India Abroad - April 29, 2011

Teaching your children well
Vijay Vazirani, who has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for esearch intoalgorithmic problems
in economics and game theory, is an
extremely popular teacher at Georgia
Tech. At least 70 students fight to be in
his class, capped at 30. A student publi-
cation recently wrote that many students
turn up a week after the classes started,
hoping some would drop out. When
asked if they have registered to be in his
class, they often say they are there just to
see how the class goes.
Students have often written to the
school officials to say how much of criti-
cal thinking they were asked to do in his
classes.
Vazirani says he does not like the old
ways of teaching, taking most of the class
time for drawing diagrams and making
PowerPoint presentations. Instead, he
introduces a concept, discusses it for 30
minutes and spends over an hour getting
the students to solve the problem.
“One of the best rewards in this profes-
sion is what the students appreciate in
your class,” he says. There is always a con-
versational atmosphere in the class
where students take a team-based solving
approach, he adds. Students have written
that the skills he encourages are very use-
ful to them to be on the top and find good
jobs even as many jobs continue to be
outsourced away from America.
‘I believe it is classes like Dr Vazirani’s
… that can reverse the trend,’ wrote a for-
mer student, Michael Qin. ‘(The course) is
the key to ensuring that the best students
are not subjugated to slower paced (cur-
ricula).’
Patrick Dillon, another undergrad stu-
dent, noted that Vazirani ‘allowed the
students to speak their minds as he pro-
vided slight nudges and insights to the
key aspects of the problems.’
At the surface, these problems seem to
be superficial, a student’s article on
Vazirani in the school newspaper said. It
added: ‘However, as the students solve
the problem, they discover gilded treas-
ure troves, where all sorts of seemingly
unrelated concepts suddenly coalesce.’ By
building bridges across fields, the article
said, ‘Dr Vazirani is able to bring out the
true beauty of mathematics and convey
this message to the students.’
Vazirani received his bachelor’s degree
from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1979 and his PhD from the
University of California, Berkeley in
1983. He is a professor of computer sci-
ence at Georgia Tech. He taught algo-
rithms at the undergraduate level as a
professor of computer science at the
Indian Institute of Technology-New
Delhi during the early to mid-nineties.
His research career has been centered
around the design of algorithms, togeth-

;Page A19
Vijay Vazirani is an extremely popular teacher at Georgia Tech

She is no swan. She is a fighter

;Page A13
Kolkata, where she critiqued, through performance, vio-
lence against women.
‘I was also disturbed,’ she wrote in her fellowship state-
ment, ‘by the “market” mentality that increasingly came to
dominate the ways in which classical dance was being
learned and performed on the concert stage. Through these
questions, I arrived at the beginning of my journey as cho-
reographer I also learned that my inspiration lay, not in
dancing about divinities, or mythological characters, but
about everyday people and their daily struggles.’
In one of her earliest successes, Unheard Testimonies
(1998), she was able to portray the story of a working-class
woman gang-raped by policemen in Hyderabad.
Dance critic Marianne Comb has noted that some people
who have a traditionalist approach may find Chatterjea’s
work surprising.
Some others are surprised that Chatterjea has been able
to build an innovative dance theater in the Midwest, and
often explore Indian dance themes.
“There is quite a big liberal community in the Midwest
and I found it natural to build a theater here,” she said. Her
work has been supported by the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Asian Arts Initiative, the Minnesota State Arts
Board, and the McKnight, Jerome, and Bush foundations.
She has been taking her work to countries in Asia includ-
ing Indonesia and Japan, the United Kingdom and
Germany, and cities across America for more than 15 years.
Her Unable to Remember Roop Kanwar, which premiered
at the Museum of Natural History Auditorium in New York
14 years ago, received much critical acclaim. It was about
the Kanwar, who was burned to death on her husband’s
funeral pyre in Rajasthan.
Chatterjea’s current production is part of a quartet deal-
ing with how women experience and resist violence.
“We are dealing with the exploitation of land, gold, oil
and water, and how this affects the lives of women,” she
explained. “I have women in our theater who tell us about
the devastation caused by gold mining in a number of
countries including Congo and Malaysia and how it has
affected the farmers, and the women, who as mothers,
daughters and sisters, have to bear the burden.”
The women associated with the ADT, she said, are not
mere dancers. They participate in antiviolence, antiracist,
antisexist and antihomophobic workshops, and they also
work in health and nutrition for women, she said.
“She’s not just teaching us to dance,” said Preston
Stockert, who has been with Chatterjea’s dance school for
about a year. “She’s actually teaching us to care about some-
thing else. Not just further ourselves, but to further our
artistry so we can make an impact on someone else or
something else.”
— Arthur J Pais

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