First lecture

I taught my first proper class this Tuesday. It's an undergraduate course called Introduction to Mechanics and as I was standing there in front of the students my mind could not help but reflect upon, in brief flashes of half-remembered memories, the days when I myself was a student in IIT (!) Guwahati. Those early mornings when the classes would start around 8 still linger in my memory as particularly harsh. And they only got harsher as the day progressed with classes and labs lined up one after another all the way up to 5 in the evening. I have still not been able to figure out what I learned from those classes since I barely remember anything taught in them. The problem, as I see now, was a combination of professors who were not very good at teaching and content which was not very interesting to me. The point of those courses, those semesters, and those years then was just to get the grades which were good enough to land something decent after graduation. And even this highly practical end goal of the studies which should instead have meant something deeper is a realization which I hardly ever made while I was an undergraduate. Perhaps there were others who saw further into the future but I don't remember having that kind of a foresight. I merely have memories of being adrift, almost a little incredulous of the situation that I found myself in, and slow to react in the larger scheme of things. I could not put it in words while my studies unfolded around me but hindsight has cleaned the dusty impression of intuition and crystallized the realization that I did not care too much about most of what was being taught. I went to the classes and gave the exams, even liked some things here and there, but it was only much later that I really came to appreciate the pleasure inherent in learning. And that kind of learning happened with no real goals in mind. It wasn't to get a great job, or to appear well read and educated, or to gain vaguely coherent sets of alphabets signifying murky accomplishments allowing one add a multitude of prefixes and suffixes to one's name. It was just because certain things were fun and interesting. Its pleasure was immediate, complete, and without any strings. It was a bit like taking the bike to North Torrey Pines beach which I used to do almost every evening for a couple of years. I never got bored of doing it even though everything remained exactly the same every day. Its pleasure was absolute to me and did not require any other reference frame for the justification of its magnitude. Its story was one which need not have been told ever again, one which was completely self content in its own silence and aloofness.