Category: NPTEL-STAR

Rama Reddy Karri At IIT Madras, Dr. Ramareddy Karri, a 71-year-old psychiatrist from Andhra Pradesh, received a standing ovation when he was called onto the stage. The Director and the assembled audience rose to applaud him, creating a moment that Karri considers more “remarkable and memorable” than even his accolades from the President of India.  …

Read more “The 71-Year-Old Mega Star: Dr. Ramareddy Karri’s Lifelong Quest for Knowledge”

Hemlatha Munamgi For 30 years, Hemalatha has taught from the front of a classroom at Lakireddy Bali Reddy College of Engineering in Andhra Pradesh. She finished her postgraduate degree in 1998, when the tools available to a young lecturer were textbooks, chalk, and whatever she could carry in her head. She was always the kind …

Read more “Two Days’ Leave: How Hemalatha Found Her Way to an IIT Madras Classroom”

Amandeep Thakur In 2020, when the pandemic arrived and postponed nearly everything, it also postponed the exams Amandeep Thakur had already signed up for. Courses remained unfinished, and certificates were left in limbo for nearly a year. During that time, it would have been simple for him to allow his enrollment to quietly expire, becoming …

Read more “The Bitter Gourd Lesson: How Amandeep Thakur Turned a Delay Into a Discipline Star”

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 …

Read more “The Bandaged Drive: Dr. Kumudavalli Refuses to Miss an Exam”

Krishnaveni B V At CMRIT Hyderabad, in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. Krishnaveni B V teaches machine learning to computer science students. This is not where her story begins. In 2019, she signed up for her first NPTEL course on a colleague’s suggestion, choosing something safe and close to her own field. …

Read more “Until Midnight: Dr. Krishnaveni’s Twelve-Time Climb to NPTEL Stardom”

Joseph Jonathan Fernandes In Margao, Goa, Joseph Jonathan Fernandis keeps a diary just for exam dates. Not his own college exams, the other ones. Every semester, when the university releases its list of NPTEL electives eligible for honours credit, he opens the notebook first, checks which subjects might overlap, and starts building a season around …

Read more “The Bug That Won’t Disappear: How Joseph Jonathan Fernandis Turned Forty-Seven Courses Into a Second Education”

Sreelakshmi PS Interest is a part of human experience that comes from jumping into the unknown. Sreelakshmi PS has an idea of it and during her years in her BTech Degree in Computer Science and Engineering, as she came near the end of her degree, it was mandated that students garner 100 activity points for …

Read more “From Points to Many Interests – Sreelakshmi PS”

Rajdeep Das Working as a Junior Fellow Researcher at the Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, under the CST, IML and CSB departments, can be quite demanding, especially while pursuing a BTech. Rajdeep Das was one such fellow, and the trajectory of his academic interests deepened and changed when an educator came and introduced him …

Read more “Higher Ceilings Through a New Platform – Rajdeep Das”

Karan Bhalla In the competitive landscape of Indian academia, Assistant Professor Karan Bhalla stands out for his relentless intellectual curiosity. A professor of Chemistry at Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana. He treats NPTEL less like a certification platform and more like an ongoing experiment in how much one person can learn. It was 2020, …

Read more “Karan Bhalla’s Food for the Brain”

 Dr Chetana Hegde The day I spoke with Dr. Chetana Hegde was her last at Fractal Analytics. Three days later, she would begin a new chapter at Accenture as a Lead AI Architect. It felt fitting. We weren’t just talking between two jobs, but in the brief pause between one chapter and the next. That …

Read more “The Road Still Under Construction: Dr. Chetana Hegde”