I met Prof. V.V Katti; who had been my mentor and guide during my student days; he used to guide me, motivate me, push me and more importantly excite me with his passionate lectures in Heat Transfer, Mechanical Vibrations and more.
He is now HOD of mechanical engineering department after his PhD from IIT Mumbai.
He passionately showed the new department, labs, computer section and about his dream of building a world class teaching/research facility. What really impressed me are;
1) Vision and Mission: He has defined a vision and mission statement to mechanical department and drives everyone around this. This is such a powerful thought. Imagine running an academic institute with a corporate rigor!! Excellent thing.
2) Building Research Facility: He passionately, tirelessly explained to me about his efforts to push his fellow colleagues to think and drive themselves to build research facilities and think outside the box for innovative ideas. He is not stopping there, but leading by example by building nice heat transfer lab; where it seems he is inspired by many simple tools like stereo, used lathe machine etc. His eyes sparked when he proudly said, ‘each and every instrument of this lab is designed, manufactured and calibrated in our college’. This is such an inspiring thing!!
3) Attention to students: During the course of four hours I spent with him, he was listening to many students, solved many issues related to couple of students and motivated couple of them to give their best and gave instructions to couple of guys. What amazed me is his ever expanding time!!
4) Hard work: He juggles between his research, publishing papers, guiding his masters/doctorate students, managing the department, being busy in academics, building a world class research lab and mentoring/guiding his fellow professors. And yes, he also mentors his son, who is an engineering student by himself. This is simply an excellent stuff and made me wonder how he manages his time and still has that everlasting energy.
5) His Dream: He has such a big dream for his students; he wants to integrate industry with academics; bring in more industry focus to students. I could see a clear dream in his eyes about his students to do well in life; have successful careers and establish themselves in industry and make a little dent to universe! He says ‘I want to change the direction of thinking of this department’. Such a powerful thought, it was just great thing for me.
Personally; the time I spent was a huge learning experience, I got inspired, motivated and amazed by one individual’s dream to change the world and his efforts towards this. His simple truth of life of keep working for the fun he is getting out of it and a clear self-driving force behind him.
Thanks you sir; for motivating me (One more time after 17 years); inspiring me by sheer size of your dreams and your passion to build this institute; for being such a simple yet positive personality to guide many students and above all having a clear focus towards social causes. I will be fortunate to contribute anything towards fulfillment of your dream.
After this trip, I have one song on my iPod which is going repeatedly, ‘Give me some sunshine, give me some rain, give me another chance I want to grow once again”
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