Kumudavalli Manjunath
On the morning of April 27, 2022, 18 days after major neck surgery, Dr. Kumudavalli sat for an NPTEL exam with the bandage still on. Her husband drove her to the center, waited through the paper, and drove her home again, the way he had done for every exam before it and every one since.
She teaches Computer Applications and serves as Deputy Director at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering in Bengaluru,her relationship with NPTEL in a single, unacademic word: addiction. It began in 2017, when a colleague known around the staff room for hunting down certifications mentioned a new online course platform worth trying. Two others joined her that first semester. Only she took the exam. She has not missed one since, and he count now stands at more than 30 courses, spanning Machine Learning, IoT, Database Systems, Scientific Writing, and, more recently, Education Leadership as her administrative responsibilities grew.
“You have never left the track of doing your NPTEL courses, why should your surgery stop you from it,”
she recalls her husband telling her, days before that April exam. The line stayed with her, not as a momentary piece of motivation, but as a reflection of a habit she had built over the years. The pandemic sharpened her resolve rather than testing it. At a center built for over a hundred systems, only 11 students showed up to write that year’s paper.
She was one of them, and the scarcity of company felt less like isolation than confirmation: if the world had narrowed this much and she was still in the room, the habit had become identity.
Around the same period she was named a chairperson overseeing examinations for 114 affiliated colleges under Bangalore University, a workload she describes as constant juggling between allocating external evaluators and monitoring roughly 9000 students. She kept her own NPTEL schedule running underneath it, trading sleep for the hours she needed rather than trading away the exam date.
What NPTEL has produced beyond the certificates, she says, is a specific kind of confidence in front of a classroom of students young enough to be her own children. A private answer to a question people keep asking her: haven’t you achieved enough? She has recruited seven hesitant students by offering, half-joking, to personally cover the exam fee if cost was the only thing holding them back. All seven passed with distinction. She has enrolled her daughter in a course too, with the same advice she gives her students: start now, argue about the reasons later.
It is a hard thing to say to a nervous colleague. But it may also be the principle that has kept her own streak going through surgery, a pandemic, and years of grading examination papers while sitting for her own.
~written by Elsa Prasad