22-year-old becomes youngest IIT teacher

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14 Jul 2010, 0819 hrs IST,TNN

Tathagat Avatar Tulsi

MUMBAI: IITians often liken the generation gap between themselves and their teachers to that between MS-DOS and Windows. This semester, however, the students on the Powai campus can look forward to someone much closer to their age: a physics teaher who has just entered his 20s.  At 22, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, who has never studied in a classroom, plans to ask his students how they would want to be taught. "I have never taught in a class. But I believe I can come down to the level of a student and help them understand the subject," he said.  Having completed high school when he was nine, his graduation in science at 10, an MSc in Physics at 12, and his PhD in Quantum Computing from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, at 21, Tulsi says he is going to write to the Limca Book of Records to include him as the youngest faculty member in the country.  Having achieved a lot pretty early in life, Tulsi may seem like a young man in hurry, but he has set a huge task for himself—to come up with an important scientific discovery, which will probably lead him to his ultimate dream: to own that shining piece of gold with Alfred Nobel on the obverse.  The "wonder boy", who suffered humiliation in August 2001 when a delegation of scientists taken by the department of science & technology to Lindau in Germany for an interaction with Nobel laureates, suggested that he was not a thinker, but a "fake prodigy" who had "mugged up" theories. Putting that behind, the Patna boy will stay on the Powai campus in the faculty quarters and work towards achieving that dream.  That "not-so-distant" goal is probably why Tulsi chose teaching over a vocation. "I want to pursue my research and at IIT-B, I will have the leisure to continue my research and one day set up a lab focused on quantum computation in our country." Going to foreign shores is currently not on Tulsi's plans. He chose the Powai college over Waterloo University, Canada, and the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER), Bhopal, both of which had also offered him teaching jobs.