Coaching Rohit

Pix: With Siddhu, my sister Rajini and her husband Naresh
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I have only one comment on my major 'vision' post !
I'm quite surprised. Even the regular commenters gave it a miss. If you think the vision is flawed, say so. I can take it !

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As I mentioned, the major reason for going to Vizag was to spend some time with my nephew helping him with his preparation for the engineering entrances. We mainly concentrated on Organic Chemistry and Permutations and Combinations and Probability, as he had missed these chapters at school due to illness. Most of the time we spent on Organic but nevertheless progress was quite slow, we only covered Alkanes, Alkenes and Alkynes. It was quite fun for me to get re-aquainted with a lot of the old stuff. Does anyone remember the Corey House alkane synthesis, Markovnikov (and anti-markovnikov) addition across a double bond and triple bond, IUPAC nomenclature ( 2,3 dimethyl buteane), benzene resonance structures.... It reminded me that (atleast part) of fashioning a new career for myself could involve working with high school and engineering stuff, as I enjoy the material. One of the things that I have on my agenda which I haven't done is meeting Sridhar Subramaniam from our Coromandel colony in Vizag who runs a engineering coaching center in Bangalore and is setting up a school too.
Getting back to topic, some of the material was quite difficult for me, the level of the coaching seems to have gone up and people do a lot of reaction mechanisms and stuff. Also Chemistry is a lot of mugging up and my nephew kept asking me 'why is this so?' and I felt bad to say: 'forget about that, just mug it'.
I could see that part of Rohit's problem was being able to plan and manage time, and being able to estimate realistically so that you don't get disappointed when you can't carry out what you estimated. I would've been as bad as he at that age and its only much later that I learnt a little (and a lot more to learn). I think there's a lot of inefficient studying happening among the high-school students and they would gain a lot from training in time manangement and planning.
Its not all fun being a coacher I found. You have to try to understand and adjust to your coachees level and aptitude/temperment. Occasionally you may get frustrated and show it which might actually get you results or might just discourage the person.

Siddhu, my other nephew (here and here) was also there, so I hung out with him a little. He enjoys shopping and is good at at, so I went shopping with him and bought me a cargo pants and a Lotto brand flip-flop.

Sajini -- to answer your comment, yes Rohit is quite thin due to two bouts of illnesses. But generally seems quite healthy and not sickly. He's grown tall, taller than Siddhu now.

I had my trusty New Balances stolen when I left them outside my parents' apartment ! These of Honolulu Marathon fame. Oh well, one mustn't get sentimental and attached. Someone is is hopefully gaining some value from them.

I had an interesting talk session with Mr. Vishweswara Rao who was a colleague of my dad at Coromandel. He now runs a small chemical plant. He's a very smart and energitic person. They had a lot of trouble selling what they made (diammomium phosphate, a fertilizer) because the market had fallen out of the business. They were in pretty bad shape but the man was able to change tracks midway to start making something else (calcium phospate derivate if I remember right) which is used in the material that is fed to domestic animals for which there is a much better market. He also branched out into engineering consultancy and has some patents to his name and is setting up a plant for somebody in Egypt (!). He felt that biodiesel was a risky area, and that another related area (generating power by burning or processing biomass) was much more interesting and that several commercially viable technologies were coming online. He also has a (rare) ability to view things at a high conceptual level and was commenting on the folly of a civilization that uses a 100 tonne car to transport a 100 Kg man, the energy cycle (does the total energy that go into making a solar cell exceed the energy output of the cell over its working life ?), stuff like that. He has travelled a bit and recommended the Dead Sea as a particularly striking place. I came away from the discussion with my head buzzing :-). Next time I go to Vizag I plan to visit their plant.

The other highlight of the trip was spending two days at Cheepurapalli near Vizianagaram, about 3 hours by bus from Vizag, with a social worker, P.D. Kameswara Rao. Hope to cover that in another post