Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

To fulfill the requirement of the PhD program at the Indian Institute of Science, I have to attend two lectures. There are some differences to German lectures. Not regarding the taught topic, but the social environment. For foreigners being the first time in India, this might be a little bit surprising.

The students pay much more respect to the lecturing professor compared to the teaching lecturer in Germany. If the professor enters the lecture hall, all students get up and stand till the professor gives a hand sign to sit down. This reminds me to my old school days. We had to do the same and after a “Good morning” from the teacher, we had to reply in a chorus “Good morning, Mrs/Mr .” More or less the chorus was stretched depending on the level of tiredness on that particular day. Something like “Goooooooooooooooooooooood mooorrrrrnnniiiiing, Mrs/Mr Kasurzeeeeeffsskiiiiiiii”. The more we mumbled, the better it sounded.

In Germany usually nobody cares, if the students leave in the middle of the lecture or come too late to class. If an Indian student is too late, he stops at the door and does not enter the lecture hall. He looks at the professor and waits till he gets a sign to be permitted to enter the room.

Usually Indian students are very eager and if the professor gets stuck in his flow of teaching, they try to finish the sentence he started. Usually this behavior gets less, if the topic gets more difficult and is not so easy to understand. Some professors might take this as an indicator, if the students can still follow.

As the time passes by and the new students get used to the environment, the behavior of showing so much respect decreases a bit. Nevertheless it is still there and the students keep maintaining some kind of hierarchy (e.g. ending each question or doubt addressed to the teacher with “Sir”).

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Finally I found some time to update my wordpress installation from something 2.0.10 (or so, yeah I know, very old) to the most current stable one. The update went very smoothly and just took round about 30 minutes. Actually I expected much more difficulties since I alternated many things in my wordpress installation so that it looks nicely on most browsers.

I also changed the theme to a very simple one. Todays screens of e.g. laptops are usually wider and do not follow the 4:3 screen format. Therefore the page design should also be wider to accomondate more information on the screen and not to overstrain the mouse wheel of the visitor.

The email encryption also works without any change.

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