Whatever Good Things I may have done in my life, I cannot claim, “I did it!’

                                         Whatever Good Things I may have done in my life, I cannot claim, “I did it!’ 

For the uninitiated (possibly including some denizens of the far flung Mumbai Metropolitan Area that soon could kind of gulp down Pune), Dadar TT is Dadar Tram Terminus. I have walked around in that area circa 1975 and I cannot recall a traffic roundabout there then and definitely there was no flyover there. Yet, after seeing a photo of that location in today’s The Hindu (2025-08-19) (the scanned image is given below),

I could not resist myself a journey back in time to that location. And I could not get back that far into the past (the old fogey in me wrote that line). But, the picture below could be from about the last two decades of the 20th century. It is hard for me to believe the photo.

Dadar TT was never so desolate. Oh, now I realize why it looks almost totally abandoned. Rain is coming down hard. Yes, there is water all around the roundabout at grade (a car appears half submerged! On the far side another car is sloshing its way through). You may also notice water splashing from under the tyres of the two wheelers on the right going lane (though I don’t notice them from under the car tyres on the left going lane). Some mystery, maybe God playing games with me; or could be good drainage on the near side and not so good, on the far!

I lost my way in this narrative. Yes, rain in Mumbai does that to people, particularly its non-natives. In that rain, in 1975, along with my classmate I was fixing the coordinates of a number of pile groups for the horizontal silo for the Fertilizer Corporation of India (FCI) with a moving horizontal formwork (the first time it was being employed in India) in Chembur. The contractor was ECC, an arm of the engineering major Larsen and Toubro, HQ Mumbai. I could not see the markings on the staff that my partner was holding quite a distance away, to calculate and fix the levels. That day was wasted and I took the BEST bus route 8 Ltd. to get to Sion East, all drenched.

That stint in the field made me realize how unfit I was to be a field engineer. This was my summer training, and at the end of which I saw the then newly released Hindi language film Jai Santoshi Maa on the day before my departure. I saw that as the sign that I should confine myself to office jobs (design), though posting at construction site is far better paying.

FCI Chembur site was my pipal tree in Bodh Gaya! I confirmed it when I, along with a different classmate, tried my hand at designing a swimming pool and also a gantry girder. Total failures both. Yet, I got my degree!  This was at IIT Madras. I was determined to do my M.Tech and my professor advised that I should pursue my M.Tech not at IITM but try at other places. That is how I landed at (in reality, my train, a passenger train between Jhansi and Lucknow, huffed and puffed before disgorging me; trains do not land) Kanpur station.. 

The next two years were heaven! I took only theoretical (quite severely mathematical) courses such as Theory of Elasticity, Theory of Plasticity (more mechanical engineering and metallurgy oriented but offered by the Department of Civil Engineering), Matrix Analysis of Structures, Finite Element Analysis (which I loved and, and unlike others in my class, scored high without any special effort)  and get this, Mathematical Methods in Engineering.

I went to the US for my Ph.D, I was burned out and I was too dumb to realize that for 10 years. Then, it is a long story, got my Ph.D degree and came back to India jobless. I would say only one more thing. During my Ph.D work, I was fixated on (Civil) Structural Analysis and Finite Element Method and read and thought about them (including their history) intensely and incessantly. The training I put my mind through in these wanderings helped me perform in my job when I returned to India, in three different types of jobs. The last of the three was in teaching.

In my retired life, I think back on that last stint−for just short of 10 years−and realize I could not have done that as well as I did without those intense efforts to understand the subjects during my Ph.D. 

Yes, I took help from my family (I also had an adopted family!, if you can figure that one out), my friends, my colleagues and many others. My career, then, was the result of wide collaborations. 

Then, I cannot, in good conscience, claim, “I did it!” Who is that “I”?

Raghuram Ekambaram