Prof. Mistry loves to speak. So it is no surprise that he puts his foot  in his mouth more often than anyone else at 5 Mahapalika marg.  We wish we had written  all his gaffes down but the few we remember are good enough to warrant a separate page. This will be constantly updated as we try to remember more…

 

 

v     After a student made him a paper model of the Hubble space telescope, Mistry uses his renowned aesthetic sense, suggests improvements.

 

Mistry: Oh! You’ve used aluminum foil for the mirror. You should have put a real mirror.

Student: But sir, the idea is to make it out of paper. And, besides the fact that I’ll have to search for a mirror that size, it’ll also be too heavy.

Mistry: Nonsense. A nice concave mirror would look so nice. You will also be able to see your face in there.

 

v     On the Spirit Rover that landed on Mars:

“The rover scans for a rock, then it positions the laser and fires at the rock and then takes spectrograph reading from the plume of smoke (yeah they’re hoping life under the surface will pop out and fight back).”

 

We hope someday to include a separate page with all the things Mistry happily believes lasers are involved in.

 

v     During prelim pracs. Rahul asks mistry whether he should plot a particular graph….

 

Mistry (emphatically) : YES! Of course!

Rahul: but sir there are no marks allotted for it and it is not mentioned in the question slip.

 Mistry: (having to uphold his initial answer):“Yeah, why not? The more you write, the more bonus marks you will get.”

 

(he just invented new university exam procedure…. We are sure It will introduced in the new curriculum the next time the university practical exams committee meets.)

 

v     Mistry gives out these cosmology notes towards the end of the year In these notes he includes some questions…. One of them, particularly caught our imagination

 

WHY and How was the universe created????

 

v     While hurriedly transferring some project work to different folders on one of the lab computers Mistry, our COMPUTER SCIENCE prof, is going about his business.

 

Mistry: (mumbling to himself) Ok! Click here and select….go to edit…copy. Then where is that other folder? Ah, there it is. Now click edit…paste. Next file….

student: Sir. You can press ctrl +c and then ctrl +v to copy and paste…

Mistry: Sshhhhhh!!! I don’t have time for that!

 

v     Mistry was discussing a few points his honors student had written on HST(he claimed to have read it):

 

Mistry: The sequence of the rockets fired to get the telescope to point at a star and then maintain its position is something to marvel at.

Rahul: Uh…there is no firing of anything sir.

Mistry: What? (all confused)

Rahul: No. The Hubble moves with the help of reaction wheels, which spin and generate torque. Rockets would generate heat and that would interfere with the infrared images.

Mistry: (after thinking for sometime gets irritated and vindicates himself) Eh! But the Hubble got into space with rockets no?

(We gather, Rahul preferred not to get more involved in this argument.)