Thousands of students and aspirants study inorganic chemistry as they cannot avoid it whether they prepare for IIT-JEE

or take part in any competition to pursue a career in engineering or medicine. At the end of the day, many of them rank this branch of chemistry as boring, memory based and lack of depth. This is not at all correct. The truth is something different. The fact is that inorganic chemistry is a natural science like others and carries as much logic and reasoning as any other natural science does. The only difference is that one who introduces students to this branch of chemistry generally allows a lot of unwanted opinions about the subject. The students are absolutely nascent. Teachers expose them the world of inorganic chemistry as they find the subject to themselves. If a teacher somehow or rather feels the subject really boring and memory based then his students cannot escape such perceptions of the teacher. At the end of the day, the teacher does not lose anything but the students. The subject loses its scientific temper for many of such students. Many of such students in the rest of their life take a permanent impression that inorganic chemistry is memory based. This is an unfortunate truth today. Behind every exception in inorganic chemistry there is of course a reason, all of which one may or may not know. Sometimes, the explanation may not be in the scope of the syllabus we are dealing. Yes, I do agree that there are informations in inorganic chemistry that a student must own and remember. This is not unique to this subject only. This is also true for every other natural science. Dont we remember certain things such as formulae, cases, tricks and methods in physics and mathematics to face unknown situations in questions? When someone, student or teacher, is not honest and friendly to a subject then the lack of such basic information obviously would worry him/her a lot. But this does not provide anyone of us a ground to classify that inorganic chemistry is a subject just to memorize like history. This is totally unreasonable and unacceptable. One more tragedy is that many coaching institutions all over India consider Inorganic chemistry as a secondary component of the syllabus. According to them, there is hardly anything substantial to understand and to explain in it. With this perception they design their teaching schedule and allocate as less time as possible to inorganic chemistry. This is the starting point of all the damages done to inorganic chemistry in the minds of young students. At the end of coaching when students face the real paper they find almost same number of questions from inorganic as they are from physical and organic. They loose marks on very simple questions in inorganic chemistry. The reason for this disaster is not that inorganic is beyond the ability of the students but the sheer ignorance.

In my view, inorganic chemistry unlike physical and organic does not allow the question setter to prepare a question with twists and turns as he wishes to spin. In organic and physical chemistry the question setter can imagine situations and frame questions accordingly. This is reasonable, acceptable and solvable too. Often the question setter tries to consume more time of the student during exam by framing tricks and twists in questions. But, this is not applicable to inorganic chemistry as it is purely experimental. A question setter does not take the risk such imagination in framing a question in inorganic chemistry unless and until it is held as a truth in the laboratory. Because of this reason alone, questions in inorganic chemistry are always direct and do not have twists and turns. This is why with lesser devotion a student can score better in inorganic chemistry and improves his/her rank. Lesser devotion does not mean ignorance as many understand. Inorganic chemistry is often blamed for remembering reactions. People say that there is no mechanism available for inorganic reactions, like those available for organic reactions. This blame is also not constructive. Inorganic chemistry deals with just four sets of compounds viz. acids, bases, salts and complexes. Among these compounds many are oxidants and reductants. If one masters the idea of classifying inorganic compounds into those six categories and understands the some basic principles of reactions, then prediction of products in inorganic reactions becomes convenient. Of course a good amount of practice is needed to acquire this art of prediction of products of various inorganic reactions. Students here need the help of a teacher.