Dr Dracula

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This evening while flipping through the modest collection of books in my shelf looking for something which I now completely forget, I chanced on a paperback titled: 'The Inscrutable Americans' by Anurag Mathur.

The Inside Front Cover had this inscription in graphic letters with double shades: "To....'Sir'....From the Class of '98".

Let me see. That makes it IM's notorious batch (they squeezed TWO wholesale and many retail Parties from my wife @Home). The handwriting is feminine. Kripa is too shy and Arundhuti too proud. So, it must be Dora (whatever happened to her?...lost touch after a fairly turbulent decade. The last I saw her was on a short visit to us by herelf & Kingshuk, both of whom were fed up with their lucrative Software jobs and were dying to return to Physics...they took away IM's QM Lecture Notes from my bookshelf).

I can visualize the scene before that Great Farewell Party at my Qrs. In return for or in anticipation of: (1) Good food, (2) Inflated Grades, (3) Mythical Recos, my students often decide that a 'book' will serve as a Revenge Gift. They could have asked me, and, I would have said, like AC, the BC Roy Hall Lotus Eater: "Cash Please!". But they had to give me this book instead. This went on for decades. After educating me in the Class Room, in my Office after each Class, they still felt that I needed more of it; and always gifted me what they thought I needed by way of improving my cobweb mind, in the best of my interest. You might not have noticed it, but I am rather a sentimental bum (there we go again!). And I always read the books my students gifted me, come what may, with one sole exception to which I shall return presently.

The chap who was convinced that my education was totally inadequate was a somewhat fiery, combative, idealistic Bengali student (you may say they are all are like that, but some are more like that). His name is Amitava Chatterjee. After fighting long listless battles in the Physics Dept at KGP, he took it up to Bloomington, and then to Chicago(?) and then simply vanished from my Radar.

Anyway, while he was in his Final Year, he led a campaign that it was high time that GR was taught in our M Sc Physics Curriculum. Since there was none in GR after SDM retired and GB retired hurt, and none was willing to read up and teach a new subject, he fell after me. Those were the days when Hawking and Black Holes were looming in the KGP Event Horizon. He first gifted me Hawking's 'Brief History of Time' which was rather diverting, after my attempts to read that absolutely unreadable 'Large Scale Structure of Spacetime' by Hawking & Ellis. He then gifted me 'Surely You are Joking, Mr Feynman' which contained more Physics than his Lectures did if only you care to tease it out (Only yesterday VK and me were talking on phone about his Extinction Theorem idea in Brazil). And I learned the basic physics of 'Least/Most Action Principle' of GR by his teaser of the Rocket Clock to an unwiiitng Grad-student of Einstein.

Under the 'hallu' of Amitabh's 'inspiration prick', I borrowed the most wonderful tome: 'Gravitation & Cosmology' by Weinberg and spent a year working out its first 12 Chapters in two fat Khatas. And he inspired his Junior batch of Somnath et al to sign a Mass Representation to the HoD asking for a Course in GR. Nothing came out of that 'Memorandum of (mis)Understanding' for various non-academic but valid reasons. The infusion of GR into our UG Curriculum had to wait a good decade till Somnath & Sayan joined the Dept and I happened to be the unwilling Chairman of the UG Committee. The first thing I did after this fresh talent joined us was to ask them to write a brand new syllabus (after 20 years) giving them absolute freedom. They did it to their heart's content and I saw to it that it got pushed through.

Amitav's dream had to wait for a decade. Indeed when my wife and I hapened to meet and chat with Sayan over cups of Hot Chai in a Dhaba at Kolaghat by prior appointment as our ways crossed this January on the Calcutta-Bombay Highway, a couple of newer recruits were passing by and accosted Sayan, who introduced me to them as 'the gps responsible for Syllabus Revision' (Mark Antony was plain wrong: "the good is oft not interred with their bones").

However, my year of working out Weinberg was not laid to waste, because about half a dozen very eager Project students benefited from it year after year and many of them made their mark in Astrophysics and Cosmology as a fruitful career. A determined teacher inspired by his students can deliver...if only by proxy.

Then Amitabh returned to KGP from the US on his first summer vacation (he was a Campus Boy). The very first day, he dumped the brand-new American Edition of MQM by Sakurai, with the beautiful CG Series Block Diagonal Matrix on its Cover, and ordered me to read it and return it in just one month; and teach it to his juniors. Which I did, as commanded by him for the rest of my life at KGP! Day before yesterday, Krish and I were talking of this book which Krish referred to as 'one in a zillion' a long time ago when he was visiting us from Maryland.

Only the other day I was talking to VK that I was a Dracula sucking the blood of students. With the difference that after slaking my blood-thirst I did that of their juniors as well.

This Dracula thing was first said by SDM in his Farewell Function. While replying to the usual encomiums suited to the occasion, he said: "Few people know that I have been a Dracula all my life: When young students talk to me I get ideas which they don't see. I work on them and publish papers with them as Part I and without them as part II, III etc. The work is mine but the ideas 'spring' from their innocent questions."

How true!

Coming to the one in the dozen exceptions: Mahadevan & Raheja of Moitreyi's batch (which had the ZC I gulled about, as well as SSG) dumped on me a 'popular' book on 'Superstrings' written by obvious experts. In spite of several attempts, I could never wade through it and gave it up. String Theory is one subject which I could never digest, but unlike Hittorf, it didn't make me unhappy.

Coming to Hittorf (I think I am right), I read this story in Sommerfeld's: 'Electrodynamics'.

Now, an aside [this is becoming Pancha Tantra (stories looped within more stories)]: SDM's eyes used to 'glow' whenever he uttered the word: 'Sommerfeld'. Obviously a fan (punkha, in the IIT lingo): Sommerfeld was not only such a genius in Physics & Math, but also a great teacher building schools, unlike Einstein.

SDM and DB used to play with Sommerfeld-Watson Transformation in almost everyone of their CG Papers. Thereby hangs a tale. After SDM left. DB got an invite for a one-year fully-paid trip to KBW's Mexico City (that was the brief period in Mexico's recent history when she was basking on her Petro-Dollars). DB landed in Mexico trying to 'collaborate' and benefit from KBW.

It was like that infamous 'Bolus'. Bolus is a morsel of food mixed with drug administered by Veterinary Doctors to their animals, typically ill bulls. The Doctor takes a hollow pipe, inserts the bolus at its one end and keeping the bolus end of the pipe in the bull's throat, he puts its other end in his mouth, and blows the bolus down the throat of the bull.

One fine day, the Bull blew first!

Likewise, DB came to know that KBW wanted to learn Sommerfeld-Watson Transformation from him first hand. After learning it, KBW vanished on, first a vacation, then a Sabbatical, leaving DB in the lurch. Nothing much came of that one year, except a 2-bedroom apartment in North Calcutta.

Coming back to Hittorf, a Senior Professor of Physics & Chemistry at Munster, his brilliant young students gifted him the brand-new 2-Volume Set of young Maxwell's 'Elecricity & Magnetism' just hot from the Cambridge University Press. Hittorf eagerly carried the Volumes home and stopped coming to the University for a week. His colleagues and students were concerned by this unusual absence of Hittorf, and visited his Home. Only to find that Hittorf was lolling in his bed declining to eat or sleep. On persistent questioning, his wife told them that he turned morose ever since he brought those books home. He was taken to their Family Physician who discovered that Hittorf was depressed that such a Senior Professor such as he was, he couldn't make out a single Equation of the young & upstart Maxwell.

The Physician advised the students to see that Hittorf takes a Holiday for a month in a nearby Beach Resort. And while doing a final check-in of his trunk, his students found that the 2 cussed Maxwell Volumes were hidden wrapped up in a long coat!

My case was not that bad. I gifted that weird Superstrings Book to the Physics Library, with Best Compliments.

By the way, I too applied the Sommerfeld-Watson Transformation converting a definite real integral into a Contour Integral and got a wonderful result.

Only, Dr Annapurna of Math showed me that it could be done by Partial Fractions which Class XI students learn.

Talk of cracking a pea with a sledge-hammer!


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