A legend is no more

I recently heard the sad news of the passing away of one of the most fascinating and  legendary people I have met in my life – Prof. M S Alvar. He had turned eighty just a few months ago.

He was then a lecturer in the civil engineering department of our college – National Institute of Engineering - NIE for short. He taught us one subject in one semester. Let me first share my memories of him and then some of the legends that surrounded him – apocryphal or not, I am not sure.

His charismatic persona was there to experience from the first class. He comes into the classroom, clutching a duster, an attendance register and bunch of chalk. He is long haired and mustachioed. A diminutive figure. Smiling. Casually, almost carelessly dressed in brown cotton pants and nondescript shirt. The first thing I remember him saying was something like this. “I will teach you Fluid Dynamics. Well, your syllabus says Hydraulics. Ugh! That is old fashioned. It is good to be fashionable. Like this” - and he caresses his long wavy hair with a twinkle in his eye and a naughty smile). “So we call it fluid dynamics in my class.” The easy manner, casual self-confidence and humour. I was hooked.

Then he teaches us Bernoulli’s equation and explains it in great detail. He makes it sound divine. “If you know this and understand this, you know fluid dynamics. Without it nothing in this field is possible.”

There is never a dull moment in class. I watch spell bound what happened a little later. The class room has a green fiberglass board spanning almost the whole width of the classroom. It has three equal parts. He has filled the first part by writing various notes. Now he moves on to the second part. And while writing something there, his left hand seems to have its own independent controls and is cleaning the first part with a duster, he is talking to us about the next problem but writing something other than what he is saying, on the board! That was really a jaw dropping performance!

Another remarkable thing was that after the first two classes he never took the attendance. He would look at the class and know who was not present. Marked them absent and rest were present. To the best of my knowledge no one missed his classes.

I remember one instance when he dictated a problem to be solved, of course, using Bernoulli’s equation completely from memory. Such problems have a value for one variable (for frictional coefficient?) which is a number after several zeroes after the decimal point. As we start trying to solve the problem, he asks us to change that number to a different value since the earlier one makes the calculations unnecessarily difficult. The principle involved are more important than the actual values anyway is what he meant. He had worked that problem out in his head and changed the values.

Another example of how humorous the way he taught things is this. While telling us about the importance of units, he once said, “Ten buffaloes and five cows shall forever remain ten buffaloes and five cows. They shall never become fifteen buffaloes and cows”.

In one class he taught us about the water hammer effect. He explained this in terms of springs, frictions and masses, LCR circuits, and using Bernoulli’s equation applied to fluids. I forgotten the details in the intervening fifty years. But the clarity and enthusiasm with which it was taught is unforgettable

We had a classmate called Subhadracharyulu. Prof. Alvar would very often call out his name and ask him if he understood what he had just then taught. And a few days of this, he explained. “You know why I always call on Subhadracharyulu? If I pronounce his name three times a day, my tongue stays in shape” Again the naughty smile and twinkle in the eye.

Whenever he addressed me in class, he addressed me as “You Scottish”. This was because I often wore chequered shirts reminiscent of tartan. One day, outside the classroom, he accosted me and said, in an irritated way, “You, Scottish! Why do you walk around as if you have nowhere to go and nothing to do? Even if you do not have a purpose walk as if you have a purpose.” It shocked me. I will not say that it changed me. That would be too easy. But it definitely left an indelible impression on me. This is only to say that I was lucky that he felt that I was important enough for him to point it out to me.

Once, I wanted to learn to read staff notation used to write western classical music. I asked one of our teachers, another towering personality, (Pun intended because he was very tall and a basketball player) who was knowledgeable in many fields. He suggested that I ask Prof. Alvar and he would definitely teach me. Diffidently I went to him and asked if he would teach me. He invited me home. I was supposed to go to his house on a Sunday afternoon. He asked his wife to make tea and we sat down. He told me, “You can learn staff notation any time. You must learn to listen to western classical music. You have to learn to recognize the various instruments. Let us listen to some music. For the next hour and a half he played to me various pieces of music each not more than ten minutes that he thought exemplified great pieces of music for each instrument. He was very glad that I knew the names of most of the instruments in an orchestra and had some knowledge about of some of the types of instruments, (string, woodwind, brass, to name a few).

Here is one example of what he did with each instrument just to give you an idea of the kind of familiarity he had with his collection of long playing records (LPs). He described a piece of music in visual terms. “Imagine a large stage and screen of a fine transparent material descending from the top from either top corners of the stage. You will now hear some twenty violins play and bring that image to mind. OK?” He then placed an LP of Beethoven’s fifth symphony on the turntable and started it. He picked up the needle arm and placed it somewhere in the middle of the LP gently. And within a turn or two of the LP, the music he had described started!

A good friend of mine who was a student of Prof. Alvar when he did his ME. He has this to say. (I am paraphrasing his WhatsApp message here with his permission)

“He was a genius of a teacher. Very passionate. I used to tell him (which I genuinely felt) that it was a big loss to the field of engineering research that he did not pursue his PhD. The way he personally taught me Real Fluid Flow (one of the toughest subjects) in ME is something that I can't describe in words. He was able to sort of 'story-tell' on several complex concepts & explain corresponding mathematically complex models like Navier Stokes Equation. If someone says I am acceptable as a teacher, it was thanks to Prof. Prof. Alvar. He has been a great source of inspiration and a role model for many like me.”

As a teacher he was universally admired.

Now to the legends that surrounded him

He once met a student on an evening before an examination. (For Mysoreans - this was said to be near Ramaswamy circle) Prof. Alvar stopped him and asked him why he was loitering instead of studying. The student said, he had not understood the subject, had tried to study and realized that he would not pas the examination and had given up. Prof. Alvar scolded him for thinking like that. He sat on a bench on the side of the street and using a stick as chalk and the earth as the blackboard, he taught the student the fundamentals of the subject which was not his specialization either. He asked the student to go home and study as much as possible and take the examination the next day. The grounding he got was so good that the student did as told and passed the exam with decent marks.

In another such legendary incident, it is said that a medical student was describing how difficult the study of anatomy was and how difficult it was to remember the names and so on. Prof. Alvar borrowed the copy of Grey’s Anatomy from the student and stunned the student in a week or two by his knowledge of anatomy and taught him a trick or two of his own device for remembering the names. It is said that later the student thanked Prof. Alvar for making him pass anatomy paper with flying colours.

I feel that it was my great good fortune to have known him, however briefly.