He was in campus last month as the Chief Guest of the 52nd Convocation ceremony. Apart from conferring degrees and committing a corpus of $500,000 for telecom research in the campus, he also found time to speak to Scholars' Avenue. Excerpts:
SA. I gathered from your speech that this is your first visit to IIT Kgp since your graduation. Now you are back awarding degrees to hundreds of students.
AS. It’s a great honour to be back here and I believe strongly that IIT has been an important place for me where I got a lot of my ideas from, and I am very happy to do something for it. If handing out degrees is a good thing to do, I am very happy to do it as well!
SA. What was your own convocation like?
AS. I wasn’t here for my convocation because it was held much later, during October. I had already gone to the United States by then but I remember that Mrs. Indira Gandhi was the Chief Guest that time. I got the B. C. Roy gold medal but I couldn’t come back to collect it. Hopefully, being here today will make up for that.
SA. Any special memories of your stay in Kgp that you would like to share with us?
AS. Oh lots of memories! I was very involved with sports when I was here. I was in the hockey team, I was in the gymnastics team and I also participated in the track and field events. I used to hang around with a group of guys, all of us from Azad. My favorite memories were with those guys doing silly stuff together.
Once we were very upset with the election results, and we suspected that the results were rigged. So in protest me and a few of my friends decided to boycott the hockey matches that year for our hall. Not surprisingly, from being the champions we finished at the bottom. I can’t imagine how stupid we were! But we were growing up and that was the exciting thing. Not only were we growing intellectually but we were also growing up as human beings.
SA. You have had a very strong educational background. You studied at a very good army school, and then you were at IIT Kgp for 5 years. You went to the University of California, Berkeley for your MS and MBA degrees. Where does IIT Kgp stand for you in terms of importance and its value to your career?
AS. Oh it was very very important to me. I had a very good schooling. Then I came here, then I went to Berkeley. Now even Berkeley is a very great institution. So I went from one great place to another great place. But I came here as a fifteen-and-a-half year old kid. The formative years are very important and that’s what I remember the most, growing up with a bunch of guys and having a lot of fun.
SA. What did you guys generally do in your leisure time?
AS. I was very much into athletics. I was involved with some sport or the other almost every evening. In our time there weren’t a lot of eating places. I do remember hanging out at the Nayar’s and Ramdas who used to sell kulfis outside S. N. Hall. Chhedis was there but it was a long way off from Azad. So Ramdas served the dual purpose of quenching our thirsts and also giving us a nice spot to stop and observe all the girls go by! There were very few girls – 50 girls and 1500 boys.
SA. On a slightly more serious note, a word on the reservation issue. A lot has already been said about it. What is your opinion?
AS. To tell you the truth, I am not very close to this issue. I live in UK and I go around the world. I’m not very sure about the exact recommendations, though it appears that they are hugely increasing the number of seats. (We inform him about the situation at hand, and the student unrest all over the country.) In a society there are many different forces at work. One of the great things about IIT is that it’s a purely merit based system. During my time, I remember there was a small amount of reservation, probably 10 or 15 % for SC/ST. There was a huge hullabaloo about this and yeh-kya-ho-raha-hai. My view is that the government is trying to instill the social policy and as long as the institution is not affected negatively, it is fine.
What I understand is numbers are being increased substantially and as a matter of principle that seems like a wrong thing. In some ways providing people facilities is a good idea but if the number is something like 50% then it is too much because that is not reflecting the diversity of the country. I do not want to take a political stand on the issue but there are many ways of protesting a point of view. You can do lots of things but you have to first think if your actions are going to diminish the brand.
(We tell him about students planning to stage a protest and return their medals to the institute as a mark of protest.) You can make a big deal about it and return your medals, but you’ve earned the medals, so keep them. This is not to say that you shouldn’t voice your opinions, but you can do it in many ways. Find other ways.
I am in favor of having dialogues regarding this. If there have to be reservations, they can’t be caste-based,they have to be means based. I’ll be very happy to carry this message to the Prime Minister as well. We need to find clever and more effective ways to do things.
SA. A final message for the students.
AS. All I have to say is, the kids here are very bright, but you have to be well rounded and think about what you want to do in life and how you want to face the world.
SA. I gathered from your speech that this is your first visit to IIT Kgp since your graduation. Now you are back awarding degrees to hundreds of students. AS. It’s a great honour to be back here and I believe strongly that IIT has been an important place for me where I got a lot of my ideas from, and I am very happy to do something for it. If handing out degrees is a good thing to do, I am very happy to do it as well!
SA. What was your own convocation like?
AS. I wasn’t here for my convocation because it was held much later, during October. I had already gone to the United States by then but I remember that Mrs. Indira Gandhi was the Chief Guest that time. I got the B. C. Roy gold medal but I couldn’t come back to collect it. Hopefully, being here today will make up for that.
SA. Any special memories of your stay in Kgp that you would like to share with us?
AS. Oh lots of memories! I was very involved with sports when I was here. I was in the hockey team, I was in the gymnastics team and I also participated in the track and field events. I used to hang around with a group of guys, all of us from Azad. My favorite memories were with those guys doing silly stuff together.
Once we were very upset with the election results, and we suspected that the results were rigged. So in protest me and a few of my friends decided to boycott the hockey matches that year for our hall. Not surprisingly, from being the champions we finished at the bottom. I can’t imagine how stupid we were! But we were growing up and that was the exciting thing. Not only were we growing intellectually but we were also growing up as human beings.
SA. You have had a very strong educational background. You studied at a very good army school, and then you were at IIT Kgp for 5 years. You went to the University of California, Berkeley for your MS and MBA degrees. Where does IIT Kgp stand for you in terms of importance and its value to your career?
AS. Oh it was very very important to me. I had a very good schooling. Then I came here, then I went to Berkeley. Now even Berkeley is a very great institution. So I went from one great place to another great place. But I came here as a fifteen-and-a-half year old kid. The formative years are very important and that’s what I remember the most, growing up with a bunch of guys and having a lot of fun.
SA. What did you guys generally do in your leisure time?
AS. I was very much into athletics. I was involved with some sport or the other almost every evening. In our time there weren’t a lot of eating places. I do remember hanging out at the Nayar’s and Ramdas who used to sell kulfis outside S. N. Hall. Chhedis was there but it was a long way off from Azad. So Ramdas served the dual purpose of quenching our thirsts and also giving us a nice spot to stop and observe all the girls go by! There were very few girls – 50 girls and 1500 boys.
SA. On a slightly more serious note, a word on the reservation issue. A lot has already been said about it. What is your opinion?
AS. To tell you the truth, I am not very close to this issue. I live in UK and I go around the world. I’m not very sure about the exact recommendations, though it appears that they are hugely increasing the number of seats. (We inform him about the situation at hand, and the student unrest all over the country.) In a society there are many different forces at work. One of the great things about IIT is that it’s a purely merit based system. During my time, I remember there was a small amount of reservation, probably 10 or 15 % for SC/ST. There was a huge hullabaloo about this and yeh-kya-ho-raha-hai. My view is that the government is trying to instill the social policy and as long as the institution is not affected negatively, it is fine.
What I understand is numbers are being increased substantially and as a matter of principle that seems like a wrong thing. In some ways providing people facilities is a good idea but if the number is something like 50% then it is too much because that is not reflecting the diversity of the country. I do not want to take a political stand on the issue but there are many ways of protesting a point of view. You can do lots of things but you have to first think if your actions are going to diminish the brand.
(We tell him about students planning to stage a protest and return their medals to the institute as a mark of protest.) You can make a big deal about it and return your medals, but you’ve earned the medals, so keep them. This is not to say that you shouldn’t voice your opinions, but you can do it in many ways. Find other ways.
I am in favor of having dialogues regarding this. If there have to be reservations, they can’t be caste-based,they have to be means based. I’ll be very happy to carry this message to the Prime Minister as well. We need to find clever and more effective ways to do things.
SA. A final message for the students.
AS. All I have to say is, the kids here are very bright, but you have to be well rounded and think about what you want to do in life and how you want to face the world.
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