“We will fire bullets at it, Sir!”
“Brilliant! And what would be your weapon of choice, young man?”
“A pistol or a revolver?”
“No Sir! Remember this - if it is aim-and-shoot, trust 303’s. Though a World War I weapon, it still works like a charm!”
Now, if I tell you it was an Organic/Physical Chemistry class, would you trust me? But that was Prof. Kali Dutt Bannerjee's art of teaching, he would transform a subject as bland as Organic/Physical Chemistry (at least to me) into such an interesting conversation, with trivia, fun-facts, et al.
This was his first class for our batch and he wanted us to understand what Ernest Rutherford had envisioned during his famous gold foil experiment, which ended the short lived era of Plum pudding atomic model of JJ Thomson and gave the world a new nucleus based model. As he walked in to our classroom - we would later be so influenced by his mannerisms that his normal gait would seem like a swagger to us - he spoke out loud and clear, in his crisp, accented English, “There is a gunny bag full of cotton and there are some well scattered iron balls in it. How would you find out - without touching, that excludes x-ray too - that there are iron balls in that bag?”
And this is what led to the conversation mentioned at the start.
“What is your name, young man?”, boomed the baritone, after he had pointed out that my choice of weapon was a poor one.
“Bikash”, I blurted.
“Bikash’s idea of firing bullets at the gunny bag was exactly what was experimented by a certain Mr Ernest Rutherford but at an atomic level. He fired alpha particles at a thin gold foil...”, he went on to elaborate in great detail how Rutherford’s experiment gave a brilliant new insight, literally, into the atomic world. While Prof Bannerjee continued, I, on hearing my name publicly pronounced, was elated and floating on cloud nine, hardly paid attention to any further details, thence. As I look back at it now, I think I was sucked into the winner’s trap that day - a phenomenon where the hero of the battle collects all accolades of the first win but never prepares and hence looses the impending war - notwithstanding a few answers to Prof Bannerjee’s levo/dextro Organic molecule queries or having been gifted a chocolate after the “Bowling Shane” incident.
“Bowling Shane!” - Adam Gilchrist, had then recently joined the Australian ODI team(“The Invincibles” of late 90’s and early 2000’s) and his peculiar style of uttering the words of encouragement, caught by the stump mic, was an absolute hit among cricket crazy fans, like us. Shane Warne, the greatest leg spinner the world has seen, was another hero who was ironically toiling hard in Indian conditions in that series, to make a mark. Post the Australian tour of India of ‘90s, Gilchrist became a permanent fixture, replacing another great, Ian Healy. Gilly though, in that tour and to us, was known mostly for his “Bowling Shane”, behind the stumps.
The finals of the inter-class cricket tournament that year, was scheduled between Std XI (I was the 12th man in the Std XI squad) and Std X. Manik Shankar, was our local Shane Warne - with a style matching Warney and a much better relative record to boast of. Before the start of the match while we were planning our strategy, Prof Bannerjee walked in. Like most of the Bengali bhadralok, he too was a big fan of cricket and was there to enthuse and encourage both the teams. We arranged for a chair and cajoled him to sit on our side. We had set a tough target to chase and as the second innings of the match progressed, Manik was introduced to the attack. I was sitting behind Prof Bannerjee and as soon as Manik found his rhythm I started mimicking Gilly (unlike him though I wasn’t behind the stumps but sitting behind a man who was an alert audience), at the top of my voice, unabashedly and quite frequently after every turning ball - “Bowling Shane!”.
Owing to our superlative performance, the match ended in our favor. I remember Suman running all the way from the stadium to the middle of the ground to congratulate our cricket captain, almost hugging him. The next day when Prof Bannerjee’s class was about to start, he pulled out two Dairy Milk chocolates and handed one to Suman and the other to me, stating that an encouraging audience, sometimes is the difference between a winning and a loosing team.
Legend has it that Prof KD Bannerjee and his team were working on a PhD thesis, funded by the Central government. They also had frequent mail exchange with an American University team, which was working on a similar idea. It was late 60’s and while the research was in full swing, all of a sudden without any consent from Prof Bannerjee’s team, the funding was stopped. The disheartening thing wasn’t that funding stopped all of a sudden but the news that the American team went ahead with their research and were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that. Discouraged yet unperturbed, Prof Bannerjee continued to serve Chemistry and after his retirement decided to train young guns like us, pun intended.
