Rest in Peace Professor Arvind (MIT)

Professor Arvind is no more. He was a distinguished alumnus of IIT Kanpur, having graduated from there in 1969. He was a Professor of Computer Science at MIT.

His death is a huge loss to the Computer Science community across the world and a personal loss to me.

The first time I heard of him was when I was still an under-graduate student at IIT Kanpur in 1985. There was a course on Computer Architecture, in which we were taught dataflow architecture (along with von neumann architecture, of course). Arvind had made major contributions in developing the concept.

Later, I would return from US to join the faculty of CSE at IIT Kanpur. Professor Arvind would visit the department almost every year. He belonged to Kanpur and had family there. And he would always make it a point to spend a couple of days in the department whenever he was in Kanpur. And he had a lot of discussions around CSE education.

I recall that once in 1999 or 2000, we specifically invited him to come to IIT Kanpur for a workshop on CSE curriculum design. I learnt at that time that MIT had a very lean curriculum and the number of compulsory CS courses to receive a Bachelors in CS was only 5 or 6 courses. I asked Arvind whether he considered courses such as Computer Networks, Databases, Compilers, Programming Languages as important. He said indeed they were important courses. But then why is MIT not having them in the curriculum. He replied that I was asking the wrong question. There are lots of important things in life and not everything is part of the curriculum. The right question to ask is whether heavens will fall if some student graduates without doing that course. And if you ask that question, the answer will be positive only for 5-6 courses. Everything else should be part of electives. We did that and I think even today, IIT Kanpur CSE curriculum is perhaps the most flexible in the country with least number of compulsory courses and maximum number of elective slots.

In another of our meeting, I asked him this: MIT must be receiving applications for admission to its MS/PhD programs from thousands of universities around the world. MIT wouldn't know the quality of these universities. How would they know if 3.8/4 CGPA is good, excellent, or average compared with a typical MIT student. He said that to judge the quality of a university, they would look at the transcript of the student and notice two things. How many courses were required for graduation. The more the number of courses, the poorer is the quality of education. Not always, but with very high correlation. He said that if we look at 40-lecture course as a typical course, MIT had 32 courses as graduation requirement. Next level programs in US had 34 courses, and even weaker programs had 36 courses. IITs had 42-45 courses, NITs had 45-50 courses (then), and technical universities had 50-55 courses for graduation. (It was then, now, most universities in India have reduced courses between 40 and 50.) And second, look at the type of courses. If there are many courses which teach skills like programming, or other technologies, there is too much of spoon feeding. These people may be good for industry but not good for research. Again, there are exceptions and one needs to be aware of those exceptions.

In a meeting in 2013 over dinner, he told me that MIT is intensely student-centric. He said most people believe that research institutions are faculty-centric but that is not true of MIT. Thankfully, the interests of students and faculty don't clash often and therefore, it doesn't matter much. But in few instances where there might be a divegence, the MIT leadership would give student success and student learning a greater focus than faculty autonomy. The specific issue that led to this discuss was that a faculty member had given a 'B' grade to all students in a course who got a zero in all assignments/exams and an 'A' grade to all those who received a non-zero marks in any component of the course. And he said that MIT would never allow this under the garb of faculty autonomy. Faculty had to give proper feedback to all students and assigning a B grade to all students with 0 marks violates that. Students' right to feedback is to be preferred over the instructor's autonomy.

I always looked forward to such discussions, which have shaped my thoughts as a faculty member, has made me a much better teacher and a human being. And since he visited CSE department at IIT Kanpur so often, his impact on the department has been huge. It cannot really be measured.

But alas, no more such discussions. But I will remember all his words of wisdom.

May his soul rest in peace.

RIP Narayanan Vaghul

Yesterday, I heard the sad news. Mr. Narayanan Vaghul passed away at the age of 88 years. He was, of course, was one of the most famous banker having become Executive Director of Central Bank of India at the age of 39, became the youngest CMD of Bank of India at the age of 44, and became CMD of ICICI at the age of 49. But beyond banking, he was a fine human being with one of the sharpest minds that I have met in my life.

The first time I met Mr. Vaghul was in January, 2008. He had invited me for a dinner at Ashoka Hotel in Chanakyapuri, Delhi. And just minutes into the dinner, he asked me if I would be interested in joining LNMIIT, Jaipur, as its next Director/VC. I told him that I was only 42 years of age and my leadership roles had been restricted to managing Computer Center at IITK and chairman of one Senate's committee. He told me his story as to how he also had taken up important roles at an early age. I started thinking about it and we had another meeting in Chennai in April, 2008, and finally I got the formal offer in May.

I was still not sure of whether I should get into administration at such an early age. So I called a friend who had provided strategy advice to top business leaders in India. He told me that it should be decided on the basis of whom I am going to work with. I said that the Chairman of the board is Mr. Lakshmi Mittal. He said that since Mr. Mittal stays in London, my interactions with him are likely to be very limited. Then I said that the board meetings are chaired by Mr. Vaghul in the absence of Mr. Mittal. And his statement was that he would be willing to work with Mr. Vaghul without salary. I further probed. I said, as a board member or acting chairman, he would probably spend 2-3 hours with me before every board meeting. There might be some emergency issues which may require another hour or two on a couple of occasions in a year. So I get to spend about 10-12 hours in a year with him on a one-to-one basis. Besides, another 15-20 hours in board meetings, convocation, etc., in a group. And his reply was that if Mr. Vaghul promises to spend 12 hours in a year with him, he will be willing to work for him for the whole year without salary. So much learning will happen in those 12 hours.

And indeed, I have made this statement to many in the last many years that if Mr. Vaghul were to call me to work on any project that he is guiding, I will leave everything to join him. The two years at LNMIIT were indeed a huge learning experience.

And it wasn't just me. When I joined LNMIIT, I asked the then Director, Prof. Sinha, what was the best part of his tenure at LNMIIT. And he said, he enjoyed the board meetings the most. And I was like, who enjoys board meetings. You spend so much time in preparing agenda and presentation, and there are board members who do not even read that stuff and ask difficult questions. At least that was my belief then without having attended any board meeting of any institution. Prof. Sinha further said that the board meeting is like marriage of your daughter, but after the wedding, there are two emotions. One is of relief that the big event has passed by without any problem, and the other is of sadness that the daughter has left your home. Here, he said, there is only sadness that the meeting is over and you will have this great interaction only after another three months. And while we had many stalwarts on the board, Mr. Vaghul made the biggest impact.

I met Mr. Mittal in Delhi in September, 2008 after I had joined LNMIIT. Mr. Vaghul was there in the meeting. Within the first few seconds, he could sense that I was very shy and almost afraid of talking to such a big person. He told Mr. Mittal, let me introduce Dheeraj. And his introduction was so fine that I gained a lot of confidence within a couple of minutes and the meeting went very smoothly.

My first board meeting happened in October or so. He came to Jaipur the previous evening and was staying at Hotel Rambagh Palace. He called me for discussions. He had read the agenda in his flight from Mumbai. He had sharp questions which clarified my own thinking even further. He then advised me that whenever I am making a proposal, I should discuss that with people who are likely to find fault with that. It will clarify my own thinking and will prepare me better for the meeting in which that proposal was going to be discussed.

Next day, the board meeting was from 10 to 12 noon. He chaired the meeting but he didn't sit at the head of the table. He sat in the middle. He explained this by saying that the average distance between him and other board members should be least. If he sits at the head of the table, he is far off from those who are sitting at the other end of the table. Also, the Chairman should not be seen as distinctly higher position. So the chair that he sat on should be same as chair on which everyone else is sitting. The head of the table chair is often distinctive and that distinction dissuades people from disagreeing with the chair and the quality of discussion suffers as a result.

Between, 12 and 1 pm, board members divided themselves into meeting different stakeholders, students, faculty and staff. Some would go around the campus. There was lunch between 1 and 2 of the board members with members of Academic Council and other senior staff members. At 2pm, Mr. Vaghul asks me if the minutes are ready. I was shocked. Minutes, I thought, would take several days to write. And he advised that minutes should be ready even before the meeting starts. Most of the time, we can safely predict what the decision will be on every agenda item. On some items, we may decide differently, and on some items, we may want to record suggestions made, etc. All this can be done while the discussion is still going on, or in the worst case, between 12 and 1pm, when the Director and Registrar are free. From the next board meeting, we did prepare the minutes and got them approved the same day after the lunch.

ICICI was our banker when I joined LNMIIT. We requested ICICI to setup an ATM machine on campus. They said that they had a process which included estimating the number of transactions per day and if they agreed based on that, they will pay us some rent. I told them that the number of transactions will be very small, and if that causes losses to the bank, we can negotiate an amount that we will pay to them instead of they paying us a rent. They said they did not have the right to negotiate any such deal. I had a conversation with Mr. Vaghul and told him that if we are willing to take care of losses of ICICI ATM machine, he should advise someone to agree to this. He was very clear that he will not intervene in any commercial decision of ICICI. Later, we started talking to several banks for setting up an ATM on campus, and SBBJ (now merged with SBI) agreed if we moved our accounts to them. I informed Mr. Vaghul about our discussions. He said that we should change our bankers from ICICI to SBBJ. I asked him that if I were to bring in a proposal in the next board meeting to change bankers from ICICI to SBBJ, will he be ok with it given that he is Chairman of ICICI. He said that when he is sitting on LNMIIT board, he will take decisions only in the interest of LNMIIT and if that means ICICI loses some business, so be it. And we did that in the next board meeting. Such were his ethics. Every small interaction with him was a learning experience.

And despite the fact that he was deeply involved in so many things, he always found time for everything. Whenever I would call his office to seek a 10-minute phone call, I would get that call the same day unless he was traveling abroad.

After I went back to IIT Kanpur, I was invited to join the board of LNMIIT. So the association continued for 3 more years and again, I would always look forward to the board meetings because Mr. Vaghul will be there. I somehow could not attend my last board meeting, and Mr. Vaghul called me personally to thank me (when I should have been thanking him) and mentioned that he was disappointed not to see me in that board meeting.

His affection for me continued and he did tell me that he had recommended my name for a few important academic positions. But we lost touch in the last few years. I had often thought about going to Chennai and meeting him, but somehow this didn't happen and now, it cannot happen.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Vaghul. I have learnt so much from you and I will eternally remain grateful to you for your guidance and affection.

The following is a picture of Mr. Vaghul taken by me at LNMIIT. He is with my family and Prof. Raniwala's family.