Those BRD classes!

BRD stands for BioReactor Design and it is one of my two subjects in my final semester of undergrad college. For reasons hitherto unknown, my department could not find a tacher for it despite having the highest number of teachers per student in NITK. So we got news of a guest faculty, a Mr Karanth, who would be coming in late Jan to take up the subject.

For those who came in late: Semester started on Dec 10 and till BRD began I had 4 hours per week of college (Sweet!!) and so when the guy finally came it was a bit of a bore to realise he will be taking a lot more extra classes to make up for the lost time- "Bore" was an understatement..

We all knew he was, well, retired to put it kindly and with Indians most retired profs are like teddy bears- All affectionate and gushing kindness! I cant be blamed for thinking the guy was in this category too and actually he was, but it was not his personality that was the issue!

Across 4 straight days, we had atleast 14 hours of classes in seven 2-hour sessions, a "break" between sessions was of help only to those who took advantage of the guy's attendence policy. It maybe sad to tell, but when you are in final sem you really lose seriousness in studies when your life after college is already set! So all that was to be taken care of was the attendence criteria of minimum 75% classes getting attended..

But when you have 14 classes in 4 days you can go down to 72% if you miss a single day of action. This was where our "training" kicked in. You see with time we get trained to notice weaknesses in other people- We cant help it, Survival of the Fittest still runs in our blood! Mr Karanth had a really exploitable way of taking attendence where he would look down at the registration sheet and never look up as he called name rolls, do I need to say whether or not the proxy system was a huge success??

Learning this strategy took 2 days though and for the 1st few days most people actually attended the classes, the breakthrough was provided by Gaurav Singhai who showed it pays to sit near the door as he left not 2 mins into the class after attendence once the prof's back was to us! Can I blame him?? Well not in this case believe it or not!

As I said before, "bore" was an understatement in this case. It is not the guy's fault- Most engineers are better off learning new applications or solving problems others cant and hence most in my class sufferred badly at the extent of theory sessions in this subject. Adding to the misery were the M.Tech people who we shared the subject hall with (Although a couple of them were cool enough to simply walk in/out of the class when desired), and a certain M.Tech guy got my goat more often than not- The feeling was shared by many others I am certain...

Saurav Mishra quoted the most fitting comment for the marathon session when he woke up from his slumber in a seat behind me to blabber "There is a limit to persevere anything!" before slipping back to deep sleep (How does he do that?? I wish I knew, that would be so helpful in class) and when the marathon finally ended all were just relieved- No joy, for all energy was sapped trying to get what was being taught! Next week we got the midsemester exams for the same subject, all I know is that reading our answer scripts the prof is more likely to LOL than be satisfied..