End of an Era

Dr PC Shejwalkar (1929-2021)

 

With Dr Shejwalkar's departure on 8 January 2021 - just a week before he would have completed 92 -, an era has ended.

My association with him goes back to 1967, when I entered BMCC as a student.  He was the Vice Principal then and had introduced an idea of a Thinkers Club, in which students would give a talk on a subject of their choice and the club would meet once a week.  I made my first speech there. It was managed by the students.  It went on well for some time before the Exam Fever caught on and then it couldn't be revived.  But the impression on my mind was that here was a teacher who was interested in doing something outside the curricula, he was on the move and would trust and support the students.  And importantly, he was always smiling.

A little over a decade later, I returned to Pune having worked in the textile industry in Mumbai after my MMS from Bajaj.  Dr MD Apte suggested my name to Dr Shejwalkar as a visiting faculty.  I was only 28 then, but he trusted me and thus began my teaching career.  Sometimes he would call me to accompany him on long walks and explain to me very many things associated with academic life.  These used to be told through anecdotes and tales mostly experienced first hand by him.  After months of such an informal orientation, he asked me to consider joining a full time position.  I was enjoying doing industry work, especially project management.  It took quite some time for me to make up my mind and I finally joined IMDR in Dec 1982.  

I enjoyed teaching because there was total academic freedom and I liked conceptual work.  Dr Shejwalkar would informally discuss things at times and would ask me to pay attention to both administrative and academic aspects of work in an institution.  People who worked closely with him have always remarked about several of his exemplary work habits.  I must mention two of those here.  He was extremely prompt in responding to mails, invitations and calls.  No letter ever remained unanswered on his desk.  No article or book sent to him by anyone and especially a first time author, remained unacknowledged.  It was no wonder that whatever he undertook moved at great speed to completion, besides enlarging his social circle.  His responsiveness earned him many admirers and collaborators.

 The second of his exemplary habits pertained to payment by due date.  Employees would get their salaries on the due date and one might ask if it is something out of ordinary.  There are many institutions today who cannot keep up the date of payment of salaries.  But that's a different story today.  Back then, it wasn't unusual to get the salaries a couple of days after the due date.  But that wasn't the case with Dr Shejwalkar, who was fanatical about keeping the date of such payments to employees, visiting faculty and everyone else.  It earned him loads of goodwill aand gratitude.  He knew what that monthly bunch of notes meant for a household.

This combination of industriousness, simplicity and sincerity ran through everything he did.  It enabled him to reach out to people, sense their concerns and address them in an innovative way, by carrying a whole lot of people with him.  The scale of his acheivements grew over time to be stupendous: the number of doctoral scholars who earned their Ph D under him, the number of years for which he ran his monthly feature in Prasad, the Marathi magazine and the number of years he spent in academia.

Building IMDR as an autonomous institution outside the University framework was his outstanding achievement and to use Gopal Krishna Gokhale's words, in IMDR he has left behind the best work of his life.  IMDR became autonomous more than four decades ago when the term 'autonomy' wasn't part of the academic parlance.  He had to gradually evolve the curriculum, teaching-learning system and the assessments.  The whole idea was to make academia more open to the world outside and to engage with it actively without getting overwhelmed.  If he found either the academician or the manager pushing things too far in their chosen direction, he would step in decisively to check it, so that the equilibrium between academic requirements and industry demands was not upset. Had  he  not been adept at maintaining the equilibrium, IMDR could have easily lost its academic character and become another job fair venue.

Another notable achievement of his is not easy to discern.  He made many innovative advances, thanks to the autonomy that he had nurtured.  IMDR was the first to run a course for Defence Personnel who were seeking resettlement in industry.  IMDR was also the partner of LIC in training its sales personnel in Life Insurance marketing, as LIC was preparing to meet the challenge of privatization.  It is no secret that LIC  withstood the challenge of privatization in a creditable way, thanks largely to its vigorous presence in the market, among other things.  The point to remember is that Dr Shejwalkar did not have to set out to innovate.  It came naturally to him riding on the back of the tremendous goodwill he had generated in industry.  He was open to ideas and he was open to the world.  The world found a willing ally in him who would step out to solve the problems.  He would adroitly craft solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Working with him gave me a unique opportunity to understand the way he looked at people, processes and institutions both in academia and in industry.  In a way he was orienting me to be the Life Member and eventually his successor.  Life Member system of the DE Society is a unique institution, whose real nature is so very elusive of neat conceptualization.  It is democratic, decentralized and extremely adaptive, if understood in the right sense. He was fully conversant with the organizational dynamics of this unique institution and was able to successfully situate an autonomous institution within the overall institutional framework of DE Society.  The success of IMDR led to many autonomous endeavours within the institutions of DE Society and it was indeed fortunate that the transformation of our flagship Fergusson College into an autonomous institution happened during Dr Shejwalkar's life time.

The other equally great achievement of Dr Shejwalkar was that he made Management a household word in Maharashtra.  He wrote, lectured and spoke at many places and fora in both Marathi and English.  He addressed industrialists, managers and also workers.  He was involved with the Productivity movement and also Workers' Education scheme.  He was accessible and open to such invitations and spoke with his characteristic simplicity reaching out to his audience in a manner they could relate to the experiences he shared.  In that sense, he made his vast reservoir of knowledge available to the general public.  It did not lay in locked cabinets of his study.

The more I think of him, the greater is my amazement at the many dimensions of what he has left behind for us.  Thank you, Dr Shejwalkar, for what you taught us and have still left for us to fathom, figure out and learn for ourselves!