Hyderabad, Sept. 4 -- Not many of us from the 1985-87 MA batch of the Department of History, University of Hyderabad took our Medieval History lecturer, Mrs. Rekha Pande, very seriously. It may have been because she was the faculty's baby of the team, a few years older than her students and extremely unassuming.

To me, just like Prof. K.S.S. Seshan, she was patience personified. There were good reasons for being so. As a mother of three boys, two of them twins, (one little guy I'd seen being extremely chubby yet very naughty), she consciously chose to spare the rod, even if it meant spoiling the child. Encouragement she realised produced better results perhaps than playing the policeman/woman.

There was enough cause for her to be annoye...