I am in to my 5th decade of academic life, of which a good number of years were spent in gaining experience in working with global universities, organizations, Government of India and Government of Tamil Nadu. During my long career, I have come across thousands of students of different caliber. Interestingly, all those youngsters had one thing in common; passion and dedication. That is amazing. Many of my students still recount all the enjoyable things that they remember as a part of class or as a part of discussions in the laboratory or many casual corridor chats. At any time, I had at least three generations of students and researchers in the laboratory. It was an amazing community around me. Most of them celebrated Diwali with my family in our campus residence year after year!
During our discussions many questions related to education were tossed around, whenever we discussed the context around a research problem. The main reason was that each and every one participating in the discussion used to justify “why they are saying what they are saying”, for the benefit of others; hearing the individual narration was a revelation to others because all of them invariably had a different education, social, and cultural background! I thought it appropriate to share some of them with the aspiring students. The main reason is that they asked exactly the same questions that the current generation is asking. When I travelled around, when the aspiring students asked questions related to higher education, I was reminded of these wonderful conversations. I thought that my reminiscence of my past is best shared as a dialogue as is given here. I hope the reader finds it interesting.