PROFESSION COMPUTER SCIENTIST
HOBBY WRITER
IN AMITABHA BAGCHI’S best-selling debut novel Above Average, published in 2007, one of the characters, Karun, asks the protagonist Arindam, an IIT hopeful, whether he’s done ‘Loney’ (referring to a book on trigonometry by S.L. Loney). When Arindam says no, Karun’s friend Bagga explains, “The last few chapters are advanced. All the really hard trigonometric identities in JEE come from Loney. If you’ve done Loney then ten per cent of maths is yours.”
“Do you know how much difference ten per cent can make?” asks Karun. Arindam shakes his head.
“Ten per cent,” says Bagga, “can be the difference between computer science in Kanpur and electrical in Bombay.”
“Or mechanical in Kharagpur and metallurgy in BHU,” says Karun.
This machismo and false sense of superiority are the air that the characters in the book breathe. But Bagchi peels off the veneer to give a glimpse into the reality of life in IIT. “The battle for grades and academic achievement was just one small part of the larger war, the others being the battles to appear unconcerned, in control, well rounded, self-confident,” he writes. “Accustomed all our lives to being lauded as exceptional, we were all scared that the true measure of ourselves, our unremarkable selves, would emerge one day.”
There is a reason why Above Average feels so authentic; it is semi-autobiographical. Just like Arindam, Bagchi, too grew up in Delhi and studied computer science at IIT Delhi, before going to the US to pursue his PhD. But there are differences. While both Bagchi and Arindam have an aptitude for science and maths, Arindam’s yearning is to be the drummer of a rock band, while Bagchi’s was always to write. He has written five novels which have been shortlisted for awards like the Sahitya Akademi Award, The Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award. His book Half The Night Is Gone won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019.
When asked whether he’s a writer first or a computer scientist, he replies with a laugh, “Around 10 years ago, a colleague asked me this. One of these has to be a hobby―writing or computer science―so which one is it, he asked. I told him that as soon as I find out, he’ll be the first to know.”
Since his teens, he was into writing. But when he was growing up in the 1980s, if you were good at maths or science, then getting an IIT education was expected of you. So he drifted in that direction. At IIT Delhi, the mathematical aspects of computer science fascinated him. Maths, he says, is all about clarity, about “keeping your table clean”. “I like that about computing,” he says. “It has an elegance of thinking.” So he decided to make a career out of it, ultimately becoming a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi.
He remembers how he felt returning to his alma mater as a professor. “My first lecture was in a hall where I had taken many classes,” he says. “I had the attendance sheet in my hand and walked up to the podium. As I looked around and saw the 70 students in the hall, I felt something strong―like an ache. But then, of course, an institution like IIT doesn’t wait around for the delicate artiste to have his moment. There are exams, homework to be assigned, papers to be graded…. Life moved pretty fast and I got over it soon enough.”
Writing, of course, was always a passion. When he was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, there were some English writers whom everyone was reading―Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie…. But he first got the idea to become a writer listening to his father’s stories―about his everyday life, funny incidents and the people he met. He would go and repeat them to his neighbours. His ambition to become a writer was cemented after he read Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. “He was writing about things that I was thinking about,” says Bagchi. “I figured that if that could be called a novel, maybe even I could write one.”
There are areas where both his passions―for computer science and writing―overlap. Both, for example, require a clarity of thinking, a precision in formulation. As a professor, he finds what he can impart to his students is not information, because they can easily find that on the internet, but rather “a way of thinking and a sensation associated with certain sets of ideas”. Being a writer, he can do this well, because he knows how to operate at the level of the intangible. “In literary fiction, it’s not so much about the character, plot or narrative, but about certain emotional states,” he says.
But mostly, he does not feel the need to label himself either a computer scientist or a writer. “These divisions are a little artificial when you view them from the lens of your own self,” he says. “No person can be boxed into one thing.” Or, as Bagchi puts it in Above Average, “We aren’t what we do or what we achieve or what we acquire or what we become; we are and we always will be what we want.”