Condensation

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Sir Biren Mookerjee and Lady Ranu Mookerjee were the toasts of Calcutta during the early sixties (their spellings too were different from the hoi polloi).

Sir Biren was the foremost industrialist when Bengal had its generous quota. He inherited, owned and developed the Iron & Steel concern Martin-Burns (later IISCO after labor troubles invaded Cal and it was nationalized).

And about Lady Mookerjee this is what wiki says:

"...In 1925, Biren Mukherjee married Ranu Adhikari, daughter of Phani Bhusan Adhikari, a professor of philosophy of the Banaras Hindu University. Ranu, later Lady Ranu (1907- 2000) was one of the exquisite beauties of her time, one of Rabindranath Tagore's closest associates since her childhood days and later became a great connoissure (sic) of art and culture..."

Biren Babu was invited as Chief Guest for our IIT KGP Convocation a year or so after I joined there. He came down with his Lady to see IIT KGP and its worldclass faculty {;-}

During those years, Convocation was held in a make-shift pandal behind Netajee Aud and so I attended it despite my claustrophobia (there was fear of fire but I was at the edge).

Biren Babu got up to speak and in a businesslike fashion told the audience that since the 12-page document of his speech is in everyone's hands, there is no need for him to read it. And he said that he would just give the gist in two sentences.

But he took ten sentences to tell a story about gisting (sorry if you heard it before):

This King had a passionate burning desire for knowledge but no time to acquire it. So, he appoints the most well-read Pundit in his kingdom to read all the books that have ever been written (along with a book grant) and tell him the gist.

The Pundit takes a decade and goes to the King offering to teach. But the King happened to be busy and so asked the pundit to take a decade more and return..and so on...for many decades.

When he lay on his death-bed, the King remembers his Pundit and calls him in and asks him to narrate the gist of all his learning in one sentence.

The Pundit rises to the occasion and says:

"Man is born, suffers and dies"

And the King dies.

That about tells how tough it is to condense voluminous literature.

My Guru SDM used to take about 9 months on the average to solve a problem, a couple of days to write up a 15-page Paper; and then a month composing its Abstract.

Talking of Abstracts I remember AIP's advice to prospective authors:

"The Abstract must be as brief as possible but not so brief that one has to go through the Paper to crack the Abstract"

I on the other hand came to know that the probability of a Paper being accepted in a phoren journal (cateris paribus) is inversely proportional to its length (the first draft). So I used to compose the Abstract first and then start writing the Paper...something like, I am told, in the Carnatic Classical Music, the aalaap covers the boundaries of the rendering.

It always worked...the revision was broader and wider.

Nowadays the newspapers are bristling with all sorts of Judicial and semi-judicial reports on various scams and these apparently run to thousands of pages.

The latest joke (for me) is that a Reporter asked the Politician blamed squarely in the Report if she is going to quit. Upon which she says: "I will answer your question after I get a copy of the Report and go through it." The Report, I am sure, is a thousand pages long.

There is a limerick I posted long time back when I read that the Charge Sheet in a canonical scam (the wife of all scams) ran into 25 steel trunks:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2009/04/satyams-chest-nuts.html

There are many condensed epics like Ekashloki Ramayan (Ramayan condensed in one shlok).

But Adi Shankara does one better. He gists the hundreds of thousands of words he wrote about his Advaita in half-a-shlok (just one line):

"Brahma satyam jaganmidhya jeevo brahmaiva naaparaha"

A couple of months before I retired, I was dumped with a thankless job of 'short-listing' for written test about 1300 applications for technical posts (I was the head of a team of 3 of our Phy Faculty). Across the whole IIT there were twenty times as many applications.

Since I was no good at short-listing, I offered to 'long-list' them...going through each application of ten pages (with supporting documents) and abstracting each in half a page. It took a month for me and my unwilling colleagues. I then quit happily to Hyderabad.

Biren Babu's Pundit was gloomy, in my opinion.

If I were asked what I find most baffling of life on this planet is, I would rather go with Yagnyavalkya's answer to his other wife Moitreyee:

"Self-Love"

Thanx!

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