APJ Abdul Kalam at a programme to welcome him at Anna University in Chennai. (PTI)

Chennai, July 26: With five new jobs in the bag, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam doesn’t wish to dwell on his previous one.

A day after stepping down as President, Kalam has declared he would be addressed as “professor” rather than “former President”.

The ex-technocrat began his first day in his new teaching job at Anna University here by gently chiding vice-chancellor D. Viswanathan as the academic introduced him to the faculty.

“Don’t call me former President. Call me professor from today,” he said. Kalam’s designation happens to be “professor of Anna University” without reference to the subjects he is to teach: nanotechnology and space applications technology.

For all his keenness to be addressed as “professor”, Kalam has had only one formal stint as teacher before, and only for seven months. That, too, came at Anna University where he was professor of technology & societal transformation from December 2001 till he became President in July 2002.

To be appointed a professor, one usually needs to be a PhD with 16 years of teaching behind one — and often needs to have published a book as well as articles in peer-reviewed journals. If, however, a university decides a potential appointee is a person of eminence, these criteria — some of which Kalam meets — can be waived.

“I have five assignments now,” Kalam told reporters.

One of these is with Nalanda University in Bihar. He has been offered the chancellorship of the upcoming Space Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram and a visiting professorship at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He will also be teaching at Gandhigram Rural University near Madurai.

Showing he was serious about his new responsibilities, Kalam later treated an auditorium packed with students to an 80-minute lecture on the “dimensions of national prosperity”. In keeping with the interactive style he made famous as President, he spent 20 minutes taking questions.

The experience left the bespectacled Bhaskar Jyoti Ghosh, an MCA student from Patna, awe-struck. “He is very energetic and his ideas have affected me strongly. I wanted to ask him several questions but managed just one,” he said.

But the shadow of Raisina Hill wouldn’t leave Kalam so soon. Reporters asked if he was satisfied with his performance as President.

There can never be “100 per cent satisfaction”, he said, but added that his biggest achievement was converting Rashtrapati Bhavan into a “People’s Bhavan”: 10 lakh now visit it every year.

He wouldn’t let the President upstage the professor, though. He asked the faculty: “Do you use new notes every day or old ones?”

When none replied, he chuckled. “I know — we all used to go to class with the same notes every day. I am a professor, too.”

A power failure in the evening, however, saw him hasten to Raj Bhavan for the night. After all, he’s a former President, too.