A Arriving at a hot and then-arid IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) campus in the summer of 1966, I was awestruck by its arresting architecture: exposed brick-work buildings, with large, circular holes, resembling ruins from the past or half-finished construction. These were student dorms, then used for faculty offices, administrative staff, student mess, kitchen and much else. We had the privilege of staying in faculty residences, before moving to the dorms in 1967.
Classrooms were in more prosaic temporary sheds, but what went on in them was, for me and most others, revolutionary. Schooled in the conventional classroom dictum of “keep your ears and eyes open, but mouth tightly shut”, the concept of discussions, with students speaking more than teachers, was alien. This essence of the IIM-A case study pedagogic method also entailed grades…
