I Owe Everything to My Teachers - Which Might Include You!

As a kid in kindergarten, my friends and I were curious to find out if ants could swim and if fish could survive out of water. So we got a bowl of water and started to drop ants in them. I don’t remember what our conclusions were, but it seemed like a lot of fun. Pulling a fish out of the fishbowl and dropping it on the floor to see it twitch though, was a lot more fun. Classmates started to gather around the blue fish as it flipped and flopped, trying to live. Our teacher, Mrs. Joseph, happened to come across this commotion of kindergartners and peeked in to see what was happening. Oh boy! She immediately ordered us to put the fish back in the water, and I picked it up and dropped it back in the tank. Unfortunately, the fish did not start to swim as I thought it would. It just sank to the bottom, dead.

Life Matters

Mrs. Joseph was not happy. That afternoon, we had a long session on the value of life - whether it is that of a human being or an animal. “How would you feel if someone dropped you in a vacuum, and you could not breathe?” Mrs. Joseph asked. From that time, I’ve never intentionally tried to harm a live being. Mrs. Joseph was the kindest of teachers I knew, and she had an influence in not only my life, but possibly my kids, and their kids as well, as I pass along many of these lessons to the next generation and future generations. A simple experience could have an exponential impact on the future, and often even the teacher is unaware of that impact.

We Are All Teachers

The content, the style, and tone of this article is the result of not just my English teacher Mrs. Shanthi, but many who have influenced my thinking. They are the people who had shared with me the benefit of their experiences; people whom I have not even met since they left the world long before I was born; and people whom I have not met physically, but only virtually.

Some, I’ve worked with months or years at a time like my college professors, and some fleeting like the parking lot attendant who always greeted me with a “hello” every day. Some great, some bad - but they all taught me something nevertheless.

In a way, every one of us is a teacher - helping our friends, our kids, and complete strangers.

A Yearning for Learning

Let me give you a peek into my life of teachers.

Miss. Mitchell had the most beautiful cursive handwriting I had seen. I aspired to write as neat and as well as she did. To get a “good job,” note from her, made my week! Though today most of my writing is through typing, I’m often called upon by friends to write some cursive script on posters or cards, and during those times I think of Miss. Mitchell! Who knows - perhaps my interest in elegant design could have been a result of that, which in turn has helped me in creating my YouTube videos.

Then there was my 9th-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Sundaram - who made biology so enjoyable. It’s due to her inspiration and more importantly, the drive to please her, that I ventured into medicine, but soon realized that was not for me. My focus and interest were more in math and physics, and I eventually switched to engineering.

High school is not easy

My 11th-grade physics teacher, Mrs. Venkatathri, was the most strict of all my teachers. But at the same time, she was brilliant and dedicated. When do you have any teacher invite her students to her home to work on challenging problems that we had to solve to get admission to the engineering program? No one paid her for any of this extra coaching outside of school, and in fact, my friends and I helped ourselves to sumptuous snacks while getting coached at her house. Sometimes I wonder if we visited her home more for the snacks than for the coaching!

I say all this now with a tinge of remorse because I never really expressed my gratitude to all these fabulous teachers in high school. As any teenager would attest to - I thought high school sucked. But now looking back if I had not had these teachers along the way I think school would have sucked even more.

The Learning Continues

College, on the other hand, was liberating, yet challenging because while it was easier to shine in a smaller school it was much more challenging to stand out in a larger college. CS Kandaswamy or CSK, as we used to call our mathematics professor, was amazing in his ability to remember things, including our names. Within a week of meeting my classmates and me for the first semester, he would stop taking attendance - because he could glance at the classroom and immediately know who was absent. His understanding and explaining of math was equally meticulous. How can you not get inspired by such talent? When I met him again 28 years after graduating from school, he goes, “Ha Ramesh, 3935. I remember you,” referring to my ID number in school. I can’t even remember a new person I was introduced to five minutes back - and here’s this guy! I asked him how he does it and he said, “If you have a deep interest in a topic, it’ll come to you, effortlessly.”

College is liberating

If I can think deeply and critically about a problem, that’s because of my thesis advisor Professor Sethi. He took a deep interest in his students and often questioning our work critically to poke holes in it. At times it may have been frustrating, but I’m a much better holistic, critical thinker, and researcher because of him and his attention to detail.

Professor Sethi also was generous in offering me a research assistantship, without which I would not have been able to afford my graduate studies. My research was on the artificial intelligence topic and more specifically computer vision. While it was challenging to get a job with that background at the time I graduated, now the whole world is talking about AI. It was just a matter of time before I had a chance to circle back to my roots, and now I can put my business and technology (especially AI) experience together to have a much more significant impact than I would have ever imagined.

Work is reality

Deep knowledge of technology is one thing, but being able to craft succinct and understandable stories around that, and to communicate that complexity to a business audience is an entirely different thing. My first work boss, Dr. Jordon helped me to precisely do that. He too was an AI expert and technologist, but he critiqued my business communication because his emphasis was on the understandability of the idea or concept. I owe much of my technical communication skills to him. And then there was Dr. Rao, my supervisor at IBM, who introduced me to the best text editor of all times, Emacs! I learned to use this editor very well, and with its scripting and automation to handle strings, I could make it do almost anything - and by my estimate, I must have saved two full years of my life by automating things that I have otherwise done manually.

At the first and only startup I worked at, from the founder Manoj Saxena I learned that solving the business problem is the ultimate goal of technology - and you’d be surprised how many people work on technology for technology's sake, ultimately losing sight of the real problem they are trying to solve. His amazing ability to envision the future and work with people had a profound impact on me and how I look at things.

A good friend taught me to “never do manually, what you can do automatically.” This guy, Majeed Arni, would automate everything that can and should be automated in software development and building massive systems. He would often change the structure of a database and migrate the data to the new schema in an afternoon, an exercise that I’ve seen less experienced teams of people at Fortune 500 companies struggle with for more than a year!

The Final Product - Me!

So when I write, doodle, tell stories, have a perspective, adhere to some principles or live life the way I do, it is a culmination of the teachings of and lessons learned from all my formal and informal teachers. You too may have influenced me in some way, as you might have influenced others in your life - some more than the others.

But know this - what you do to teach others has a tremendous impact on the future, whether you realize it or not.

Of course, I have missed mentioning hundreds of other people whom I have learned from and have been my teachers in one way or the other. These include my parents and my sister who had a tremendously positive influence on me, my friends, my relatives, my acquaintances, and many more.

For all my teachers, I am incredibly grateful. Happy Teachers month everybody.