First year Quarterly Examinations

Rangan studied very hard. On hearing about Rangan’s selection to Engineering College, Rangan’s sister-in-law’s brother by name Srinivasan gifted him with a Multi Log Slide rule on his return from London. This slide rule had been the pride possession of Rangan for long.  There were 180 class mates for the 3 faculties Mechanical, Electrical and Civil Engineering. In the quarterly examination conducted by the college, Rangan secured the third rank and was offered a book on Structural Design.  On going through the marks, he realised that he could have got the first rank, if he had done the machine design drawings better. Those with less neatness were getting more marks. He approached the lecturer Venkatachalam and sought his advice. Venkatachalam said “Rangarajan ! We give as many marks for indicating dimension lines, centre lines and dotted lines for the Plan, Elevation and Endviews besides marks for neatness also. Neatness is not everything in Drawing. Drawing is the Language of Engineers”. Rangan got the clue. Rangan’s eldest brother was working in Bombay in VSNL Satellite Communication Wing. As Rangan became familiar with the subjects and classmates, he collected data from on satellite communications. In September 1962, he delivered his first talk on “Overseas Communication through Satellites”. This had earned a good name and appreciation for Rangan from Lecturers and Professors.  Towards the end of the year, more like minded classmates joined him in studies. Rangan formed a group of five with Narasimhan, Chandrasekhar, Sadhasivam, Sampath and Rangan, to gather data from Library, tutorial books, earlier years’ question papers with the sole aim of documenting, understanding and obtaining good marks as a group. During the annual examinations, Rangan made it a point to include all dimension lines and was glad to secure the third rank in the college, amongst 180 classmates.  Other team mates also secured good marks strengthening the morale of the group in working together.