It takes a village ...

 “Young, very enthusiastic, naïve, slightly tense students arrived when it was pouring [rain] in 2006 ….  It was a tough task as a warden for me to think about their well being, to think about their welfare.  At the same time, the students had lots of expectations, lots of aspirations.  We had to meet their demands, their expectations, their standards.”

This is how my colleague Dr. Ramakrishna G. Bhat describes the incoming students of the very first batch at IISER Pune.

Students are the heart of our campus.  The image of the proverbial ``ivory tower” professor, fashionably buried in their own work with little time or concern for students is largely down-voted by faculty at IISER Pune.  It is a different matter that students can be a handful, meeting their expectations (especially non-academic!) can be a rough ride and we don’t always succeed, but then, who wants easy?

Ramakrishna Bhat was the first faculty member to join IISER Pune after the director, Professor K.N. Ganesh.  On joining, he was allotted the enormous task of setting up a hostel for the incoming 2006 batch.  This (temporary) hostel was to be created in a 30-year old abandoned building near NCL.  It was renovated at a feverish pace in about 15 days [1] and the first batch of our MS students walked into their residence in August 2006.  Ramakrishna and Professor G. Ambika (currently, dean of graduate studies) wholeheartedly threw themselves into the job of making these students feel at home.  They both stayed in the hostel for the first three and a half years. Be it holding tutorials in the dining hall (drawing chemical chain reactions on the menu board), handling frantic midnight requests to investigate stolen buckets or even waking up sleepy students for morning exams, they have done it all. 

Everything was all set to get even more chaotic with the admission of the 2007 and 2008 batches.  Sutirth Dey and Shouvik Datta joined the team of wardens and were responsible for the 2007 and 2008 batches respectively.  In order to accommodate the growing community of students, the institute was left with no option but to hire bungalows or apartments in the Baner and Pashan areas.  2008 was particularly tricky.   When Shouvik joined the Physics group in July 2008, he also took charge of the 2008 batch.  One of his earliest experiences was a crisis created by a last minute cancelation of living arrangements that had been planned for students.  A frenzied search yielded a bungalow (owned by Nana Patekar no less!) on Sus Road and some apartments in a building on the Baner Pashan Link Road.  Just a day or so before the students arrived, Shouvik went to check out these dwellings and found himself arranging beds in one of them along with the director! 

More colourful experiences were to follow. On Day 1, Shouvik had to go to all the buildings where students were staying and hire autorickshaws to get them to the dining hall located at NCL.  Gradually, he got used to regular phone calls at 1 am from security guards at these apartment complexes regarding noisy students.  Sometimes, he would personally have to visit to get stubborn students to climb off water tanks on the terrace (didn’t I say that our students are a handful?)  Another regular problem he would have to handle was when the other residents of these buildings would get annoyed and turn off water connections to the student apartments [2]. 

Soon, the chaos subsided.  A serious problem was about commuting between their apartments, academic buildings and dining hall.  This was resolved by hiring/purchasing an adequate number of buses.  The IISER bus network has served the community very well.  In an institute where the hostel(s), dining hall, classrooms and labs were far apart, these buses served as a lifeline.  They also provided a safe and convenient commute to our students if they wished to spend an evening in Pune main city. Until we became a fully residential campus, almost at any time of the day, two kinds of buses would be seen regularly on Dr. Homi Bhabha Road: buses from the National Defence Academy and from IISER.

Even after the most important logistical issues were taken care of, the “lighter” complaints were treated with utmost seriousness.  Once, when students complained that the chapatis in the dining hall were not as soft and round as what they had at home, the wardens held an emergency meeting with the purchase section to order roti makers!

In those years, a lot of energy also had to be expended towards “parenting the parents,” that is, allaying the apprehensions and fears of parents.  Their children were walking into uncharted territory: until 2011, it was not clear what they would be able to do with an IISER education.  Moreover, they had to drop their children off at buildings scattered all over Baner instead of a proper hostel.  In those days, the director and other leaders would regularly have long meetings with parents to assure them that their children were in safe hands.  Occasionally, there would be comical situations with the “don’t-you-know-who-I- am-my-kid-will-not-stay-here-one-more-minute” parents, but even they were tackled with tact and grace. 

Taking care of students is no joke.  On one hand, one has to implement hostel rules and oversee discipline issues.  On the other hand, one needs to be friends with them and guide them.  In the early years, the job got compounded because very few people had to take care of a large number of issues.  Two or three wardens would oversee a lot of things including hostel life, meals, transport, sports, recreation, discipline, health and mental wellbeing of students.  Loss of personal space, occasional frustration and overwhelm come with this territory.  Our leadership and the wardens took it in their stride, bade goodbye to personal egos and did their best.  It also helped that the administration was friendly, supportive and ready to work well beyond office hours [3].

This reminds me of an incident a few years ago: I was at a different institute then and had never visited IISER Pune.  One day, I wrote a somewhat helpless, somewhat miffed post about my wardenship duties there, whether I was any good at it and whether this job was of any use whatsoever.  A student from the 2007 batch at IISER Pune (who had graduated by the time my blog post appeared) wrote back a gentle rebuke and mentioned how hard his warden, Sutirth Dey, had worked for these students and how much of a lasting impact he had made on them!

As of today, our student hostels tower over the IISER campus.  When guardians arrive to drop off their freshmen wards, they encounter an elaborately built residential area with two tall buildings right next to a dining hall, a medical clinic with an ambulance on standby, a helpful hostel administration and decent security arrangements, not to mention a unified campus.  After students check in, they head towards our auditorium in the academic area for a welcome meeting with the dean of graduate studies, COSA (Committee of Student Activities: a team of seven faculty members who take care of student issues outside of the classroom), the dining committee members and our team of counselors.  We take great pride in conveying to these freshmen (and their parents) that there is a proper system to take care of every aspect of their life on campus.  The task of running this system is shared by a large number of people.  It is a reasonably decentralized, efficient system that gets better each year [4].  There are separate teams of people to look after different requirements so that no one person gets overwhelmed.  But, it took a lot of sweat and tears to raise this village that now raises the child!

On their part, the students have done every bit to deserve this and more [5].  There will be a future post on how proud they have made us.  Meanwhile, you may enjoy this blog with some awesome IISER alumni stories.




[1] The story of how the IISERs were visualized and started in a couple of months is a fascinating story (with enough thriller effect) narrated in this video by the planners themselves.  Important decisions were taken just days before the first session started and this meant that a lot of things were done at the last moment. 

[2] The tolerance of “housing societies” of Pune is world-famous. 

[3] After having visited or stayed at multiple institutes in India and after interacting with colleagues at many others, I realize that this is something to be truly grateful for!

[4] and many people in the admin office still work beyond office hours!

[5] though they are still a handful :)