Written in 2020. I've left it mostly as it was, so some links and details may be out of date.
This morning, Prof. Asim Banerjee passed away. He had been fighting Covid-19 for over a week.
The entire DA-IICT student community is grieving today. Many of us still can’t believe it. He was one of those teachers whose presence felt permanent, someone you assumed would always be there the next time you came back to campus.
I want to write down a few memories while they’re fresh, and try to explain why one professor mattered so much to so many people.
“Come, come!”
Every time I visited Gandhinagar after graduating, a visit to the DA-IICT campus was inevitable. And a campus visit meant calling Prof. Banerjee.
His answer was always the same: “Come, come!”
We would walk around the campus, or sit in his office. Sometimes for hours. He never seemed to be in a hurry, even though he was always busy. He made time, and he made you feel like that time was well spent.
He had an uncanny ability to sense when something was bothering you. If I was struggling with a decision or carrying some doubt, he would know before I said it. He didn’t jump to advice. He would ask questions, a lot of them, or tell a story that seemed unrelated at first. By the end of the conversation, I always left with something: a new perspective, an answer I had been looking for, or a lesson I didn’t know I needed.
When I visited campus in July 2018, I wrote that a campus visit is incomplete without meeting Banerjee sir. I meant it. I just didn’t imagine that sentence would one day become a memory.
The puzzles
In the classroom, he was unlike any other professor I had.
He taught software engineering, but every lecture started with a different puzzle. You would sit there wondering what on earth he was trying to teach you today. The puzzle never seemed to have anything to do with the syllabus.
Then, by the end of the lecture, it all came together, and you were left awestruck. The puzzle had been the lesson all along. He hadn’t told you the answer. He had walked you to it, step by step, until you saw it yourself.
I didn’t fully appreciate it then. I do now. He wasn’t only teaching software engineering. He was teaching us how to think: how to sit with a problem you don’t yet understand, how to break it down, and how to stay curious long enough for it to make sense.
What he taught me
I’ve thought about what made him different, and I keep coming back to a few things.
Questions before answers. He rarely told you what to do. He asked questions until you could see the situation clearly. As a founder and a product person, I’ve come to believe that asking the right questions is most of the job. I learned that from him first.
Lessons don’t have to look like lessons. A puzzle, a story, a walk around campus. He understood that people remember what they discover far better than what they’re told.
Make time for people. He had thousands of students over the years, and he still made time for each of us when we came back. Some of the most valuable hours of my life after college were spent in his office, with no agenda at all.
Teach the person, not just the subject. His lectures were about software engineering. His impact was on how we approached work, decisions, and life.
A debt we can’t repay
Prof. Banerjee left a deep mark on thousands of students. Many of us carry a little of how he thought into the work we do every day, often without noticing.
In the years since college, I’ve had my share of difficult decisions, failures, and fresh starts. In a lot of those moments, the instinct to step back, ask better questions, and stay curious came from him.
Prof. Banerjee, you’ll be sorely missed. You’ll always have a special place in our hearts. We can’t thank you enough for shaping our lives and preparing us for the battles we fight every day.
If you were his student too, I’d love to hear your memories. Write them down. It’s one small way to keep a great teacher’s lessons going.
May your soul rest in peace. 🙏