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In India, the teacher-training programmes have been running through refresher or orientation courses
for the past 30 or more years. Coupling them with API has made them highly ineffective. The steady
effort of an academic mentoring programme, spread over two or more years for every young faculty as
well as Ph.D. student, if implemented with sincerity, will prove to be very fruitful.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to the memory of my two mentors: Professor P.T. Narasimhan (Indian
Institute of Technology, Kanpur, my Ph.D. supervisor) and Professor Robert G. Parr (University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A., my post-doctoral supervisor). They were immensely
instrumental in inculcating core academic values in several doctoral and postdoctoral students like
me.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mr. Shrikrishna Vaidya, Pune for providing a copy of Altekar’s work. The help
from Dr. Nalini Joshi, Sanmati Teerth, Pune in translating the passages from Sanskrit is gratefully
acknowledged.

References

Altekar, A.S. 1944. Education in Ancient India. Benaras: Nand Kishore and Bros, Educational
Publishers.

Berg, H. M. and M.A. Ferber. 1983. Men and Women Graduate Students: Who succeeds and why? J.
Higher Educ. 54: 629–648.

Krebs, H.A. 1967. The making of a scientist. Nature 215: 1441–1445.
Prasad, Debi. Fifth edition, 2006. Rabindranath Tagore, Philosophy of Education and Painting. New
Delhi: National Book Trust.

Ramakrishnan, V. 2009. Nobel Lecture. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation.

Sands, R.G., L.A. Parson, and J. Duane. 1991. Faculty Mentoring Faculty in a Public University. J.
Higher Educ. 62: 174.

Swami Sharvananda. 1921. Taittiriya-Upanishad. Madras: Ramakrishna Math.

Vale, R.D. and K. Dell. 2009. The Biological Sciences in India: Aiming high for the future. J Cell Biol.
184: 342–353.
Yadavji Trikamji, Acharya. (ed.) 2009. Ayurveda Deepika. Commentary by Chakrapani Dutta
on Charaka Samhita by Agnivesha: revised by Charaka and Dridhabala.Varanasi: Chaukhamba
Krishnadas Series.

Endnotes

1 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 2020. 11th Edition.

2 MacMillan Dictionary. https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/mentor.

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