Dr. Anantaraman of IIT, Madras always Noticed Pythagoras!

At IIT Madras 1981-1983, we had a great teacher Dr. V. Anantaraman for Organizational Behaviour. He was tall, dark, on fatter side, shirt always tucked in and had booming voice. Commanding presence in a classroom. 

He was an alumnus of Cornell University, US. (some other notable teachers then were - R K Gupta, L V L N Sarma, Dipak Chaudhuri, R Rajagopalan, T T Narendran, Rita Ghatak, Smt. S Kalpakam)

He made every lecture very interesting by illustrating all the theory with examples from real life , of which there was no shortage because he had huge experience as a consultant and sharp observational skills of life around him. 

 For instance he was helping then Madras local bus transport company called PTC and had helped them make many changes to their organizational structure successfully. He also was involved with a few student activities and was very popular among students. Therefore, illustrations for the theory also came from the campus.

Sprawling and beautiful  IIT Madras campus then had every major department named as a block and housed in a separate building. Typically students, faculty and other staff during a day walked or cycled around from one block to another for various reasons. 

The formal paths from one block to another were marked using tiles etc but people almost always took shorter paths, not using formal, marked roads in the process.  Anantaraman gave that example to us while teaching OB. 

This cartoon reminded me of my Professor...Anantaraman would be smilingly tell us - I-told-you...he always anticipated Pythagoras

artist: Not known to me