CS class. Mistry
passes around an old-fashioned slide photo of some student group with whom he
had seen Stone-Henge (which according to him is really a very advanced
calculator). First person to have a look is Arjun. Mistry, grinning slyly (read
stupidly), “Do you see it? (grin grin) Or are you looking at the other thing?”
Turns out the ‘other thing’ is a foreign girl in tight shorts whose butt is
jutting out. Stone-Henge is barely visible in the background.
After everyone has seen the jutting butt, its time to
move on in time (Mistry has a TimeLine drawn on the board). Mistry – “After
1300 BC, the next major advance came in 1200 AD, which is…let’s see… 100 years
later.”
-
CS class. Mistry
– “Has jYo-Tea taught you this?” (That’s Jyoti Singh)
-
Guest lecture by
TP Singh. Mistry (after introducing the speaker) “…and now to present a token
of appreciation to Dr. Singh, we have Ashame, Ashame will you please…?”
(The suitably embarrassed student is Aseem Paranjape)
CS class. Internet lecture in progress. He’s telling us
about the NSF (which stands for National Science Foundation, a US organization
which gives grants for scientific research) and how it set up 6 supercomputers
over various universities in the USA.
He’d asked Arjun the previous WEEK to do some research on
this topic. Typically, Arjun has done nothing. He’s ready, however, with notes
that MISTRY has given us, which have some information. Excerpts from the conversation
that followed
Mistry – So have you got something?
Arjun – Uhh, ahh, yeah I have SOMEthing.
M – Can you tell us what? (Note that on the average, in
any conversation, Mistry doesn’t give the person before him more than a few
milliseconds to talk. Since he himself tries to talk as fast as possible, this
entire conversation is happening at breakneck speed)
A – Well I went online…
M – Yes, yes, where?
A – I got some names of univer…
M – Universities that NSF gave supercomputers to? Yes can
you name a few?
A (realizing that he’s better off talking in
monosyllables) – Cornell…
M (not realizing that A is reading straight out of M’s
own notes) – Yes that’s right, good my brother was there you know (pause for
breath)
A (taking advantage of pause) UCLA…
M – Are you sure? I don’t remember…
A (confidently, even though this one’s not in the notes)
– Yes Sir I’m sure…
This goes on for
a while, eventually Mistry takes up a monologue and Arjun is completely off the
hook. It must be mentioned here, that this is a trick that Arjun has perfected,
and he has pulled it off at least one other time. Since Mistry loves the sound
of his own voice, it doesn’t matter how many assignments he gives you, just
pause long enough to make him impatient (long as in 0.5 secs) and he’ll take
over and forget that this was YOUR assignment.
But why the title for this story? Well that’s because of
how Mistry rounded of the lecture.
“So that’s how
all these Universities got supercomputers from the NSF, which is
the…ahh…National...whatisit…Supercomputing…right…Facility…”
Physics class. Beginning of second term. Mistry’s
discussing the performance in his terminal exam Relativity paper. He draws a
profile of no. of students vs. marks obtained, and it shows a smooth Bell
curve, biased towards the HIGHER marks. (For those who’re confused, this means
the majority of the class got MORE than 60%)
Mistry – “ Hmmm… you see this Gaussian is slightly
biased… I would have preferred a peak closer to the center (we’re shocked, he
actually wants the class average to be LESS than what it is. We find out why in
his next statement.) … It would have looked much better… much neater…”
Editors note…I have from a good source that these graphs
weren’t shown to batches a few years ago. It seems Ptu started the craze by
putting up a tongue-in-cheek delta function at 0 marks. The next year patu Put
up an exponential decaying to 0 by 5 marks.
(mentioning also that he would prefer a gaussian)
The rest of the Department not wanting to seem averse to
this new pedagogical method., and not completely appreciating the implications
of these graphs, decided that all post exam paper analysis must be replaced by
suitable histograms. This lead to the
above incident and various others where the professors come in to class and
declare proudly their knowledge by saying “ I would have preferred a gaussian”
no matter how the graph looked.
SHORT STORY 3-
Relativity class. Transparency lecture (Mistry’s first
and only during the year).
Mistry – “We have to study an important topic today, the
Twin Paradox. Please look at these transparencies CAREFULLY, they’re important
from the exam point-of-view.”
Proceeds to put up a transparency with CARTOONS drawn on
it. Cartoons are of two guys, one stays on earth, other takes off in rocket.
Mistry (can’t stop emphasizing how important all this is)
– “ It’s important to remember the names of these two fellows. The one who
stays BACK is called Joe. The one who LEAVES on the rocket is called Moe. You
need to know their names otherwise you’ll get confused in the exams.” (Trust
old Mistry to emphasize the least relevant point. What the HELL does it matter
what their names are, we know the one who stays back gets old)
Mistry puts up another transparency with more ridiculous
cartoons, this time the ‘stay-at-home-twin’ (M’s phrase) is an old man, and so
on.
Mistry – “You could also name the
twins Dave and Bob. Just be careful that DAVE goes in the rocket, otherwise
you’ll mess up. You know why I chose Moe and Joe?” (NO! And no one cares!) “ I
once had a student named Joe. By the way he’s coming back… I’ve asked him to
talk to you people in the lab. He’s designed a revolutionary new hearing aid.”
(Takes out a magazine, points to a page that shows inner structure of the human
ear) “You probably don’t realize what a marvel of engineering the human ear is…
Nature is so wonderful, so economical, it boggles the mind… Engineers should
learn from nature…look what our engineers do. Have you ever sat in a taxi? Half
of them have doors with broken handles… and have you seen the handle-bars in
trains? They make the handles so thick and all for show, they don’t know any
physics… does anyone know where the pressure comes on a handle-bar in a
train?…anyone?…Arjun?…Ashame?….” (we’re too flabbergasted to answer, whatever
happened to Moe and Joe?)
“…you know I was on the design committee for seatbelts in airplanes…blah
blah… I was in the Intel Competition as a judge…blah blah…(more name-dropping)
…my research in BARC… blah blah…lasers…blah blah…lasers…blah…”
Ladies and Gentlemen, a typical Mistry lecture. Wonder
when we had time to actually LEARN anything.
These essay are not
contributed by anybody