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One of the facets of his 'much-misunderstood' and 'much-maligned' personality is that SDM never cared for teaching, or impressing an audience. His mind was always 'elsewhere'. I am sure while he was ‘taking’ a class he was cracking one of his absorbing research problems. He would drivel, and his audience smirks politely.
Any third grade teacher like me could talk on one of ‘his’ papers and get a big applause. He himself could never do it. But, if I or DB went to his room after his ‘lecture’ and sat down with him, he would go on for two hours about the Naxalite Menace, or Tolstoy or how he saw Dirac go senile at the age of 40 (he went to England to work with Dirac, and met his match in Dirac; both were 'elsewhere' at spatially separated world points). But in between (one has to wait and watch for those golden moments) he would pass such a profound remark or two about the intricacies of his paper, that we could easily churn out half a dozen papers as offshoots, if we wished to.
Once I was struggling to ‘prove’ a hunch I had about one step in our paper which was holding it up. He was to catch a train to Bangalore to talk about 'Unsolved Problems in Physics'. (I am sure the audience there had a tough time following him). I would go to him only when I was about to give up. I went to his Quarters and asked for help. He talked and talked about extraneous things and the rickshaw arrived. Not one to give up easily, I followed him to the railway station, bent on seeing him off. Just before the train left, he made a comment: ‘Doesn't it look like a tensor transformation?’ The train steamed off and as I bicycled back to my bachelor digs, I could see that his comment solved the problem.
By the time he returned after a fortnight, I wrote up the paper. I went to his office to give him my write-up. As usual, he talked on and on for two hours about the fine time he had at Bangalore and what a wonderful city it was and how he would love to settle there after retirement (not speaking a word about how his talk went). He then asked me to give him the unsolved step and he would ‘try’ it. Baffled, I told him that he had already solved it and reminded him of his comment that ‘it looked like a tensor transformation’. He told me that he was not aware of it at all!
There goes the 'genius' at work.
SDM & Teaching
One of the facets of his 'much-misunderstood' and 'much-maligned' personality is that SDM never cared for teaching, or impressing an audience. His mind was always 'elsewhere'. I am sure while he was ‘taking’ a class he was cracking one of his absorbing research problems. He would drivel, and his audience smirks politely.
Any third grade teacher like me could talk on one of ‘his’ papers and get a big applause. He himself could never do it. But, if I or DB went to his room after his ‘lecture’ and sat down with him, he would go on for two hours about the Naxalite Menace, or Tolstoy or how he saw Dirac go senile at the age of 40 (he went to England to work with Dirac, and met his match in Dirac; both were 'elsewhere' at spatially separated world points). But in between (one has to wait and watch for those golden moments) he would pass such a profound remark or two about the intricacies of his paper, that we could easily churn out half a dozen papers as offshoots, if we wished to.
Once I was struggling to ‘prove’ a hunch I had about one step in our paper which was holding it up. He was to catch a train to Bangalore to talk about 'Unsolved Problems in Physics'. (I am sure the audience there had a tough time following him). I would go to him only when I was about to give up. I went to his Quarters and asked for help. He talked and talked about extraneous things and the rickshaw arrived. Not one to give up easily, I followed him to the railway station, bent on seeing him off. Just before the train left, he made a comment: ‘Doesn't it look like a tensor transformation?’ The train steamed off and as I bicycled back to my bachelor digs, I could see that his comment solved the problem.
By the time he returned after a fortnight, I wrote up the paper. I went to his office to give him my write-up. As usual, he talked on and on for two hours about the fine time he had at Bangalore and what a wonderful city it was and how he would love to settle there after retirement (not speaking a word about how his talk went). He then asked me to give him the unsolved step and he would ‘try’ it. Baffled, I told him that he had already solved it and reminded him of his comment that ‘it looked like a tensor transformation’. He told me that he was not aware of it at all!
There goes the 'genius' at work.
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