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In January of 1992, I spent three weeks in Belgaum, Karnataka, India,
on a UNDP assignment with the
National Institute of Hydrology's Hard Rock Regional Centre.
That spring, back in the United States, I shared with my CIV E 445 (Engineering Hydrology) students
my observations, and told them
that I had not seen many fat people in India, certainly not in Belgaum.
The last day of the semester, I decided to do a review of the class in an unconventional way:
I would have
every student tell me in a nutshell what he/she learned in the class.
Each of the students sitting in the front of the class, usually the better students,
had a favorite topic that they particularly remembered,
such as the rational method, the unit hydrograph, or channel routing.
As I reached the students sitting in the back of the class, one of them responded
to my query in the following way:
"I learned that there are no fat people in India." That was certainly not hydrology, but it
was a lesson nevertheless.
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