Interviewers: Adil Khan, Samyak Shah
This interview was conducted as part of Department of Electrical Engineering’s “Alumni and Corporate Engagement” initiative. Check out the Department’s official student newsletter at this link.
Mr. Sharad Saraf is an alumnus of IIT Bombay (B.Tech. ’69 Elec. Engg. H2) and has also served as a member of the Board of Governors (BoG) of IIT Bombay.
Devdutt Pattanaik writes on relevance of mythology in modern times. Trained in medicine, he worked for 15 years in the healthcare and pharma industries before he plunged full time into his passion. Author of 50 books and 1000 columns, with several bestsellers, he is known for his TED talks, his TV shows especially Devlok, and his innovative views on culture, leadership and Indian approach to management. As any issue on mythology would be incomplete without any input from Devdutt Pattanaik , the Fundamatics editorial team reached out to him with few questions that we thought would be interesting for our readers. We are fortunate that he agreed to respond to queries. Hope that you, our readers, will find his replies and comments illuminating, as we did. The illustrations used in his article are by Devdutt Pattanaik.
[Noseybee’s Nosy Note: The Wondering Minstrels was a joyous exploration of poetry that began as a poetry-by-email service and soon morphed into a lively community of poetry lovers. From Feb ’99 till Jan ’07, The Wondering Minstrels were a source of a poem a day, (almost) every day, accompanied by commentary, analysis, criticism, biographical information about the poet, literary anecdotes, historical asides, trivia etc. Eight years, over 1900 poems, and tons of information about most of them; surprisingly, this treasure trove of verse was the handiwork of three geeks from our very own IITB – the poetry-by-email service was started and run by Abraham Thomas and Martin De Mello, with an accompanying archive website created and maintained by Sitaram Iyer. Read more about their motivations and their journey with The Wondering Minstrels in this interview.]
Discussion on the issue of education in India typically gets partitioned into either the issue of primary education or higher education, and most of the attempts at out-of-the-box thinking on education seem overly focused on the ‘box’ itself. In other words, the problem of delivery. How do we deliver high quality education to the millions of young Indians in a timely and meaningful fashion? Without discounting the enormity of the delivery issue, in this article we approach the education issue from a different angle by focusing what is within the box – in other words the content of Indian education. Parag Saxena, Founding General Partner and CEO of New Silk Route Partners who also co-founded Vedanta Capital LLC, in 2006. Parag has been a member of the Foreign Direct Investment task force for the Prime Minister of India and during his last sojourn to India, the Fundamatics team discovered that Parag holds the issue of Indian education very close to his heart. Bumblebee got him to share his thoughts on what he feels is the need of the hour for Indian education and the content required to make Indian education and the institutions that deliver it more relevant. ~
Discover if the anecdotes associated with GBF are more real and bigger than the people who created it.
Anecdotes are anecdotes. Campfire tales that are recollected after decades to evoke nostalgia. Often, an anecdote becomes an integral part of the narrator, more real than the event that created the anecdote. It’s an anecdote that an apple fell on Newton’s head. Had it been a coconut rather than an apple, he may not have lived to tell the tale of gravity. Had Archimedes been from IIT, he wouldn’t have had a bath, leave alone in a tub and we wouldn’t have had the Eureka moment and his principle that’s taught at IIT.
How the rain gods sounded a discordant note in the symphony of the much awaited GBF orchestra night.
The YPO performance at GBF 2015 was much anticipated by everyone, most of all, by the performers. If you peeked behind the curtains during a rehearsal in Pune, you would see that YPO rehearsals resemble a wrestler akhada more than an orchestra. Old habits die hard. Folks in their 40s, 50s and 60s become nostalgic and fight over how their hostel in their time was musically superior to the other guy’s hostel and had beaten them at so-and-so inter-hostel competition, and how that girl in your team was cute looking, but used to sing two full notes below the original Lata Mangeshkar scale, and so on and so forth. Once on stage, however, we set aside all existential disputes about chords, scales, rhythms and present a picture of perfect harmony and professionalism (well, almost).
How a no-show by cabs at the Goa airport left hundreds of GBF guests stranded.
It is 12:45 pm on Oct 17. The stadium is filling fast and it gives me a relief to see the crowd pouring in. This is the most critical time of the GBF and most of the airport arrivals are to happen between 10am and 2pm. I am feeling good in my black suit and white shirt and generous dosage of deo. Little do I realise that there are more people stranded at the airport than are entering the stadium. As usual my mobile is on charge. I glance at it and feel the shock. There are 12 missed calls and my phone is on silent by mistake.
A budding entrepreneur shares the story of how he scored deals at the GBF.
“First alumni event in more than 10 years since graduation!” is what came to my mind as I was boarding the flight to Goa. Not that I have been actively trying to avoid my classmates or that I don’t enjoy their company, I guess the Alumni Association just made a really kickass effort this time around to grab my attention and got me to sign up.
About a GBF volunteer who couldn’t resist dropping pearls of wisdom much to the chagrin of others.
Our SIG was blessed with an eager young student volunteer who not only managed tons of work but also had us in splits every so often with his foot-in-the-mouth comments. On one such occasion, a group of us, of varying vintage, were chatting about the food available on campus.
