I guess I have written about him already out here. But no amount of writing
can do justice to the respect I have for this man. He is simply phenomenal. A
PHD in Physical Chemistry, a great lover of hindi film music and english
films, an experienced trekker (he knows the wester Ghats by heart I think),
has a lot of knowledge of medicine, astronomy, astrophysics, astrology,
philosophy (well, he is a PHD), electrical systems, electronics (I've learnt
a thing or two about capacitors from him after getting my BE degree) and
still going strong. And to top it all, a magnificent teacher. More than
anything else, he taught me how to learn.
Everytime I go to him, there is some surprise waiting for me. This time, it
was set of astronomical diagrams showing the path of the sun across the sky
at various places and at various times. Believe me, it once took me at least
24 hours to independently imagine and visualise the paths (I sat one whole
day with a globe in my hand, looking at it from all possible angles and then
spent a whole night thinking about it) and it is really really difficult to
explain it to someone else. Either you have to be able to visualise it
yourself or you need diagrams. I've photographed these diagrams and I'll put
them up on my website soon. I have to acknowledge his patience in drawing
these. I could have done thiem myself, but I could never get myself to
actually do it. The least I can do is put them up on the net.
Being a film buff, he invited me to watch Vertigo with him and I gleefully
accepted. Its a grand movie, a very good plot and the way the plot unrolls is
vintage Hitchcock.
--
There are two types of Linux developers - those who can spell, and
those who can't. There is a constant pitched battle between the two.
-- From one of the post-1.1.54 kernel update messages posted to c.o.l.a
An 'eye opener'
Let's say that you are teaching a class. Let's say that you are teaching Unix.
You have drawn a neat sketch of the inode-wise layout of the disk and you are
explaining the concept of the hierarchical filesystem and directories and
inodes and hard and soft links with the help of your neat diagram. Suddenly
you discover that one of the students is not getting the whole picture ...
because he can't see ... *because he is blind*.
At that moment I didn't really feel the impact because I was too engrossed in
the subject, too engrossed in teaching. But the whole thing really hit me
hard on the bus ride home. A thousand questions were raised, not many
answered.
First, about teaching - in such a situation, do you teach for the lowest
denominator or the higher one. Doing anything is going to unfair to the other
category. But in this case, the whole problem is magnified to a huge extent.
I obviously cannot rely so much on gr...
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