Once upon a time..........(2010's rainy season)
Sem III had begun, and it was very nice to learn a lot of new subjects - it was the start of real Mechanical Engineering subjects!
I was standing in a queue outside the SBI ATM at Lonere and I was the last guy in it. My thermodynamics professor joined the queue, and as a courtesy, I asked him if he was in a hurry and needed to skip the queue. It was the first time we had met outside the university premises. He asked me what I would be doing after B.Tech.
The biggest question anyone could ask at that age. It has become a tradition to do engineering and then think what to do next. I, on the other hand, had different intentions. Like most of those who pursue engineering, I too didn't want to do engineering. I wanted to do a B.Sc-M.Sc-Ph.D and become a teacher in some school. I sort of loved that life. Having studied in MSAS Panvel from nursery to XII standard, I guess, each MSAS student must have met Sandip Mitra sir, who taught science in school and physics in junior college. I loved this guy! Cool, smart, techie, happy, a very good teacher, a sportsman who played football, basketball, badminton almost daily after school hours and even late evenings. Why wouldn't I want to be like him? I always admired him. I just wanted to be like him. A teacher. Someone whom all students admire, love and be open to!
Fortunately or unfortunately, none of my teachers wanted me to pursue a B.Sc-M.Sc and I had no intentions of living Panvel. My parents didn't want me to pursue a B.Sc either. Everyone tried convincing me that I should rather take up engineering like everyone else. So I changed my mind to choosing Automobile Engineering, which I suppose, each kid those days would like. That resulted into a new problem - there weren't much colleges with a degree in Automobile Engineering and closest to Automobile was Mechanical Engineering. That's how I entered Mechanical Engineering.
And here was this professor asking what I would do after B.Tech when I actually drifted far away from my flight plan.
Politely, I replied, I want to be a teacher. That quite surprised him. In a very typical style of his, he saw me in the eyes bypassing those frameless spectacles of his, and said, why teaching? I said I like it. He said, teaching has a good scope and that new IITs would come up in future and those IITs would need good teachers. I asked him how would someone be a Professor, and he said, go to some IIT and do a M.Tech or go abroad and do M.S., but don't stop there, pursue a Ph.D., do research and then return to become a professor.
That prof later became my M.Tech guide and would probably be my Ph.D guide too!
