perched perilously on a window sill, embarrassingly clothed, running the risk of falling off to a hopeless, messy, end several dozen feet below.  As I stood there, not having attained the object of my desire, like Gene Wilder, I could not help wondering:  Just a few days ago I was a happily married man with a wife and children.  How did I land here now? 

The Gene Wilder analogy is humorous exaggeration.  An one sided account of my life as someone forever aspiring to be an academician and never attaining that goal.  It has not been all as hopeless as the story of Gene Wilder in that movie though.  

There have been the happy, bright interludes.  They have all been on the personal side though, by God's grace.  What one lost in the swings one sort of made up on the roundabouts, to borrow a favourite metaphor of Wodehouse.

There is much more to say about these years at IIMB.  Lots more.  But I have to stop now.  With a class to teach in a few hours from now I have miles to go before I sleep, to steal a line from Robert Frost. 

Nanni...Namaskaaram...

When everyone is smarter than you, anyone is...

The title of this post is not just meant to grab your attention - unlike the title What They Do Not Teach You at Harvard Business School, which the author Mark Mc Cormack reveals in the middle of the book was chosen precisely for that purpose.

To a certain extent the timing of this post is attributable to my having just finished reading this allegorical novel The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exuprey.  Books like this send one into a deep and reflective spell.  What a riveting book, a haunting story!.  Hope to write more about it another time.

The idea behind this post goes back to a game that I started playing in childhood and which I have been unable to kick in my old age.  The game started with a riddle that my father used to pose when I was a  boy of seven or eight years.  The riddle had been composed by my Dad's friend Varakavi and would go as follows.

There is this woman wearing a pink saree, walking with a vessel towards a tank to draw water from it.  She has long hair, bedecked with orange coloured flowers and the tank has seven steps leading to the water.  What is the woman's age?

I never asked my father whether Varakavi was the man's real name.  Nor did I ever ask my father what Varakavi did for a living.  I could merely gather he did nothing substantial according to the normal conception of doing anything in life.  

 

My father is now too old to recall anything about Varakavi.  All that one can infer from what I recall therefore is that Varakavi was a poet of some sort, self styled in all probability.  That is all we will know about him.  

 

And that is a real pity.  I believe that in literature of any kind, trivial or sublime, one cannot separate the art from the artist himself.  To understand Varakavi's poetry one would need to understand Varakavi the man.

Varakavi's riddle was one of the triggers that got started me on this game  that I played by myself, where I would draw inferences about people's smartness, their vocation and their disposition based on their external appearances such as the clothes they wore, their gait, attire, shape of their toes and fingers, their mannerisms, if any, and so on.

 

It was multi factor predictive analytics to borrow from contemporary data science.  It drew on unlikely explanatory variables, in much the same way, discerning non-intuitive patterns.

Over time this game turned into an obsession of sorts.  The moment I laid my eyes on any man, woman or child, the algorithms in my head would begin to churn.  To use current machine learning metaphor again these algorithms of mine were capable of learning, constantly revising the probabilities based on new results.  

 

Somewhere though the inference rules were messed up.   Often the trials produced silly and inconsistent results.  I would come across this extremely personable young man who I would imagine was a smart, urbane soul, only to discover that he was poorly informed, uncouth and occasionally ill-bred in his behaviour too.  

 

On the other side I would come across a relatively unimpressive looking guy, with uncouth mannerisms but who would either be utterly bright or possess a kind heart, sometimes both.

 

Yet I persisted, because a game it was, after all.  Moreover, I did have my occasional successes too.  At least often enough for me to hope that the success ratios would improve as my sample size on which I trained my algorithm grew to go back to a metaphor from statistics, now refashioned and rechristened as data science.  

 

Whatever their other shortcomings, you got to give it to these statisticians that they know how to keep themselves in business, evergreen.

 

Years later, last week, as I flipped through the pages of the tome, The Laws of Human Nature I got the impression that the author Robert Greene had developed my game into a discipline, an art.  His many fans who wrote beautiful, grateful reviews of his book would obviously spite me for my apparent trivialisation of Greene's magnum opus.  My intent is far from any of that.

I persisted with the game as I grew older.  It remained almost the same with the passage of years in my life.  The way I played the game and tried to infer about people remained largely the same until I started my life as a teacher at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore where I currently work.
 

My constant application of these horribly erroneous algorithms has had one desirable upshot though. I have come to realise that nearly everyone I see around me inside IIMB and outside is bright.  And everyone, bar none, is brighter and more accomplished than I am.

The most obscure looking guy would turn out to be a tiger in econometrics.  Some one with a highly uninspiring appearance would expound inimitably on an arcane theory of economics or social science and so on.

 

It is a tough, realisation to come to terms with me:  That when it comes to intellectual sophistication one brings up the tail end of the world that one sees around oneself.  

 

There is a great sense of lightness when one has accepted it though.  There is no more proving remaining to be done.  Proof is required normally when one wants to establish that one is smarter than oneself.  Fortunately when one acknowledges that one is down there, no one steps up to say: Prove it.

 

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Ivory Throne

It is close to a year since I wrote a post.  Increasingly it felt so futile, even silly, an idle indulgence of a passion to write that was leading me nowhere that I could no longer bring myself  to continue writing.  

Today I break the silence that had kind of overpowered me for the past year, essentially to record an important event in my life:  I completed reading a book that I realised is important to me after  I finished reading it:  Ivory Throne by Manu S Pillai.

In terms of reading 2020, has been the most productive year in all my sixty one years in terms of the number of books I read in a single year.  Eight in all so far.  Starting with Sri M's Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master, Shiller's Finance and the Good Society, Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, Sapiens by Harari, Big Billion Startup by Yogesh Dalal, Social Entrepreneurship by Boorstin, Patient Capital by Lerner and  and now finally Ivory Throne by Manu S Pillai.

In between I nearly completed reading Mazzucatto's The Entrepreneurial State, a book that I hope to complete soon God willing.  And several more that are between a third and half complete.

Sapiens and Ivory Throne changed my life by changing my thinking and understanding of issues I care about deeply.  

Sapiens changed my understanding of the evolution of human beings.  It made me realise that much of our attention to the story of human beings is focused on events that took place over a trivially small fraction of the history of the species homo sapiens from the genus homo.  And if it had not been for certain evolutionary accidents the story of the genus could well have emerged differently in a way that I might not have been writing this piece of inane prose.

Was that an accident?  Was it an Act of God?  Was that part of a grand design in the process of evolution that humans are yet to understand?  Harari does not answer that question.  

But this post is not about Sapiens.  That book requires a full length post of its own which I know I will never write.  This post is about Ivory Throne, a history of the State of Travancore.

Ivory Thrones (IT, hereafter) completely rewrote my understanding about the part of this planet that my family and I hail from:  The State of Travancore.  

Until I read IT I was simply fond of Travancore as a part of the larger state of Kerala.  My love for its people was often confused by their traits that puzzled me.  IT did not resolve the confusion entirely.  It did reassure me that these traits were many centuries old.  And so it consoled me that it must have been part of their genetic make up in some  way.

IT will easily be the among most memorable books I would have read to the day when I will have to stop reading because I would not be able to see any more or my brain would be unable to process what my eyes see.  As I advance in age I often remind myself of that inevitable denouement because nearly everyone who has claimed to be able to call the future that I have known among my acquaintances have assured me that I will live that long.

Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the principal character in the book IT will always stand in my memory as the personification of stoicism, although in the entire length of the book the author surprisingly does not use that term even once among the hundreds of words he uses to describe her personality. 

The book made me revise or form new opinions about many people and events surrounding the place where I grew up.  It made me revisualise in that historical backdrop the life that important people in my life such as my paternal and maternal grandfather and my own father must have led.  About prominent people who defined the history of the state such as Sir C P Ramaswamy Aiyer.  And much more, many more.

I hope God will help me write a fuller post on the book and my emotional journey as I plodded through its 550 pages excluding the bibliography of another one hundred pages, over seventy days or so, sometimes a few pages a day, many long days of no reading and so on.  Probably the last post I will write for some years to come, if not forever.

I am not sure I will get to write it though.  The things that I have to say do not appear worthy of being told any more.  They were never profound in any sense to begin with.  I am squarely in the throes of an once aspiring writer's ennui.

For now I just wish to close with the most memorable line about the Maharani from a speech by her grandson Balagopala Verma, quoted in the book, that brought to my eyes tears of admiration and sadness at the same time.

"It was only later, looking back at her life, that I came to realise how much change she had had thrust upon her.  One day, a little girl playing in her own backyard, the next day a princess and a queen, and then back to being an ordinary person.  Throughout it all she conducted herself the very same way, with the same qualities of approachability, integrity and dignity.  Perhaps the biggest lesson that I have learnt is that a person must stay the same whatever life throws at you." (p 536)

The story of every human is in some sense the story of moving on, of dealing with the vicissitudes of life, of coping with ones that are painful, accepting graciously those that bring joy and pride.  The difference between an evolved mind and the not so evolved is the ability to "stay the same" as the Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi of Travancore did.

Thus it is with a heart overflowing with recollections, reflection and emotion that I close this post on this day that I completed reading the book. 

Nanni. Namaskaaram.