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That was a week or so after I joined SDM. One evening, I went to him with my khata and started showing my progress in cracking his paper (his papers needed some cracking). At one step, I told him, a ‘determinant’ was missing in the denominator. He looked at me quizzically but kept quiet. I persisted. He blew his top and banged me for not knowing that the determinant of an orthogonal matrix is unity. And asked me to go read some ‘Algebra’ book; ‘not Hall & Knight’, but ‘Advanced Algebra’ (to rub salt into the wound). My face fell. I gathered my khata and oozed out of his room. That was the only scolding I got from him, but that was too much to bear. I was shattered.
One weakness of SDM was that he had ‘no roof to his mouth’. The next day, some of my colleagues were sniggering at me in the corridor. I came to know that SDM spread the word that ‘Shastry’s math is katcha’. A lesser soul would have given up going to his room. Well, I am not a lesser soul, and I continued my daily visits. He seemed a little sorry for giving such ‘treatment’ to who, after all, was his colleague. But he said nothing and we had our daily sessions.
Meanwhile I read up all the books on Algebra available in the Library. (Didn’t HNB say that SDM would teach me all the math I needed!)
One year down the line, one day when I was sitting in his room, I found him quietly chuckling. Apparently, he dispatched ‘his’ paper (I think to the Annals of Physics, U.S.A.) that morning. He showed me one step in his manuscript where he was proving a complicated numerator to be exactly zero. He then mentioned that it took 3 DAYS of ‘lengthy calculation’ for him. He challenged anyone, including the referee, to do that calculation in 15 days!
That evening I went to the Library and took down one of the Algebra texts I waded through earlier. After half an hour, I came up with a little known lemma: ‘The cofactor matrix of the cofactor matrix of a 3x3 singular matrix is a null matrix’. (I think I recall well.) That required two steps to prove. Applying it to his ‘numerator’ I got his result in 15 ‘minutes’.
I awaited his entry to his room next morning. He was perplexed, because we met only in the evenings. Then I read aloud the lemma I found, and he started shaking while pulling his manuscript out of his bag. He heaved a sigh of great relief when he saw that he didn’t include his 3 page long ‘proof’ in his manuscript; just out of sheer mischief, playing with the referee (This was one of his other weaknesses. He was always afraid that if he showed his steps, the referee would say that it was all trivial. This turned out to be a good ploy in this paper; but made many of his later papers rather opaque. One shouldn’t play games with referees, when there is no need to do so.)
Then onwards he tried to propagate in equal measure that ‘Shastry has a great insight into math’. That was SDM for you! Very even-handed. Silly, but, of course it didn’t catch on. But, he did remark that I knew that it should be zero, whereas he had only a hunch. Very true! Nonetheless, I did win a handsome Acknowledgment in ‘his’ paper (Not easy, not easy, as Professor G. S. Sanyal would put it, shaking his head in his inimitable style)!
But my troubles had no end. One week after he gave me that sound drubbing, there was this cussed “Doc Screw” meeting. SDM proposed that I should be asked to take; (1) Complex Variables, (2) Partial Differential Equations (both at the M.Sc. level in Math Department), and (3) German (that weakness for Gottingen that was prevalent those days) as my ‘Course Work’.
Anyone else would have felt this was a mean trick on me. The going rule was that Ph.D. students be given M.Tech., not M.Sc. courses as their Course Work. But I thought that was fine with me because I had already taken all of them in my M.Sc. and these were listed in my transcripts.
The teacher of Partial Differential Equations in Math Dept was lenient when I showed him my soiled Sneddon’s tome and my transcripts. I was excused from attending classes and taking the exams.
Then I went to the German teacher, a soft spoken bhadralog who I discovered later on was as tough as nuts and bolts. I showed him my M.Sc. Degree Certificate where it was written ‘German’ against the compulsory foreign language. He smiled and mentioned softly that that degree was a decade old (as if the German language had undergone a metamorphosis in that decade), and asked me to attend all the classes and take all the tests. Phew!
The Complex Variable teacher, a revered old man, was even more uncompromising. I showed him my ‘Complex Variables’ course in my transcripts. But, he said he had his own ‘way’ of teaching that subject and I would immensely benefit from his lectures. He even changed his ‘routine’ kindly to accommodate my off-hours. He didn’t relent. So, I had to sneak into the Math Department and try and sit inconspicuously in the back row, while my ex-students of First Year were sitting in the front row and wondering what gps was doing back out there. That was not all. He used to throw a question and when none of his regular students could answer it, he would ask me to stand up and answer it for the students’ benefit. Everyone would start looking back and it was thoroughly embarrassing for both. And, he insisted that I take the exams with them. And he ‘circulated’ my mid-term answer script as a role model. DAMN!
So goes the Ph.D. I won….’Agony and Ecstasy’.
Moral: There is a very beautiful Telugu poem which I quote verbatim, transliterated into English:
This is part of a famous ‘Vemana Shatakam’, translated into English by C. P. Brown in the early 19 th century. I can’t get hold of the English version. Ask any Telugu friend of yours to translate it for you. Briefly, I give just the meaning:
‘The Dhobi thrashes soiled clothes, and hassles them; And then he removes the dirt and presses them into wonderful wear. Just so, what if a Guru, who dispels your ignorance, slaps you once in a while!’
Slap or Stimulus?
One weakness of SDM was that he had ‘no roof to his mouth’. The next day, some of my colleagues were sniggering at me in the corridor. I came to know that SDM spread the word that ‘Shastry’s math is katcha’. A lesser soul would have given up going to his room. Well, I am not a lesser soul, and I continued my daily visits. He seemed a little sorry for giving such ‘treatment’ to who, after all, was his colleague. But he said nothing and we had our daily sessions.
Meanwhile I read up all the books on Algebra available in the Library. (Didn’t HNB say that SDM would teach me all the math I needed!)
One year down the line, one day when I was sitting in his room, I found him quietly chuckling. Apparently, he dispatched ‘his’ paper (I think to the Annals of Physics, U.S.A.) that morning. He showed me one step in his manuscript where he was proving a complicated numerator to be exactly zero. He then mentioned that it took 3 DAYS of ‘lengthy calculation’ for him. He challenged anyone, including the referee, to do that calculation in 15 days!
That evening I went to the Library and took down one of the Algebra texts I waded through earlier. After half an hour, I came up with a little known lemma: ‘The cofactor matrix of the cofactor matrix of a 3x3 singular matrix is a null matrix’. (I think I recall well.) That required two steps to prove. Applying it to his ‘numerator’ I got his result in 15 ‘minutes’.
I awaited his entry to his room next morning. He was perplexed, because we met only in the evenings. Then I read aloud the lemma I found, and he started shaking while pulling his manuscript out of his bag. He heaved a sigh of great relief when he saw that he didn’t include his 3 page long ‘proof’ in his manuscript; just out of sheer mischief, playing with the referee (This was one of his other weaknesses. He was always afraid that if he showed his steps, the referee would say that it was all trivial. This turned out to be a good ploy in this paper; but made many of his later papers rather opaque. One shouldn’t play games with referees, when there is no need to do so.)
Then onwards he tried to propagate in equal measure that ‘Shastry has a great insight into math’. That was SDM for you! Very even-handed. Silly, but, of course it didn’t catch on. But, he did remark that I knew that it should be zero, whereas he had only a hunch. Very true! Nonetheless, I did win a handsome Acknowledgment in ‘his’ paper (Not easy, not easy, as Professor G. S. Sanyal would put it, shaking his head in his inimitable style)!
But my troubles had no end. One week after he gave me that sound drubbing, there was this cussed “Doc Screw” meeting. SDM proposed that I should be asked to take; (1) Complex Variables, (2) Partial Differential Equations (both at the M.Sc. level in Math Department), and (3) German (that weakness for Gottingen that was prevalent those days) as my ‘Course Work’.
Anyone else would have felt this was a mean trick on me. The going rule was that Ph.D. students be given M.Tech., not M.Sc. courses as their Course Work. But I thought that was fine with me because I had already taken all of them in my M.Sc. and these were listed in my transcripts.
The teacher of Partial Differential Equations in Math Dept was lenient when I showed him my soiled Sneddon’s tome and my transcripts. I was excused from attending classes and taking the exams.
Then I went to the German teacher, a soft spoken bhadralog who I discovered later on was as tough as nuts and bolts. I showed him my M.Sc. Degree Certificate where it was written ‘German’ against the compulsory foreign language. He smiled and mentioned softly that that degree was a decade old (as if the German language had undergone a metamorphosis in that decade), and asked me to attend all the classes and take all the tests. Phew!
The Complex Variable teacher, a revered old man, was even more uncompromising. I showed him my ‘Complex Variables’ course in my transcripts. But, he said he had his own ‘way’ of teaching that subject and I would immensely benefit from his lectures. He even changed his ‘routine’ kindly to accommodate my off-hours. He didn’t relent. So, I had to sneak into the Math Department and try and sit inconspicuously in the back row, while my ex-students of First Year were sitting in the front row and wondering what gps was doing back out there. That was not all. He used to throw a question and when none of his regular students could answer it, he would ask me to stand up and answer it for the students’ benefit. Everyone would start looking back and it was thoroughly embarrassing for both. And, he insisted that I take the exams with them. And he ‘circulated’ my mid-term answer script as a role model. DAMN!
So goes the Ph.D. I won….’Agony and Ecstasy’.
Moral: There is a very beautiful Telugu poem which I quote verbatim, transliterated into English:
Chaaki kokaludiki cheekaaku padajesi
Maila deesi lessa madichinatulu
Buddhi cheppuvaadu gudditenemayaa
Visvadaabhiraama vinura Vemaa!
This is part of a famous ‘Vemana Shatakam’, translated into English by C. P. Brown in the early 19 th century. I can’t get hold of the English version. Ask any Telugu friend of yours to translate it for you. Briefly, I give just the meaning:
‘The Dhobi thrashes soiled clothes, and hassles them; And then he removes the dirt and presses them into wonderful wear. Just so, what if a Guru, who dispels your ignorance, slaps you once in a while!’
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