Never judge a book by its cover !

I have this bad habit of judging people - no matter how hard I try to change, I find it difficult. The "real me" pops out once in a while.

I want to take all of you to the year 1994. I was doing my Engineering first year at GCT Coimbatore. We had a dozen odd subjects to study during the first year - but, the most dreadful one was Engineering Drawing (ED). The terms cuboids, trapeziums, quadrilaterals created night mares not only for me, but for the entire class. Until we joined college, all that we knew was "A pencil is just a pencil". But, after the ED class, we learned that there are different types of pencils such as HB, B, 2B, F etc., based on the grade of the lead.

To add salt to the wound, we had a professor for the ED class, who was as strict as an army major. He can't expect anything that is short of perfection from the students. In fact, he continuously said "Small things make perfection, but perfection isn't a small thing". Let us call him as Mr. Victor to keep his identity anonymous.

One day, during our ED class, one of my classmates didn't use the right pencil for the drawing. He got her drawing sheet, tore it into 8 pieces and threw it into the trash bin. Another day, another classmate didn't have the right dimensions and margins in the drawing sheet. He got the sheet and dropped it from the 3rd floor to the ground floor. All of us at that time thought "Had he been in Hitler's army, he would've grown to the ranks of  Army General in no time". He was so brutal.

Almost all students made a visit to the Vinayagar temple near GCT campus, on the day of the ED exam, to successfully clear the exam. Thankfully, all of us cleared the exam and moved to our 2nd year. And most importantly, we didn't have to deal with Engineering Drawing and Mr. Victor anymore, because we had chosen "Computer Science" as the major.

Fast forward to December 2017. We had our 19th year reunion at the GCT campus. We invited many of our staff members to join us for the reunion. The first person to show up for the reunion was Mr. Victor. He had grown old and he told us that he retired from GCT a few years back. To our surprise, he was one among the 3 staff members who showed up for our re-union. When he spoke to us during the reunion, Mr. Victor said "Dear students, I know I was very hard with you in 1994. But, you know what... yours was simply the BEST batch that I ever dealt with. I never saw the kind of commitment / sincerity that your batch exhibited. Your Engineering drawings are simply the BEST that I've seen in my entire career. I still have some of your drawings with me. I'm very glad to see many of you nearly after 20 years". I thought "He is trying to flatter us and this may be the standard talk track that he has for ALL reunion events". After the meeting, he told us that "He can share with us some of the drawings that he has, if we want". I was really curious to see, if he is really preserving those drawings for 20 years. We asked him to mail it to us.

A week ago, my friend received a courier. When he opened the courier, he was shocked. Mr. Victor had mailed one of the 20 year old drawings from a fellow classmate to him. This is the same girl whose paper was torn into pieces 20 years back. My friend took a picture of that and shared it in our Whatsapp group. I couldn't control my tears when I saw that picture.

Mr. Victor was so hard with us during our college days because, he was trying hard to bring the best out of us. Not only that, whatever he told us during the reunion was 200% true ! For a person who deals with several 1000s of students over a 20 years period, to maintain a drawing from a student for 20 years is unbelievable. Our educational institutions still have such sincere professors, who wanted to bring the best out of their students.

I felt so sorry for having judged Mr. Victor in a bad light. I learned a very important lesson from this experience "Never judge a book by its cover". Long live Mr. Victor and his values.