Secretfreaks

=========================================================================

Prof R and I joined the Phy Dept at KGP the same day in May 1965. He was ten years older to me (but married two years later), a perfect gentleman and a great teacher. Since we joined the same time, we were rather thrown together, sharing the same room in the Dept, the same Hostel, and the same Bachelors Flat (BF-1/6) for a while later.

On our way to the Registry with our Offer Letters to 'join', he asked me if I was a Lecturer or Associate Lecturer. I said: "Ass Lecturer". I guessed that he was joining as a Lecturer and asked him how many advance increments he got. He kept quiet and changed the topic and said: "KGP is very warm in May"

After a while, we were both shooed to our Independent Qrs, he happy and I sad, because he was planning to bring his mother to stay with him; and I hated the enormous Qrs (C-23) with its huge unkempt front and backyards. It was so lonely.

Within a month one day I returned from the Dept for lunch and found that my front lock was broken and the burglar had snitched my bag of rice and my spare shirt and pants...like Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, that's all the property I had there. I ran to the Police Station and brought a Policeman with me thinking that the Bengal Police was like Scotland Yard and would take fingerprints and catch the thief in an hour or so and restore my bag of rice. Prof R got to know it and accompanied the Policeman. And the fat-cat, instead of taking fingerprints, started quizzing me on my very personal habits, to which I was responding as best as I could. And I offered, in my enthusiasm, my worst-kept secret: "I keep my cash in my Feynman Volumes though" The cop smoked a couple of my fags and quit.

Then all hell broke loose...Prof R chastising me for leaking out my stealth-wealth. I asked him what is the harm...the Police was trying to help me, no? And he was aghast: "Don't you know that the thieves of Bengal are in the pay of their Police (or is it the other way round)?...Change your hiding place immediately...(to your Webster!)"

When I narrated this incident to DB much later, he said the Delhi University (where he was an RS under the famous Theoretical Physicist, SNB) had a different take on theft. Apparently, within a week of his joining, he met his Guide who warned him sternly:

"Throw your cash wherever you like in the Department...no one is going to touch it...but always keep our calculations, particularly, the Feynman Diagrams, under lock and key"

DB ran away from Delhi as soon as he could and joined KGP to work with SDM, who had his own fears about his calculations. SDM's problem was that while he was working with his Research Scholars and juniors like me and DB, he was intent on publishing at least one paper per year all by himself. He was honest enough to admit that in a collaboration where ideas are a two-way street, it is tough to say which idea is whose because there is always a synergy (a term he never used). But still...he wanted one single-author paper per year.

One afternoon at lunch hour, SDM landed on the lawn bench beside me in our Faculty Hostel where I was relaxing, and proposed something curious. Apparently he and his Research Scholar had just published a lovely Paper on the Volume Element of SU(3) and sort of split in a huff...he could never pull on with his young Scholars. And that morning he happened to go to the Library and 'discovered' that his RS was sitting in a cubicle with a huge Drawing Sheet spread in front of him; and SDM happened to 'oversee' that his RS was trying to get the Volume Element of SU(4). And SDM told me with a purple rush in his face: "I already did it on my own and sent the manuscript to Annals of Physics yesterday!" And he discreetly asked me if I could find a way to inform this piece of sad news to his RS. I assured him that he must have been mistaken and left it at that...

I knew that there were terrible wartime secrets in the making of those 'atom bombs' and there were code words like: "Natives are friendly", not to talk of our own smiling Buddha...but to think that Feynman Diagrams at the DU and Volume Elements of SU(4) belonged to that category was and still is beyond me.

Much later, when SDM left KGP and joined Vishvabharati as the HoD of Math, both DB and he were extending their joint work on the Master Analytic Functions of various Groups, a longstanding invention of SDM. One day DB got a postcard from SDM asking him to immediately rush to Vishvabharati, and on returning, DB was all smiles when he told me the story of how SDM was in tears and blurted out: "I just don't have the time for completing this calculation (DB said he must have found a more interesting another)...I am laying all my cards on the table before you...will you please join me in this problem?"; and of course DB jumped at the offer, and they continued their long-distance collaboration.

Later I read hilarious stories of how Experimental Particle Physicists hunting for new particles were hogging Accelerator Time trying to secretly outwit their 'opponents'.

Since I never did any front-line cutting-edge research, I never could understand this secrecy...I always thought that the business of Physics was to pry the secrets of Nature from Her heart...

==========================================================================