With ❤ from Acadly — a tool for class participation and communication. With instant and automatic mesh network based attendance and a LaTeX-ready messenger.

Part 1/4 — The Book

In 2003 I inherited — as I did throughout my childhood — a pile of used textbooks from my elder sister. I was about to start grade 11, two years from finishing school and starting college. Along with hundreds of thousands of students in India I was to appear for the IITJEE, the famously difficult exam you need to take to get into one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (or IITs), India’s premier science and engineering colleges.

Scott Adams‘ adorable Asok happens to be an IIT graduate. As does Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google.

What was different about this pile as compared to the previous decade or so was that it was full of “extra” reading. I now had at least five textbooks for each of Chemistry, Physics and Math. My sister gave me the low-down on what I had to do to prepare for Physics.

“The school textbook is very basic. Resnick & Halliday is great, but it doesn’t use the metric system. I.E. Irodov is too complex, even by IITJEE standards. But whatever you do, do read H.C. Verma.”

And so I did. As have millions of others over the years, due almost entirely to word-of-mouth recommendations. In India, private tutoring or ‘coaching’ for IITJEE and other engineering examinations is an industry worth billions of dollars. Despite the consequent abundance of reference texts and narrow-minded partisan interests that govern what content is pushed upon a populace desperate to crack the exam, H.C. Verma’s book is often the first recommendation from a teacher to a student. Concepts of Physics is among India’s, and indeed the world’s most read textbooks for high school Physics.

It took Professor H.C. Verma 8 years to write the two volumes that made him a household name. And now they seem to pop up in places where you least expect them to. You might find a copy lying next to the monthly edition of Vogue at a railway station bookstore, or even in the odd mainstream Bollywood movie.

A still from Main Hoon Na, an Indian movie

A year before the IITJEE exam, I started studying under India’s other great high school Physics textbook author — Mr. D.C. Pandey — whose own series of textbooks are the closest thing to competition for Concepts of Physics… although I doubt either of them cares about such trifles. Tongue firmly in cheek, Mr. D.C. Pandey once told us that Concepts of Physics was “the second best Physics textbook in the world”.

For the uninitiated, here’s a marker of the textbooks’ enduring quality and stunning popularity.

Number of years since the first edition was published: 25

Rank on Amazon’s list of best-selling books in India (as on July 20, 2017): 25

Better than any other textbook across subjects, levels and languages, even though sales at small stores far outstrip those through online retail. Concepts of Physics is more than just a textbook in India. Some call it the Gita, Bible or Quran of Physics. Others call the Gita, Bible and Quran the Concepts of Physics of their religions.

Part 2/4 — The Man

Two years went by. I did well in the IITJEE and got selected to the bachelor’s program in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. However, I was unaware of one tiny detail about my alma mater until someone asked me a month before I left for college -

“Doesn’t H.C. Verma teach at IIT Kanpur too?”

I hadn’t thought it possible, but the excitement of going to IIT Kanpur stepped up a notch. Towards the end of the first semester, registration for term 2 began and the news spread among the batch like wildfire: Professor Harish Chandra Verma was going to teach us PHY103, one of the foundational courses for the first year of the Engineering and Sciences curriculum.

As we walked to the first PHY103 lecture, you could feel the excitement build up. All 500 of us had known Professor Verma for two years. Like me, most others had read his book. Many felt they owed him a debt of gratitude. He was an old friend of his new students… surely, he must know it too?

He walked in to class to thunderous applause, and simply let out a chuckle. You could see he’d come to expect this from his experience over the years.

Was there anything remarkable about his lectures?

You bet.

For at least a quarter of his lectures during the course, Professor Verma brought to the classroom something from his (as we soon realized, massive) collection of experiments. These were simple experiments that he had devised to demonstrate the concepts that he would teach.

He has created over 600 such experiments. Yes, you read that right.

He says it may be 700 too. He doesn’t keep count anymore.

He recently concluded a MOOC titled Learning Physics Through Simple Experiments. It features some of his famous experiments, many of which he used in his own courses over the years. The MOOC received more than 22,000 comments from students and teachers, both of whom were attendees. Though he insists he is an “old school professor”, he has evolved with the times better than most.

And then earlier this month, Professor Verma hung up his boots after a distinguished teaching career of 38 years.

Unsurprisingly, adulation poured in from all quarters upon this announcement but fittingly, I got the news through a text from my father, one of the many parents who have made the trip to the bookstore to buy Concepts of Physics for their children. After all these years, the enormity of the H.C. Verma name wasn’t lost on him either.

As I called up Professor Verma about this interview and said “Sir, I’m very excited about this”, I heard from the other side of phone the same chuckle from 11 years ago. It felt like he hadn’t changed much, and for a moment I was the same first-year college kid too.

Still star-struck, still in awe, and with an even better sense of what Professor Verma has achieved over the decades.

We spoke to him about his textbook, his experiments, his favourite classroom memories, active learning, edtech, his philosophy of teaching and what students preparing for IITJEE should focus on. Here’s the conversation.

Part 3/4 — The Interview

Professor H.C. Verma headed to the picturesque Himalayas after leaving IIT Kanpur. He spoke to us on phone from Nathuakhan, a little-known rustic town in the Nainital district.

Us: Congratulations on a fantastic and distinguished career, sir. It has been an inspiring journey.

Professor H.C. Verma: Thank you for the kind words. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten such affection from so many young Indians.

Us: To start with, we’re sure a lot of people would love to understand how you come up with all those experiments. It is quite a collection!

Professor H.C. Verma: Most of these experiments do not need anything to be purchased from a science store. As you’ve seen, on most occasions I use common things that we see in our daily lives.

If one develops a knack for connecting textbook Physics with real life, you have ample things in nature to make experiments. All of nature is a laboratory. You just need to choose what to show — the experiments are already there!

For example, if you want to teach refraction from a curved surface, you don’t need lenses at all. All you need is a glass of water! If you fill it lower than the brim, it’s a concave surface. If you fill it up completely, the surface becomes convex. And if you put that glass of water on a piece of printed paper and look at it from the top, you can observe refraction from a concave or a convex surface, which is a fairly advanced topic in school physics.

Us: Let’s talk about your two “Concepts of Physics” textbooks, considered by many to be the best textbook for high school physics, especially in India. What are some of your core principles behind authoring a textbook? In what ways was it intended to be different compared to the other texts out there?

Professor H.C. Verma: As a Bachelor’s student at Patna Science College and then later during my Master’s program at IIT Kanpur, I always found Physics to be very beautiful and I realized then that textbooks are very important. In those days, I used to read a lot of books from our central library and pick up books from stores. So an affection for textbooks and appreciation of their importance was very much there since those days.

That’s when I understood the first core principle of textbooks: a textbook needs to be authentic, lucid, readable, thorough, error-free and there needs to be a continuity or flow between different chapters. The whole book should be one text and not a collection of separate chapters.

The other core principle that I realized only after I started teaching at Patna Science College in the early 80s, was that Physics has to be presented in a package that is relatable to a student.

Therefore, I had in mind the average Indian student… who is neither from Bombay and Delhi, nor from a remote rural village. A small city would be perhaps be closer to the average, where people have seen both urban and rural lifestyles.

And that’s how you have all those monkeys and horses and jhumkas (earrings) and names of actual Indian rivers like Alaknanda.

Monkeys are frequent protagonists in Concepts of Physics

Us: We want to pick your brain on our field of work — edtech for face-to-face (and not online) teaching. What should be the core objective of using educational technologies from the perspective of professors? Has the era of smartphones changed anything as far as this is concerned?

Professor H.C. Verma: (Laughs) As you’ve pointed out, these are days of very fast-paced change and it’s very difficult to predict where we’re going. I’m an older-generation teacher trying to pick up the new ways also, so I may not be the right person to answer your question.

But my feeling about this is that every student is unique, and our teaching methods do not personalize the delivery of new information. In a classroom, we’re often teaching everyone the same stuff without regard for how students may be receiving it. We’re tempted to assume — incorrectly — that everyone would learn in the same way.

So when technology is used in face-to-face teaching for classroom interactivity, you’re immediately able to teach everyone in a different manner. Different students interact with your activities in their unique ways and the teacher is supposed to respond to that. And that can work! In fact, I went to the Acadly page yesterday and registered myself. I hope tools like Acadly will help achieve this purpose.

Us: We hope so too, and it’s exciting to have you on board! On a lighter note, what’s your favourite memory from in all these years? Any particular incidents that have left a mark?

Professor Verma: (Laughs) Let me tell you the story of my first lecture back in 1979. I joined Patna Science College before the summer vacations. I met the Head of the Department before the break and he assigned the course on Special Theory of Relativity for the B.Sc. Honours class to me. I was really very excited.

I spent the summer at IIT Kanpur and I was writing my Ph.D. thesis at the time. Throughout the summers, I prepared thoroughly for the Relativity course using all the books I could find in the library. I also started giving mock classes to my friends, answer their questions and that required more than a few visits to the canteen where I usually ended up footing the bill for everyone’s tea or coffee.

After the vacation when I came back to Patna and met the HOD, he asked me:

How’s your preparation for the class of Quantum Mechanics to B.Sc. Honours?

And I was shocked! I told him he had asked me to prepare for Special Relativity, not Quantum Mechanics, and that I’d worked very hard for the course!

To that he replied that the change was made during the summer vacations and Special Relativity had been assigned to a senior professor. So I had to take Quantum Mechanics instead, and the first lecture was just two days later.

You can imagine what happened then. I had to replicate two months of effort within two days. There was no other option, so I spent all 48 hours preparing for the first lecture. I was very shaky and afraid, but when I entered the classroom and put chalk on blackboard, somehow something happened and all those fears simply vanished.

I delivered that first lecture very confidently. It was a beautiful lecture and in fact, the entire course went very well. And that finally inspired me to write my book on Quantum Physics!

Us: Back in 2006, we remember you once pointed someone out in class for not asking “the right question”. It was one of the things that stuck with us through all these years. Never had a chance to ask you this then, but what makes questions “right” and how can one encourage students to ask them?

Professor Verma: A decade has passed since 2006 and I no longer remember the context in which I may have said this. But over the years I have changed my views because students generally do not ask questions. Our schools discourage them from doing so anyway, and that is very harmful.

My view now is that every question is a good question. If a student is asking something, they are already a hundred steps ahead of the others.

Answers can be wrong or stupid, but questions cannot be. And what’s often wrong about answers is not that the information supplied is incorrect, but that it may not address the source of the confusion.

However, in this same context, I’d like to quote this statement Heisenberg once made when all of Quantum Mechanics was struggling as a field. It was then that Heisenberg said something to the effect that we need to ask the right questions about nature. And I too believe that we get into trouble often as physicists — and in other domains in life — when we ask the wrong questions!

The Heisenberg quote Professor H.C. Verma thinks is the essence of all Physics

Us: There are millions in India right now, following ‘Concepts of Physics’ and vying for a seat in the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. What would be your message for them?

Professor Verma: Often students think too much about the exam. You’ve been through the process yourself and you know it well. Students stop enjoying their learning because of the stress they go through thinking about what’s going to happen during those three hours.

My message is: forget about examinations and enjoy studying. Develop your mathematical skills, your physics skills, your skill to connect two different things and look at the common principle guiding them. Doing well in the examination is simply a by-product of this process.

Us: Thanks for the wonderful message and all your time, Sir. It was an absolute pleasure to speak to you after all these years!