Thus, we were approaching the end of the India Immersion Programme of Ngee Ann Polytechnic students. The people who had been invited to take classes for them were selected based on their expertise, not based on their fame and public image. Of course, good communication in English was absolutely essential. A few members of faculty from our own institution were also included. Many others from outside had also taken classes.
Just one week before the concluding week of
the programme, our
Director called me to his chamber and
asked me. “ Do you need a speaker for taking class to
the Singapore students? I can give you one, he is a close
friend of mine”. I could easily understand
his predicament. He wanted to
invite one of his friends to NITC and spend some
time with him in
the pretext of
this lecture. We had already fixed
up the speakers for all days, but could not
say No to the boss. So, we agreed to arrange the class
early next week. However, we had no idea what this
‘friend of mine’ is going to talk about or how long he is going to talk.
Boss did not ask us nor did he ask us to tell him
what is to be talked about. We thought he must have talked
to him about the programme.
His class was arranged on
a Monday. At 7AM, I phoned up the guest
house to make sure the
guest speaker has come. I
tried to talk to him several times but I could
get him only by 8AM just before I was about to
start to NITC from my
residence in the city. I asked him “ Sir, what
are you talking about ?” Then he started asking. “
What is this programme? What am I
supposed to talk about?” I told him
about the programme and said as per our programme, every session is
of 2 ½ hours duration to be
engaged by each speaker. There will be a break of about
15 minutes in between for tea. I think he was upset when I told him thus.
Obviously, he was not prepared to talk to the students
for this much time. He must
have thought he has to talk for 15-20
minutes in an inaugural meeting or something
like that. That is what VIPs do
these days!
As I was driving to the campus, I
straightaway drove to the guest house to meet
him. I wanted to meet him in person and arrange for his
pick up from the guest house to
the place where the class is
being held. As soon as I met him, he
said he will give me an email address of a
person in Chennai who will send me a
video which he asked me to download and bring
it to the class room. He said he will start
the class and this video will be
useful for the latter part of
his class. I went to my office and
requested the person to
send the video file. I found from the person
that what he is asking for is a nearly 2-hour video which cannot be
sent by email. As per the technology available at
that time, this could be sent only on a CD or
DVD. There was no Google drive or cloud
computing to share large files as of now. The
person who was asked to send
the file to me did not know about
any method of sending/ receiving the
file in half an hour. I personally walked up
to the class room and told me that there is no way the
video file can be brought for the
class. While I was approaching the class, may
be because of the class till then, I found most of
the boys and girls playing something on their laptops without
attending to what he was speaking. Probably, he
was talking on something irrelevant or on
something that they were not interested
in. Somehow, he continued till
the tea break, that was all. He returned to the
Director’s chamber and I managed to
keep the students engaged for
the rest of the time.
The story did not stop there.
In the evening, as is the regular practice,
Director took his friend to the Taj Gateway hotel for
dinner and the Guest house staff told me he returned late into the night. The learned guest returned to
Chennai in the morning flight. When I met
the Director after he left,
he was very angry. It seems he
had told him that the boys and girls have no
manners and they were squatting on the chairs
instead of sitting on it. He continued “What
is the benefit for the institution in training
these polytechnic students? What benefit we will get for improving our research?”
etc. Now we knew, what was the reason. His
friend had taken anticipatory bail to cover his inability
to engage the class for the students. He was telling
all bad things about the manners and inattentiveness of
the boys and girls. This was
like the road side justice, when an
accident occurs. When someone comes and
hits your car from behind and comes out and
starts attacking you, the driver of
the car who was hit from behind.
Just by the casual remark by
a ‘friend of his’, all our efforts for
the last six months or so was declared as
useless. This was the benefit we obtained by obliging
to bring his ‘friend’ to
address our students. We could have comfortably
avoided him by telling that all
speakers have been fixed already.
Except for this minor aberration,
the students and accompanying
teachers were very happy about the programme.
As soon as they returned to Singapore, all of
us in
the administration received congratulatory
messages thanking us. They were very haapy at the way
their students and staff were taken care of during the six
weeks in the campus. They wanted the
programme to continue for three more years and made a
request to that effect to the Director.
However, in spite of the
positive comments from all quarters, our boss decided to
unceremoniously drop the programme.
The reason he
stated was really funny. “What benefit
we will get to improve our research by
training a few batches of polytechnic students?”. It is
strange why he could not realize
this before venturing on this programme. For
many of us, this was a golden opportunity to tell
others what N.I.T. Calicut is and what it is
capable of conducting a training program
for a set of students and faculty from abroad.
These days, reputation of an institution is
not evaluated only based on their website, but also by
word of mouth from students, parents and
visitors like this from abroad. In spite of
our hard work for conducting this programme in an
exemplary
manner, the boss believed only
the blatant lies of
his close friend who had to
cut a sorry figure in front of the youngsters. We hear that
the programme was taken up by some other N.I.T
next year and continued for a few years. Well, bosses
are bosses, they have the
power to do and undo at the flick of a
second. Very few of them care a penny about
the hard work put up by their subordinates.
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