Academic Activities

Besides my research activities, being a professor at an university, involved lot of teaching and mentoring of students, both under-graduate and post-graduate. I was basically trained as a theorist, but on joining Roorkee, I had to face a peculiar problem. I was immediately given the charge of the nuclear physics laboratory for Masters students. I found the big lab to be in a very bad shape with none of the equipment working. These were electronic valves based instruments and I was no expert of instruments. Working slowly with the help of a senior technician, I could make most of the instruments working. These were older generation instruments which one could repair by replacing faulty resistances and capacitors. I also learned how to do shouldering and run simple tests by using multimeter etc. Since we had to give the final year students projects to work on, I always gave some experimental projects and learned many things about using the neutron source in the lab. I also introduced plastic track detector based experiments and many projects could be done by using them at relatively low cost. This gave me the confidence of handling advanced experiments when my Ph.D, students got involved in some experiments.

I had the opportunity of bringing to life the laboratory at Yangon University in Myanmar, where I was sent on deputation for few months. They also had an idle van de graff machine, which generated 14 MeV neutrons. I learnt its operation by reading the manuals and after 2 weeks of hard work, which involved testing the various parts, liquid nitrogen cooling, high vacuum, high voltage etc., I could run it and get a neutron beam. One senior professor working in another nearby college had used the machine many-many years ago, and he came to help me many times. The Myanmar government run by the army at that time had introduced a very unusual practice of transferring professors from one university to another university every 3-4 years. As a result many labs lost the experts and became defunct. Also, no expertise could be nurtured at one place. This is what happens when persons ignorant of academics take over the reign. It is the most stupid practice that I have ever seen.

During my 40 years of teaching at Roorkee ( which was interrupted many times when I went abroad), I learnt how to teach and how to make things simpler for the students. It took me many years to become a mature teacher and this was possible by observing others and interacting with students. It gave me an opportunity to teach a wide spectrum of courses. Of course teaching nuclear physics was my first choice, but I loved to teach quantum mechanics, and modern physics courses.

Influence and legacy of my father also gave me an opportunity to read about philosophical and religious literature. I will read anything that I could lay my hands on. Books were not easy to come by. But my father had a big library and I will spend my leisure hours sitting there and searching for books that I could read. This gave me an exposure to the Hindi literary world also. He didn't have science books anyway. I tried to fill that gap by buying as may books as possible in the limited amount of money available to me. The soviet influence was quite significant and I could get good quality soviet books in science, all in English. I had very few friends and that gave me more than enough time to browse into literature, science, fiction, non-fiction, history etc. I still cherish those moments because I am not able to do as much reading now.