Where There is a Will: 19. Golden Semesters - Part I

 I make arrangements for my family to come. Anil introduces OmPrakash Gupta, another Grad Student (Industrial Engineering) who is doing Travel Agency on the side. I arrange for air ticket for my wife and children to reach West Lafayette via London and  Chicago.

                             
  All set for going to the US!
My Family:
Veda with daughter Sowmya and son Prabu
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I schedule for my surgery during the semester break before Fall Semester. I had hydrocele which was bothering me. I had taken medical insurance when I was at NU, on the advice of an Assistant Director for International Students Affairs at NU. Anil gave me the ride to the clinic (Home Hospital) in Lafayette.
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I got admitted to the clinic the evening of the day before the surgery. In the night, the surgeon came to meet me and explain the possible after-effects of the surgery. Then close to bedtime a nurse - a Pakistani gentleman - came to "prepare" my body for the surgery. As he started working on my left side, I told him my problem was on the right side! He confirmed that with the doctor and prepared my right side.
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As I am lying in the hospital bed, my thoughts go back home.... I had gone to the Voluntary Health Services Centre in Adyar sometime in the late 60s. I had to stay there for some blood tests. The blood had to be taken when I was in deep sleep. My experience at VHS was quite satisfactory........ I remember when my wife had to be admitted to the Kosha Hospital in Triplicane, Madras. We were referred by our family ObGyn to her friend/surgeon in the Kosha Hospital. When we went there, we had no place to sit and we were standing under the tree. As we were standing, we saw some commotion among the lady outpatients, and the lady police (a novelty in those days) beating the patients with lathi to quieten them. Then a doctor came out and shouted why we (I and my wife) are loitering. I had to tell her that we are waiting to see the doctor so and so. "Why are you shouting? You are not supposed to crowd here." I replied "Where are we to go and wait? I do not know who is shouting...." Later it turned out that she was the doctor we were referred to and she had gone and complained to our family ObGyn about my rude behaviour!
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Home Hospital is a municipal hospital run with taxpayers money and donations. The staff members were very courteous and the facilities were quite good.
                                                                                  Home Hospital, LaFayette, Indiana, circa 1969
Lafayette Home Hospital was a 270-bed medical centre in Lafayette, Indiana, United States, owned by the not-for-profit Franciscan Health, a division of Sisters of St. Francis Health Services, Inc. The facility ceased all medical services on February 25, 2010. Wikipedia
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Hydrocele, I learn, is a tropical condition/ailment and is not known here. In India, they usually perform the surgery with a local anesthesia. Here they give general anesthesia. Just before the surgery, the anaesthesiologist comes and asks my name. "We are going to make you go to sleep Mr. Muthusubramanyam". I feel a prick. I wake up in what felt like a few seconds, I am told by a nurse that the surgery was over! The doctor comes and tells me that the surgery was successful and I can return home in a few hours. Anil takes me back to my apartment.
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I am waiting at the airport, wondering how my wife is managing with the two little ones. My wife, who has not gone north of Madras, and perhaps not travelled in a train within Tamilnadu without an escort, managed very well. My daughter was travel sick throughout. My daughter spots me first! When they come out I learn that they had air tickets only to Chicago and not to W. Lafayette as I intended.  A cab driver (an Afro-American as most of them are) said he will take us. I told him we are heading to W. Lafyette, Indiana. He said he can take us! After we had gone a mile or so, he suddenly said he cannot go that far! I asked him to take us back to the greyhound bus station. He dropped us there and did not collect any money from us. We travelled in a Greyhound bus. There were just us four besides the driver (they refer to them as the conductor - they also collect the ticket, and drive the bus.) The children seemed to enjoy the bus trip. The bus has a built in sanitary toilet for passenger use, but no TV or radio as we find in Tamilnadu!
West Lafyette

Preamble:

Now starts what may be considered as Volume 2 of my story.  From  now on I will write in the past tense.  What I write about Purdue University facilities and buildings may not be true today.  These are described as they were in 1978
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Aerial View of Purdue University Campus

Fall 1978 (September 1 to December 31):

Purdue University had two sets of married student housing.  The ross-Ade apartments are smaller units on the North side of the campus.  The apartment allotted to us (me and my family) was one of two such complexes and was on the South side of the campus, very close to Purdue Airport.   Anil Bhandari  and Padmanabhan were in the Ross-Ade apartments.  On the South side there was one Satish Mohan and Edward Gonzales, both Civil Engineering graduate students.  Satish Mohan had worked in an African country and was undergoing doctoral studies on his.  He had a daughter and son about the same age as my children.  Edward was  from Guyana.  His apartment was directly across from ours.

I had requested Satish to pick us up from the airport.  But as that plan (of flying into Purdue Airport) was foiled, we arrived at the Greyhound bus station at Lafayette (a different town on the other side of Wabash river).  I called Satish to let him know that we are at the Greyhound station.  He came and took us to our apartment.

Purdue University Airport -  The Married Students’ Housing is seen in the Northeast Corner.

To start living in an apartment with running water and gas stove was a totally different experience.  Children got admission into Klondike Elementary school in grades 4 and 3 respectively.


Klondike Elementary School

There were no fees to be paid.  They could ride the bus free of charge to and from school.  They both made friends pretty soon as there were children of other married students of several nationalities.   There was a grocery store within 5 minutes walking.  There were friends who were willing to take us to other bigger grocery stores and malls to get more stuff.  Of course we had to order rice, dhal and other Indian stuff from Patel Brothers of Chicago.
 
We were living in unit 16 of building 220 seen to the West of Arnold Drive and South of Nimitz Drive

I had signed up for Transportation Systems Evaluation (TSE), Transportation Plan Methodology (TPM) and Design and Analysis of Experiments (DAE).  TSE was taught by a young professor of Australian origin.  It was basically about the economic evaluation of projects using time value of money, cost benefit analysis and such.  TPM was taught by Prof. Sinha who was promoted as the Head of Transportation Planning group.  Design and Analysis of Experiments was taught by Prof. Virgil Anderson using the textbook authored by him.  From my 10th grade on I have had the good luck of having the authors of the textbook to be teachers on several subjects.

I was given a desk space along with about a dozen transportation graduate students in a separate office space at the Civil Engineering building.  Besides Anil, I need to mention Abdahir Majid, a Tamil speaking Malaysian and Benjamin from Puerto Rico, Ikuo Harazaki from Japan and Essam Saraf from Egypt.

I bought my first car!

So far I did not feel the need for a car.  Now that my family is here I needed a car.  I bought a Chevy Malibu.  The Chevy Malibu of those days was a 6 cylinder car and used to give 8 miles to the gallon inside cities and 12 to the gallon on freeways (compared to the 4 cylinder cars of today, giving upward of 30 miles to the gallon).  The car was sold by the owner and Anil  helped me to check it out.  It was perhaps a late 60s model and I got it for $500.   I learnt how to check the fluid levels and fill them regularly.  I took the car to a local mechanic to have the brakes checked and repaired for $70.  I was taught to drive by Anil, Edward and one Abdalla from Ethiopia.  Abdalla lived in the apartment right below ours.  I had to get a learners permit by passing a written test on the driving  rules.  I learned by driving with a licensed driver accompanying me.  As winter set in soon, I could not go for the driving test and get my full license.

My first car was 60s Chevy Malibu - Like the one shown here

We had an India Students’ Association.  Anil was the president.  They used to watch Hindi movies regularly.  There was a Diwali celebration, well organized by Anil and his team.  Veda got a chance to sing. 

The Big Dipper! Columbian Park slide (Lafayette, IN).
The Big Dipper was a slide attraction in Columbian Park before it was torn down in 1998 to make way for Tropicanoe Cove.  They used to claim this as the world's biggest slide!

One Prof. Kahyap (Hydraulics) used to bring  a monk of the Ramakrishna Order every now and then and give us the benefit of SatSang.

On the whole we had a lot of fun.  There were places to visit,

I was on ¾ time assistantship.  I was given  ¼ time for my research work and ½ time for teaching Engineering Graphics, thus giving me $630/month.

Teaching Engineering Graphics was quite a fun.  There was a separate Engineering Graphics Department, headed by Prof. Botkin.  I am not sure what else was being done by this department beyond Engineering Graphics for undergraduate engineering students.  It was taught by graduate students like myself.  There were perhaps 10 or 12 sections.  There will be 1 hour recitation where the graphic concepts (geometrical drawing basically) will be explained by one like me.  Then there will be two classes on the drawing board.  The department had prepared sheets with partially done drawings.  We handout these sheets for the students to work on and complete the drawing and find the answer to the given problem.  The problems assigned will be in the form of an engineering problem to be solved graphically by completing the drawings.  I was amazed at the level of competence of the students.  I felt that was a very effective way to teach Engineering Graphics.  The prescribed textbook was one authored by Prof. Botkin.

My Services at Anna University were terminated:

When I came to the US to join Northwestern University, I assumed that I could get a doctoral degree in a matter of 1 year. Total misconception! Madras University had just become Anna University when I left. I was given 6 months leave with half salary. When I decided to continue at Purdue University for doctoral studies (especially with the enhanced assistantship) I wrote to Anna University explaining my position and asking for extension of my leave without pay. In return, I got a letter from my employer of 8 years that my services were terminated as I failed to report for duty.

Spring 1979 (January to May):

Veda and children experienced their first winter.  The weather in West Lafayette, Indiana is not much different from that in Chicago, Illinois.  During winter months, incessant snowfall will result in ice formation on the ground and the ground will be highly slippery for vehicles as well as for pedestrians.  Being University town, there was not much snow removal activity other than some individuals shoveling to clear the ground.   There is a joke about Indiana and their way of handling the winter snow.  Indiana is more an agriculture based state and did not have the financial resources to equip with enough machinery and manpower to handle the snow problem.  So they solved the problem by declaring themselves as “a southern state”!

I signed up for Highway Pavement Design, Modeling Transportation Systems (taught by my advisor Prof. Sinha) and Optimization in Industrial Engineering.

Abdahir Majid of Malaysia was with me in Pavement Design.  This course was taught by Prof. Yoder, who was also the author of the only text book on Pavement Design.  The class was big - perhaps 100 students.  Instead of taking attendance, he used a trick to make students attend his class and be attentive.  I learned that trick and successfully used while teaching my classes.  He will announce the very first day that at the beginning of one of the three class meetings there will be a short quiz.  The quiz will be either on what was covered in the previous class or what is to be covered in that class.  The grades obtained in these quizzes will form 20% of the course grade, the rest being from homework assignments, term exams and final exams.  There is no way one can get an A without doing well in these quizzes.

Eldon Joseph Yoder (1918-1983)

Optimization was taught by three professors - Ravindran, Ragsdale and Reklaitis.  It was taught using pre recorded video lectures based on a book being developed by these three.  An interesting aspect was that when Ravindran is physically present, the video will show one of the other two talking. Similarly, when one of them is in class, the video will show Ravindran or the third person!

Prof. Ravindran - Retired as a Faculty at Penn State University in 2017 (He was one of the three guides for my doctoral thesis which dealt with Goal Programming, a variation of Linear Programming)

I got my driving license!

Now that the winter weather is over I started getting ready to get my driving license.  So, I started driving with a licensed driver by my side.  Started driving in parking lots during Sundays and then driving within campus.  Most of the time Mr. Majid accompanied me as he had an international driving license.

On the day of my driving test, I was ready to go with Mr. Majid.  Benjamin visited our house just like that.  When he learned that I am going for the driving test, he wanted to go with us.  The driving test in Indiana in those days consisted of a theory test (answering a set of multiple choice questions electronically) and driving on the road.

Before starting, the examiner wanted to see proof that I was accompanied by a licensed driver. I showed Mr. Majid and he showed his international driving license.

The examiner rejected it and said he is not qualified as international driving licenses are not valid for driving in Indiana!

Fortunately I was allowed to take the test based on the fact that Benjamin, who had a valid driving license and accompanied me, and I passed.  The most critical part of the driving test was to demonstrate that you can do “parallel parking”.  When there is curbside parking, cars will be parked parallel to the curb and there may be a gap of one car between two parked cars.  It is quite a maneuver to park in that gap without hitting the other two cars.
How to Parallel Park Perfectly (Step-by-Step) - Driving Tips

From that day on and until Majid could get his driving license, I accompanied him as the licensed driver!

As Anil was graduating, he sold his Chevy Vega to Majid.

The 1971 Vega was an all-new Chevrolet 4-cylinder powered sub compact available in four 2 door models: sedan, hatchback coupe, Kammback station wagon and panel express truck. This "perky" little car was intended to replace the Corvair. Why did Chevy stop making the Vega? The Vega was a failure for Chevy because of engine issues with the aluminum die-cast engines. The valve stems were found to be faulty within the engines, allowing oil to seep through into the combustion chamber. This caused repairs that the company deemed unrepairable because of the aluminum aspects of the engine.

Vegetable Gardening at Purdue:

The University gave a plot for each family of resident students who want to do vegetable gardening.  Veda was interested and we got one plot and did vegetable gardening.  She also learnt to can vegetables and was busy doing that.  It was very difficult to get good vegetables in the local markets those days - it may still be so in such University Towns.
Kim Hardaway, Purdue Village residential life manager,

stands by the Purdue Village Gardens. The 30-by-30-foot

garden plots are available for rental to anyone in the

community -- with or without connections to

Purdue. (Purdue University photo/Andrew Hancock)