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India's Best B-school Profs

If you are a professor, what does it take to win the respect and admiration of some of India's brightest kids? A complete mastery of your subject apart, it takes some self-deprecation and a sense of humour. Meet the nine most popular professors at IIM-A, B and C. By Ahona Ghosh

IIM-A

Arnab Kumar Laha/Probability and Statistics

A Head For Numbers And Humour JULY 16, 2006

Calculus isn't the easiest of subjects to learn if you've never

studied it before your first year of MBA. Yet, Arnab Kumar Laha, a 38-year-old Professor of Probability and Statistics at iim Ahmedabad, never has trouble getting a full house. Why? He knows just how to put the greenhorns at ease. He tells them jokes and spins funny stories around statistics to make the subject less formidable. "He comes down to the level of the students to explain concepts," says Anuja Trivedi, 23, one of his second-year students. Laha is so good at keeping his students engaged that most of them actually enjoy his 90-minute lectures. Not surprisingly, IIM-A's graduating class of 2006 had no trouble voting him as the best professor. Interestingly enough, Laha never set out to be an academic. After getting his bachelors and masters degree in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, he worked with a software company for one year, before taking a break to do his PhD. That done, he decided to turn to teaching and joined IIM-A in 2004. It is "the ability to remain at the frontier of research that drew me to academics," reveals Laha. Understandably, then, when not teaching, Laha spends time on research. Currently, he is working on 'change-point problems' relating to financial volatility in stock prices. That's another reason why his...