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During my close encounters with my Guide SDM for over five years, I imbibed a wee bit of his perfectionism...though not his perfection.
It was a great learning experience for me to sit with him for a couple of hours while he composed the Abstracts of our joint papers. Of course he was too lazy to take his pen and paper. He would sit in his sofa and compose the Abstract aloud for me sentence by sentence. After each sentence he would grimace and say that that was not what he wanted to say. And correct it and re-correct it. And dump it bodily. And look at me while I sat stone-faced watching his slow and steady arrival at the perfect version.
It was during these sessions that I learned how to write cogent and pithy sentences when I wanted to. I guess I learned more about English composition than Physics from him.
One fine day that I thought would never arrive, he gave me the thumbs up to write my thesis and said it would take 6 months. It did. And I finally got the typed version painfully done by another perfectionist, Shyama Prosad Banerjee:
When the thing was done up, SDM said there was no need for him to read the Chapters...the referees will only read the Introduction and have a look at the attached reprints and references to see if their name is there boldly as often as possible.
So I took extreme care to get the Introduction perfect in sense and sound and grammar and punctuation and spelling without any typos...there was a rumor that a thesis from AgE Department was recently rejected on the grounds that it was unreadable and full of typos.
And gave the typescript of my Introduction to SDM who took it and asked me to meet him at his Qrs the next weekend when he would read it in my presence and make corrections. Many weekends went off, with me meeting him at his Qrs and he chatting away for six hours in each sitting on everything under the Sun except my Introduction.
And I was getting exhausted and impatient.
Finally, a blessed evening, he took out my Introduction from his bag, grimaced at it and said that he was in no mood to read it. Instead he asked me to read the damn thing aloud for his pleasure. I did it in less than an hour...before he relapsed into one of his famous chats...
He sat in his sofa closing his eyes and went into a trance. In between, he got up to visit his bathroom saying:
"The referee will learn a lot from your Introduction"
And he passed it without looking at it.
And by and by it did get passed by my 'phoren' examiners.
And SDM left KGP, and Prof HNB took over once again as our HoD. When HNB was about to retire, our Department arranged an all-India seminar on Luminescence in which HNB did path-breaking work all his life.
And I was made a Sub-Editor of the Proceedings and HNB asked me to write up my part-preface for the august publication.
And I submitted my confident 2-page essay to HNB for his approval.
HNB called me the next morning and said it was well-written except that I made a howler in the spelling of 'luminescence'...which I wrote in long hand as 'luminiscence'.
HNB smiled at me and said:
"The verb is 'luminesce'...not 'luminisce'."
My face fell.
And I recalled suddenly that the word 'luminescence' occurred once in the Introduction of my erstwhile thesis.
And I rushed home to check how I had spelled it there.
And to my consternation it was leering at me like a ghoul with my wrong spelling.
And I felt that I would have escaped this humiliation if only my great Guru, SDM, had read my Introduction rather than go into a coma merely listening to it.
There was no way I could correct my spelling in the 5 copies that went here and there...one to the US, one to the Netherlands, one to Russia, one to our CL and the last to myself...my ignominy stays in them forever...fortunately no one appears to have read it...the thesis topic was not all that fashionable.
There went my passion for perfection into the gutter.
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During my close encounters with my Guide SDM for over five years, I imbibed a wee bit of his perfectionism...though not his perfection.
It was a great learning experience for me to sit with him for a couple of hours while he composed the Abstracts of our joint papers. Of course he was too lazy to take his pen and paper. He would sit in his sofa and compose the Abstract aloud for me sentence by sentence. After each sentence he would grimace and say that that was not what he wanted to say. And correct it and re-correct it. And dump it bodily. And look at me while I sat stone-faced watching his slow and steady arrival at the perfect version.
It was during these sessions that I learned how to write cogent and pithy sentences when I wanted to. I guess I learned more about English composition than Physics from him.
One fine day that I thought would never arrive, he gave me the thumbs up to write my thesis and said it would take 6 months. It did. And I finally got the typed version painfully done by another perfectionist, Shyama Prosad Banerjee:
When the thing was done up, SDM said there was no need for him to read the Chapters...the referees will only read the Introduction and have a look at the attached reprints and references to see if their name is there boldly as often as possible.
So I took extreme care to get the Introduction perfect in sense and sound and grammar and punctuation and spelling without any typos...there was a rumor that a thesis from AgE Department was recently rejected on the grounds that it was unreadable and full of typos.
And gave the typescript of my Introduction to SDM who took it and asked me to meet him at his Qrs the next weekend when he would read it in my presence and make corrections. Many weekends went off, with me meeting him at his Qrs and he chatting away for six hours in each sitting on everything under the Sun except my Introduction.
And I was getting exhausted and impatient.
Finally, a blessed evening, he took out my Introduction from his bag, grimaced at it and said that he was in no mood to read it. Instead he asked me to read the damn thing aloud for his pleasure. I did it in less than an hour...before he relapsed into one of his famous chats...
He sat in his sofa closing his eyes and went into a trance. In between, he got up to visit his bathroom saying:
"The referee will learn a lot from your Introduction"
And he passed it without looking at it.
And by and by it did get passed by my 'phoren' examiners.
And SDM left KGP, and Prof HNB took over once again as our HoD. When HNB was about to retire, our Department arranged an all-India seminar on Luminescence in which HNB did path-breaking work all his life.
And I was made a Sub-Editor of the Proceedings and HNB asked me to write up my part-preface for the august publication.
And I submitted my confident 2-page essay to HNB for his approval.
HNB called me the next morning and said it was well-written except that I made a howler in the spelling of 'luminescence'...which I wrote in long hand as 'luminiscence'.
HNB smiled at me and said:
"The verb is 'luminesce'...not 'luminisce'."
My face fell.
And I recalled suddenly that the word 'luminescence' occurred once in the Introduction of my erstwhile thesis.
And I rushed home to check how I had spelled it there.
And to my consternation it was leering at me like a ghoul with my wrong spelling.
And I felt that I would have escaped this humiliation if only my great Guru, SDM, had read my Introduction rather than go into a coma merely listening to it.
There was no way I could correct my spelling in the 5 copies that went here and there...one to the US, one to the Netherlands, one to Russia, one to our CL and the last to myself...my ignominy stays in them forever...fortunately no one appears to have read it...the thesis topic was not all that fashionable.
There went my passion for perfection into the gutter.
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