I met him first when I was stranded in the finest institute of this country with no supervisor for my PhD. He was the faculty in charge of us, the so-called "orphans." In an obscure nowhere of a place, he had his office, hiding the fact of how giant he was. It was dark all around, with only his office having a ray of sunshine that seeped through the frayed curtains.
When you meet him, the first thing you notice is the soft voice. A soft, soothing voice, the result of teaching for years and also of the daily riyaz he does. For a newly admitted PhD student in a new program, in a new department, hundreds of miles away from any air of familiarity, hearing that voice makes you re-assured. Haven't you met those people whose first word out of the mouth adds a newfound confidence to your self? He was that person. He patiently listened to my problem and then calmly told me to do the coursework needed for my PhD to begin. With no knowledge of which guide to choose, what he did was give me the breadth of knowledge I could get in the next six months. He gave me four courses to choose from, all from different realms of computer science — but the first of which was a course in Artificial Intelligence, taught by him.
I enjoyed that course very much. It was different from anything else I had learned, and from the way the lecture was taught, I believe I sat in front of one of the best teachers in the world. The first exam, I got 2 out of 20. I was devastated. Years later he told me why not just me but the rest of the class got very few marks — in fact, the average mark was 0. That was done to crush the ego with which I had applied and gotten into the institute. Now that the ego was off the table, learning was easier, he said.
At the end of the semester, there was a lab assignment, and he was late. Normally he is not. The assignment was supposed to be completed as a team, and my teammates were nowhere to be seen. But it wouldn't have mattered. I was fretting, because what I did for that assignment was something which was not supposed to be done, according to the instructions. Since my teammates were not present, I kept pushing the boundaries of what could be accepted. It was my belief that everything would be presented together, so the professor wouldn't know whose mistake it was. Alas, on that day, as fate would have it, I was alone to defend all the choices. He pointed to the logical fallacy of my choices and asked me to explain. For the first time, I started to explain as if things were written in the air.
We were conversing through an invisible board — on thin air. He understood what I was telling him, and he was telling me something, which I could grasp. At the end of the conversation, he asked me whether I had decided under whom I was going to do the PhD. I hadn't talked to anybody. I was thinking of going back and joining Boston University. Casually, he asked if I could do the PhD under him. I loved AI, and I gladly said yes.
And thus I started my PhD journey at home. I was under the impression that I would be doing a PhD in artificial intelligence. But to my dismay, he asked me to do a course on NLP — natural language processing. The very next semester, I had to take this course on NLP. And trust me, I did not like it. Until then, the lab had been more focused on word sense disambiguation, entity extraction, information retrieval. So I thought maybe I should find a new topic for the lab, and I started my journey into something unknown for the people around. He was new to it. I was new to it. Everybody else was new. So we had a lot of things to turn around and understand. We started our steps — smaller steps, minor steps — and then slowly built upon them.
There, he taught me the joy of building something from the ground up. Making something from absolutely nothing.
It was very difficult to get an appointment with him. Sometimes he would call me in the morning at eight o'clock. Sometimes at three in the afternoon, sometimes at five in the evening, sometimes at eight at night — and when the papers were being written, it would be at eleven o'clock, or twelve, or one in the night. I thought this man never sleeps. He was a workaholic. He never slept, or rather he slept very little. Any time of the day or night, you could send a mail, and most probably you would get a reply. He had so many mails coming every day that he used to track three or four inboxes. The primary one, he would always keep transferring so that there was space inside it — so that students and other companions could always reach him. Mails would come from the world over: queries from students, grant proposals, thesis corrections, committee deliberations, project proposals, questions on teaching methodologies, on new research. A single man holding up the entire research effort in one of the hottest subjects of current computer science.
We had a custom of taking walks across the sprawling campus. We would walk for hours together. And this was the private time for the students to be with him. We would discuss the research, and then sometimes life. And you would not even know how the hours passed. During these walks, the conversation would take strange shapes, where the research would be explained based on the spirals around the fences, sometimes while praying to god, sometimes just looking at the lake and seeing the traffic going on the other side of the lake horizon.
We never found any solutions during these walks. What we focused on was framing the right questions. Because he knew that if we were compelled to arrive at the questions, then each of his students had the ability to go and find the right solution. We found many solutions. Some famous. Some hidden, waiting to be famous. Some just being solutions for problems that may come in the future.
I've seen so many people shouting to make a point. One of his superpowers was being silent and making you do things which you would never forget doing. It was a silent anger, so focused, and a laser-sharp stare that followed. I have met many people in the last seventeen, eighteen years since I graduated. None had conveyed aggression with silence like him. He taught me what a pause means in a conversation, and how powerful that can be. Sometimes we all need to have a pause. It allows us to think — not just the one who is listening, but also the person who is speaking.
Sometimes when you explicitly tell someone what the expectation is, it actually helps you reach that expectation. For me, he had set it in the first year itself. And with that clear expectation, I became a machine in publishing research papers. We went through things that lab had never attempted — demos, machine learning with linguistics, economics, and many more. Not that he would be involved in every aspect of it, but he gave freedom and direction. Sometimes a nudge, and it just removed the static friction for us to roll.
A PhD is a long journey. Somebody told me that having a PhD means having a state of mind which suggests that anything can be hurled at you and you would survive, and sometimes thrive. But sometimes that state never comes. Nevertheless, there comes a time in your PhD when you need to stop the work. You don't know if you have done enough. For him, it was when his confidence in you had reached a level that you could be let go into the wild. I think that realization came to him when, for the first time in four years, I said no to one of his corrections while writing a paper. And there it was, the usual silent stare, with hordes of people just watching the two of us. After a while, with a smile, he agreed to my correction. Out of the many papers submitted from that lab that year, only that paper got accepted. He asked me to pack my bags and leave.
After leaving, I tried different things: experimented, failed, survived, thrived. It was a non-linear path that seldom made sense to the people around me.
We had brief contacts over the years. But unlike the rest of the students, I never tried to stay in touch. I never highlighted that I was his student. But it was always in me that he had guided me — in research and in life. I knew he was busy. I knew he would have scores of students and other people bothering him every second. So I thought I didn't have to burden him. Also, I think at the bottom of my heart, I thought I was not meant to be in his league, nor the league of the other students from that lab. I took paths that none of them took.
Years later — perhaps a decade after — I was on the campus to present a paper in a completely different field from NLP. He was the chair of that conference. I met him, and I felt he had never changed. He looked so young. He was very happy to see me and my team. Later, at the banquet, he was introducing me to folks from various parts of the world, telling everyone that I had my own company. I think students made him young, and teaching kept his curiosity alive. It surfaced with a naughtiness when he casually asked me if I was making enough money as an entrepreneur. I said enough to survive. He laughed.
Then on a Sunday, I got a call saying that he had passed away. At that moment, I did not feel it. But over the days, it dawned on me that I had a number on my phone which I never called for any favor; it dawned on me that I knew a cabin on the campus where he would no longer be; it dawned on me that I never said thank you for everything he taught me; and it dawned on me that I would never get to hear his soft voice calling my name again. I felt angry at myself for being where I was. I don't know why. But then I consoled myself, saying again that among all his students, I did not have much importance.
Months later, a friend was talking about him — how he used to be part of all the vivas he conducted, even after students graduated. I was thinking I never got such chances with sir. Then he said something that unsettled me beyond my wildest dreams. Sir thought I was unique, doing great things which none of his other students were doing, and he was incredibly proud of me. While listening to my friend — at a time when I thought I was at my lowest, mentally, in my life — it was the only push I required to have clarity about my expectations.
Even after he left, he was pushing me to chase.
Life gives you many learnings. But seldom do you get good teachers. To me, he is the teacher who built me.
Goodbye, sir.
