My PhD Coursework Exam!

It was the last week of June, and I had just been relieved from the daily grind of attending the online lectures of Paper III of my PhD coursework. The offline lectures for Research Methodology (RM) and Paper I had already been survived in May and June, ten days each, at the Department of Technology, Shivaji University, Kolhapur in 2025. I dusted my hands, mentally filed the whole coursework business under ‘done for now,’ and settled into the comfortable belief that the exam was a distant December problem.

Then, on the 3^rd of August, WhatsApp happened.

The Notification That Shook the Group

A message landed in the PhD students' WhatsApp group of 2023-24 and 2024-25 batches, announcing with the casual cruelty that: the exam would start on the 17^th of August. Not December. August. As in, two weeks from now.

My first reaction was shock and awe, in that order. My second reaction was to do the mental arithmetic: three papers, three hours each, written by hand, with no study, no revision, and no reference material anywhere in sight. My third reaction, along with half the WhatsApp group, was denial. Surely this notification was meant for some other unfortunate batch. Surely it would be postponed to December, where it belonged.

My colleague and batch-mate Mr. Nevagi sir, ever the quintessential realist leaning pleasantly towards pessimism, declared this whole business a plain injustice. I, on the other hand, operate in what Nevagi sir has diagnosed, as permanent FMEA mode: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, running continuously in the background of my brain, forever calculating what could go wrong and what to do about it. So, while everyone debated the philosophical injustice of the notification, I filled the exam form on day one. Nevagi sir, in a fitting display of his own risk model, waited until the very last day.

Meanwhile, some research scholars mounted a spirited campaign for postponement on the WhatsApp group. I admired their optimism. I did not share it. Some FMEAs you just know how they end.

The Study That Almost Didn't Happen

Step one of preparation was collecting books from the college library. Step two was discovering that I could not locate the notebook I had used for the RM and Paper II lectures back in 2025. I didn’t find it even after repeated searches!

Nevagi sir, again, came to the rescue, digging through his WhatsApp chats and the SUK website for the syllabus, the exam scheme, and the passing criteria, and passing it all along to me like a one-man help desk. Slowly, material began arriving from every direction: books, presentation handouts, handwritten notes, old question papers, contributions from Walvekar sir, from AI chatbots, from YouTube, from the group at large. All that remained was the small matter-- actually reading it.

I remember Saturday, the 8th of August, distinctly. I had declared, with great inner voice, that I would study the entire day. I picked up the book. I opened it. My mind took one look at the syllabus and firmly declined to cooperate. I decided, in a moment of strategic surrender, not to read a single page until the tension built up high enough to override my own will. That is precisely how I spent one full day of the four holidays I had before the exam: watching Netflix and waiting for tension to build up.

It arrived, reliably, on Sunday.

The People Who Helped Me

If FMEA had a category for ‘colleagues exceeding expected mitigation,’ mine would all score full marks. I had been quietly terrified of the numerical problems on castings in Paper II, so terrified that I hadn't even properly read the questions from previous papers, assuming they were beyond me.

Desai madam glanced at the same problem and declared it easy, genuinely easy, and walked me through the pouring basin, sprue, runner, gate design, and riser in a way that made me wonder what I had been afraid of. She also lent me her book on casting along with NPTEL notes.

Hublikar madam repeatedly stressed the importance of sitting in one place for a full three-hour stretch, and of practising writing by hand for that long. I practised for exactly half an hour before giving up and deciding to fight the writing fatigue live, on exam day, like a true Kung Fu Panda disciple ignoring his own risk. She also lent me a calculator.

Bhandare sir, my friend, philosopher, and guide, remained chill as ever, advising me not to take any stress and to walk into the exam as though it were any ordinary test.

Maskar sir, in his own inimitable style, assured me that once the question paper was in my hand, I would somehow manage to write everything within the stipulated time. Meeting him and hearing about his own coursework exam experience was oddly refreshing, the way war stories from a slightly earlier war usually are.

Nevagi sir and I studied RM and Paper II together, solving casting and line-balancing problems side by side, and for reasons I still cannot fully explain, I actually enjoyed working with the calculator that afternoon. Sometime during this phase, he told me the old story about the essay on a crow, the one student supposedly writes regardless of the actual topic given, and we decided, half as a joke and half as genuine exam strategy, to go find the crow hiding in every subject.

A.C. Patil sir, watching all this unfold, understandably remained mostly in a state of quiet astonishment at how PhD examinations are conducted in Indian universities.

Exam Days

 

Eventually the timetable arrived, the hall ticket was generated, and the last flickers of hope for a postponement were formally extinguished. The mind, having exhausted its options, finally accepted the reality.

RM was first, on the 17th of August, 10:30 am. The four musketeers: myself, Nevagi sir, Gopal Bhosale sir, and Anmol Magdum sir, car-pool partners since the RM lectures of June 2025, left Sangli at 8:10 am and reached DoT by 9:35. The paper was of medium difficulty, and having successfully located the crow in this particular subject, I managed to answer everything required within three hours, filling 28 out of 36 pages. A personal triumph, promptly and thoroughly eclipsed by Nevagi sir's 31-page record.

Paper II, Recent Trends in Mechanical Engineering, came on the 19^th of August. I had decided to keep attending college on non-exam days, so I conducted a Design of Machine Elements lecture on the 18^th. My preparation was so-so, resting heavily on my hopes for casting numerical actually appearing. They did. I reached page 29 this time.

Paper III, the last of the three, was scheduled for the 21^st of August. The day before, exam fatigue had well and truly set in, and preparation was thin. The saving grace was that I had taught much of this subject myself in various other courses over the years. I walked in with Bhandare sir's prescribed mindset, stress switched off, and came out having written 33 pages, my personal best of the three rounds.

Overall, the whole exercise went noticeably better than expected, and the fingers are now crossed for the result. It ended with a long-awaited lunch at Hotel Marathi Bana in Kolhapur, over Non-veg Tambda and Pandhara Rassa, which tasted, exactly like relief.

What I Learned

Challenges, it turns out, are rarely as large as the mind first makes them out to be. Most results are still achievable through hard work, even the last-minute, tension-triggered kind. And when the notification lands with only two weeks' notice, it is almost always the people around you -- a casting expert with a spare book, a madam who lends you her calculator, a chill philosopher-guide, a colleague who promises that you will simply know what to do during exam hours and a fellow musketeer with 31 pages to your 28 -- who quietly carry you through it.

Thank you, everyone.

 

What is Stress?

It was a Tuesday morning, second period, sometime in the start of the semester. I was teaching Design of Machine Elements to my TY B. Tech. (Mechanical) students, and the topic for the day was the stress-strain diagram, a curve every mechanical engineer meets early and never quite forgets. I drew it on the blackboard the way I always do, the chalk turning my fingers white by the time I finished: the straight elastic line, the gentle bend at the yield point, peak of ultimate stress and finally the sharp break at fracture.

One student in the third row, a boy who spent half his time looking at his notebook and the other half looking out of the window, raised his hand and asked a question I was not fully prepared for. "Sir, why does stress even get generated? Why can't the material just change its shape?"

The Material That Refuses to Move

I told him what I tell every batch that asks this question. When a force acts on a material, the material does not want to deform. It is comfortable where it is. Its atoms are arranged in a particular lattice, holding their positions, and any force that tries to disturb this arrangement is met with resistance from within. That internal resistance is what we call stress. It is not something imposed on the material from outside; it is the material's own reluctance, made visible and measurable. No force >>> no resistance >>> no stress. But equally, no force >>>no motion >>> no change of any kind.

I remember pausing there for a moment, chalk still in my hand, because I realised I was no longer only talking about machine elements.

A Line of Kusumagraj's That Came to Mind

There is a line from a Marathi poem that came to me right there in the classroom that day, one I have returned to many times since. It is from Kusumagraj's "कणा" (Kana, meaning 'the spine'), a poem I first read as a schoolboy and never fully forgot: 'मोडून पडला संसार तरी मोडला नाही कणा, पाठीवरती हात ठेवून फक्त लढ म्हणा' - my household may have collapsed, but my spine did not break; just place a hand on my back and tell me to fight. I had always read it as a poem about human dignity in poverty. That day, with a stress-strain diagram still fresh on the blackboard, I heard it almost as an engineering statement. I have often thought that we treat stress in our own lives as something the world does to us, an external attack we did not invite. But if you look closely, you will find it is generated in us in exactly the same way it is generated in a steel rod under load. Life presents us with a force: a change we did not ask for, a relationship that ends, a plan that falls through. And what we experience as stress is not really the force itself. It is us, holding on to how things used to be, refusing to bend, refusing to let go of a shape we had grown attached to.

The material has no say in whether a force acts on it. But it does have some say, in its own quiet mechanical way, in how it responds to that force. I think, in this one small respect, we are not so different.

The Idea of an Elastic Limit

Every material we study has what we call an elastic limit. Up to this point, it can absorb a load and, once the load is removed, return exactly to its original shape, as though nothing had happened to it at all. But push it further, past what engineers call the yield point, and something in it changes permanently. It does not break yet, but it is no longer quite the same material it was before. This permanent change is called plastic deformation, and interestingly, it is not always spoken of as a failure. A blacksmith shaping a straight iron rod into a hook is doing precisely this, deliberately pushing the rod past its elastic limit so that it takes on a new, more useful form.

I find that human beings have their own version of this elastic limit. Ordinary, everyday disturbances we absorb easily and return from unchanged by the evening. But certain experiences in life push us past our own yield point. We do not break. We simply stop being exactly the person we were before that stress entered our life. 

 

One Idea, Many Subjects

Teaching this subject year after year, I have noticed something I find genuinely fascinating. This resistance to change is not an idea that belongs only to mechanics. It reappears across almost every subject I have ever studied. Newton's First Law calls it inertia, the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest. Thermodynamics call it as thermal equilibrium. Physiology calls it homeostasis, the body's insistence on keeping its temperature and its internal balance exactly where it was. Economists notice the same pattern when a market resists a sudden shock before finally settling into a new equilibrium. Different subjects, different vocabularies, and yet the same principle repeating itself.

I find this connection fascinating. It suggests that knowledge is not really divided into separate compartments called Engineering, Physiology, Psychology, and Economics, each sealed off from the others. It is closer to one large, interconnected structure of understanding, and we simply happen to enter it through different doors depending on what we choose to study. When I explain a stress-strain curve to my students, I am, without saying it aloud, also explaining something about grief, about heartbreak, about why even a whole nation resists reform.

What Engineers Actually Design For

There is something we rarely tell our students, though every practicing engineer eventually learns it: a completely stress-free machine is not even the goal of good design. A bridge experiencing zero stress would be a bridge doing no useful work at all. What engineers actually do is design elements that can absorb stress more safely. We round off sharp corners with fillets, because stress concentrates at sharp edges. We choose materials with a higher yield strength. We build in a margin, a factor of safety, for the load we did not fully anticipate, for changes in material properties and for changes in the dimensions of manufactured component. We do not remove the force acting on the structure. We build a structure capable of meeting that force without shattering.

I believe this is the real work available to a stressed mind as well, not the pursuit of a force-free life, which is as impossible for us as it is for any loaded beam, but the quieter, more patient work of raising our own elastic limit. Widening, little by little, the range within which we can absorb a difficult conversation, a lost opportunity, or a change we never asked for, and still return to being ourselves, perhaps a little sturdier than before for having carried the load (strain hardening).

Newton wrote (in first law of motion) that a body at rest continues to remain at rest, and a body in motion continues in motion, unless acted upon by an external force. At its heart, it is a law about our resistance to change, and I have come to believe every one of us is, in that sense, a body that prefers rest. The force will arrive regardless of our preference in the matter. Stress is simply what happens in the space between that force arriving and us finally agreeing to move!

 

Rethinking Ambition, Luck, and Letting Go

It was an evening of hot summer day. We were sitting on the benches under trees near the coffee outlet in our college and discussing about how our careers have progressed over the period. Almost every one of us was unhappy about the current status of their career. I was unhappier.

I was venting out my frustration (which happens often, nowadays) about the current status of my career which does not reflect the one I hoped for. I dissected my past decisions and how I did not grab the opportunities which were presented to me in the past. I was searching for the root cause of my current partial failure. I thought my own decisions along with the bad luck were responsible for this situation.

To my ranting, my colleague calmly replied, ‘Jo hota hai, achche ke liye hota hai - whatever happens, happens for a good.’

My immediate internal reaction was the total rejection of this thought. How can someone say that their bad fortune has happened for good reasons? I replied to her, ‘Jo hua hai, bura hua hai - whatever has happened, happened for a bad.’ As someone who believes that every effect has to have a cause (many times in our control), the idea of just trusting the universe felt like a surrender. I was thinking ‘if we simply accept that whatever happens is for the best, progress stalls.’

We finished our coffee, and I walked away convinced I was right. But over the next few days, her words refused to leave my head. I started to wonder if I had completely misunderstood her point. What if ‘jo hota hai, achchhe ke liye hota hai’ wasn't a sign of surrender, but actually a necessary framework for navigating a life where, despite our best calculations, we are never fully in control.

We are conditioned by modern culture to believe we are the sole architects of our destiny.  When we operate in this mindset, high accountability is our default state. We believe that if we just work harder and plan better, success is a certainty. But the danger of this worldview is what happens when things  go wrong (as they usually do). We turn the focus inward, torturing ourselves over past actions, ‘If only I hadn’t taken this role, or if only I had studied for that exam harder.’

The Illusion of Choice

We place a lot of pressure on our choices, treating our careers as if they are isolated, closed systems. We look back at a decision and label it a ‘bad choice’ simply because the outcome wasn't what we wanted. But this is a flawed analysis. We make the best decisions we can with the data we possess at that exact moment. You can design a very good strategy, but if the environment changes, the outcome will change with it. A perfect choice can still yield a negative result, and a terrible choice can sometimes lead to a breakthrough. We cannot judge the quality of our decision-making solely by the outcome.

The Role of Luck

Luck is the hidden variable we hate to acknowledge. We love to claim our successes are due to our own brilliance, but we rarely admit that being in the right place at the right time, or a sudden shift in the job market has a massive role in career trajectory. Just as we cannot take all the credit for our good luck, we must stop taking all the blame for our bad luck. Sometimes, despite flawless execution, external forces push against you. Blaming yourself for a random string of unfortunate events or systemic shifts is unfair.

The Psychological Shock Absorber

This is where ‘Jo hota hai, achchhe ke liye hota hai’ finally clicked for me. I had initially viewed the phrase as dropping the control over our life. I was wrong. It is not about giving up your agency. It is a psychological shock absorber. In any system subjected to vibrations, you have to design dampers to absorb the vibrations (energy in the system, actually). Without them, the entire structure fractures under stress. The human mind requires the exact same protection.

The true breakthrough came when I realized my colleague and I weren't actually arguing about the same thing. We were just looking at different sides of the timeline. My obsession with agency, choices, and effort applies strictly to the future: the variables we can still influence. Her philosophy of acceptance applies strictly to the past: the outcomes that are already locked in. The realization was liberating: I don't have to choose between ambition and acceptance.

It comes down to a simple paradox. You need my approach to act as the prime mover (engine or electric motor). It provides the necessary forward momentum. But a powerful engine bolted to a rigid frame will eventually tear itself apart if subjected to rough road (and hence, vibrations). Her approach ‘Jo hota hai, achchhe ke liye hota hai’ is the suspension system. It doesn’t slow the vehicle down, it absorbs the unpredictable shocks of bad luck and failed plans so the engine can keep running without reducing itself to pieces.

The ancient Stoics had a concept for this called Amor Fati, which translates to ‘a love of one's fate.’ Amor Fati is not about passively sitting back and letting life happen to you. It means pursuing your goals, but the exact second an outcome is finalized, no matter how disappointing or unfair it feels, you immediately embrace it as a necessary part of the design.

I finally realized that this mindset is not about mere survival, it is about growth. The author Nassim Nicholas Taleb perfectly captures the essence of what the synthesis of these two different views of looking at the things taught me.

In his book Antifragile, he writes: ‘Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.’

Likewise, you should want to be the fire and wish for the wind. The next time a plan fails, do not waste your energy fighting the reality of the situation. Accept the new variables, find the hidden advantage, and let the wind feed the fire.