DB

Prof Dulal Bhattacharjee - The news of his leaving this earth did not much surprise me, I don't know why! May be the image of him when I saw him last time, that was like two years back, was on my mind. He looked pale and sick and though I went and greeted him, I couldn't be very sure if he recognised me or just thought of me as one of his hundreds of students.

He was a brillant teacher, and I remember, whatever he taught, I did not have to much refer to my Physics text. But his coming to class was something we would doubt, wait for and when it happened it was brilliant. I remember examples from real life that he would cite and laugh about it!

Rest in peace Sir! I will always remember the days I spent learning from you!

My First Class

Teaching does not require me to spend much effort as most of the time I am confident when I know the subject and believe that I can explain it well. I also used to take classes for school students when I was in my graduation days and my best achievement was when a so-called 'good for nothing' student reached 90% after my continuous guidance and I was mighty proud.
Those were the days when I did a lot of study myself and was more confident. But after my post graduation and when I was job hunting, I had opted for a teaching job just to fetch myself some money and also since boredom and frustration would have killed me otherwise! When appearing for my interview, I chose all possible subjects which I could teach so as to give me better prospects for that job. And my first class was of Operations Research, a subject I was not much fond of anyway! On top of that, the first chapter was something about goal setting which I had never studied myself. With only a few hours that I got for preparing myself, I took to a real test of teaching.
Well, I gave my students a very detailed introduction of what we are doing, what we need to do and why we are doing and what my expectations were. You see I had to survive one hour. Then we set out to do an example and I think by the end of the class, I had arrived.
This class,  I learned later, use to be the most notorious class and my first class was actually a litmus test, to ascertain whether I was fit for teaching. And it seems they had okayed me. Later all of them grew so friendly even as I maintained the dignity of being a teacher for students of my own age and may be elder. I was so strict that I would ask them to solve problems in the class and not look at each other's notes. On one ocassion, I asked one of them to use my calculator since he had the excuse that he didn't have one.
This day remains fresh, very fresh in my memory and I know that I can!