====================================================================
Seven Ages of a Lying Man
They say that everyone remembers their first kiss. I doubt it. Born during the height of the Second World War into an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family in an ultraconservative society, my first kiss was on our wedding night (no lies here). It happened at the ripe age of 36 on a stuffy moonless night when there were more pressing matters to attend to.
But I distinctly remember my first lie. It happened at the tender age of 3. Since then I must have lied a hundred times, but they were pure routine.
I have a great regard for Truth in the Abstract. Left to myself I would never have uttered a single lie. I am not one of those artistic liars who lie compulsively even to themselves. All my lies were forced upon me by others.
Though a ‘super’ dramatist and a ‘sensitive’ poet, Shakespeare was also an ‘able’ Accountant: he broke up the Life of Man neatly into Seven Ages, as is well known. I think I can cut up and package my lies into seven ages and stages of my life (such as it is):
1. Innocent Lies (below 4)
2. Student Lies (well known)
3. Teacher Lies (little known and less advertised)
4. Interview lies (for career advancement)
5. Marital lies (both pre- and post-)
6. Financial lies (PF Loans)
7. Smiling lies (ripe old age).
I now dwell on the first and the last.
First the last, the Smiling Lies. At 66 these are uttered mostly to my mother (87) and to my wife (59).
My mother asked me soon after my son’s marriage what my daughter-in-law’s salary was. I smiled and lied that I didn’t know.
A week back I did a crazy thing: going alone in a taxi touring South India for a week. On my way back I dropped at my mother’s place. She promptly asked me what the trip cost. I smiled and replied that the driver is my good friend and doesn’t charge me a single penny and drives me around with me by his side in the front seat, just for the pleasure of my witty company.
She too smiled knowingly.
I hunt all over Hyderabad for used books and get hold of a couple of very old bound volumes of antique Wodehouse donated or sold or got rid of by the great-grandson of a book-lover who bought and read them with pleasure a century ago.
My wife asks me what they cost. I reply: ‘A million dollars’.
I now come to my first lie which I cherish.
I was 3 and was playing marbles in our village street one afternoon. My father was busy penning a post card in which he used to squeeze about a thousand words of calligraphy (he ought to have attached a magnifying glass). There was then a sudden uproar as some old lady in our rented complex spotted a green snake on a green tree in our compound (she must have been on the lookout; no TVs then). My father was summoned to do the needful and he was too chivalrous to refuse.
But since it was past tine for clearing the neighborhood post box, he sent me to the Village Head Post Office with a complicated instruction:
I was to post this card if he didn’t have any incoming mail. If there was any post card meant for him (no one ever wrote anything but post cards thon), I should bring back his outgoing card without posting it, along with the incoming card.
The thing looked pretty clear to me.
But when I reached the Post Office, our ‘Friendly Neighborhood Postman’ cuddled and lifted me and showered me with stinking kisses (I must have been pretty cute or he never saw a kid of 3 handling a post card). He snatched the card from me, defaced it with a thud, and tossed it into its pigeon hole.
I was trying to swiftly return home to my playmates, but he stopped me and asked me to wait. He then scanned his stack of ‘Incoming Sheaf of Cards for Delivery’, and found one for my father.
He handed it to me asked me to RUN!
On my slow and pondering and thoughtful and guilty walk back home, I tore up the nasty card in my hands (which felt like a slithering slippery green snake) into small bits and pieces and scattered them all along the roadside one by one.
My father was back at his desk and asked me if I had posted the card. I said ‘yes’. He asked if he had no incoming cards. I said: ’no’.
I had eaten the forbidden Apple in my Garden of Eden and never looked back.
Oh, well! I am no George Washington, who was too truthful to be scared of his father in the Cherry Tree episode. But he was 6 then and his father was no Headmaster!
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Rain Drops and Pearls
======================================================
It was a late rainy evening of lyrical Bengal Monsoon in 1985. To keep ourselves out of mischief, my 4-year old son and I were tossing a shuttle cock in our spacious hall of the Faculty Quarters at IIT Kharagpur.
There was a honk and I found two gentlemen knocking at our door. Dripping wet, they alighted from the only Maruti car in the campus driven by my colleague, the Professor-in-Charge of Training and Placement, who holds as it were the future of the final year students in the hollow of his palm.
The other was a short fair well-built eminence with prematurely thinning hair, 30-ish. The features looked vaguely familiar but not the figure. I welcomed them in; and the T & P Professor introduced the gentleman as Dr. Moorty, the Personnel Manager of TVS, Madras. And I was told that Dr. Moorty generally sends an officer two rungs below him for campus recruitment, but he himself flew down this time to KGP just so he could meet me.
I was a little nonplussed and embarrassed not being able to place him firmly. But we teachers learn how to hide our ignorance and keep the small talk going. We talked of this and that, cabbages and kings, how TVS is doing, how the IITians were faring; and the weather, over cups of hot chai and biscuits for a pleasant half hour.
Before taking leave, Dr. Moorty touched my feet and pushed a sealed envelope into my pocket.
Later, upon opening the envelope, I found 5 crisp 100 Rupee notes and a small ThanQ slip explaining things.
And then it all came back to me as if in a flashback:
More than a decade earlier when I was a carefree bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel, I got a post card in an unknown hand from an unknown Moorty, who said he got my address from a friend of my friend. It turned out that Moorty didn’t do all that well in his B.A. (English) and so had to grab a seat in M. A. (Psychology) which was the only one available for his score at our alma mater at Waltair. And he didn’t do all that well in M. A. either and was footloose at the moment. He asked me if I could please find some opening for him at IIT KGP.
I was amused at Moorty’s temerity: IIT is an Institute of so-called National Importance in Science & Technology; not in Psychology!
I was inclined to trash the post card when it occurred to me that there IS a small service Department of Humanities, so why not make a trip. It turned out that just that year a young Faculty member in Industrial Psychology was recruited at IIT. I met the gentleman and showed him the post card half expecting a rebuke.
But the young man bade me sit down and asked me to immediately wire Moorty to come down with his original certificates. I came to know that this newcomer was bent on starting a one-year Diploma Course in Industrial Psychology that year itself. The minimum number of students required to run a course was an inflexible 4, but since this was a new course, the entry criteria could be relaxed. He could find 3 candidates in the short time available (they were young campus ladies), and was waiting eagerly for a fourth.
Rest is fairytale: the lean young boyish Moorty joined the brand new Diploma Course which paid a handsome stipend of Rs. 400 p.m., did well in the course work under his guide’s close supervision, did his Project studiously at the fledgling IIM Calcutta, got into IIM’s Fellowship Program, completed his Ph. D. in record time, was absorbed as Manager (H. R.) in the Paper Mill at Rajamundry, changed jobs quickly over a couple of years, landed the plum job of Personnel Manager in TVS at a tender age, got happily married, had an infant son, and all was hunky-dory except that something was gnawing his conscience:
Apparently, while at IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student, his fellowship fell a little short of the city expenses, and he had come down once to KGP (the local train fare being Rs. 3) to borrow from me Rs. 50….a thing I vaguely forgot.
That explained his ‘recruiting visit’ to KGP…. to redeem his long-standing debt with a whopping Interest!
There is a charming folklore in A. P. which goes like this: In the dead of the dark monsoon midnight when the Swati Constellation is at zenith in the sky, the thirsty oyster surfaces with its mouth wide open, waiting for a tiny rain drop to fall into it. Its thirst quenched, it clams up and dives down and goes hibernating. After 3 months, lo and behold, the rain drop turns into a glowing pearl of such purity and brilliance that no hi-tech-pearl-culture-technology can ever hope to match.
Moral: The chosen rain drop that finds the oyster’s waiting open mouth turns into a pearl; while its million unlucky friends miss it, slip into the water, merge into the sea, and get lost!
It was a late rainy evening of lyrical Bengal Monsoon in 1985. To keep ourselves out of mischief, my 4-year old son and I were tossing a shuttle cock in our spacious hall of the Faculty Quarters at IIT Kharagpur.
There was a honk and I found two gentlemen knocking at our door. Dripping wet, they alighted from the only Maruti car in the campus driven by my colleague, the Professor-in-Charge of Training and Placement, who holds as it were the future of the final year students in the hollow of his palm.
The other was a short fair well-built eminence with prematurely thinning hair, 30-ish. The features looked vaguely familiar but not the figure. I welcomed them in; and the T & P Professor introduced the gentleman as Dr. Moorty, the Personnel Manager of TVS, Madras. And I was told that Dr. Moorty generally sends an officer two rungs below him for campus recruitment, but he himself flew down this time to KGP just so he could meet me.
I was a little nonplussed and embarrassed not being able to place him firmly. But we teachers learn how to hide our ignorance and keep the small talk going. We talked of this and that, cabbages and kings, how TVS is doing, how the IITians were faring; and the weather, over cups of hot chai and biscuits for a pleasant half hour.
Before taking leave, Dr. Moorty touched my feet and pushed a sealed envelope into my pocket.
Later, upon opening the envelope, I found 5 crisp 100 Rupee notes and a small ThanQ slip explaining things.
And then it all came back to me as if in a flashback:
More than a decade earlier when I was a carefree bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel, I got a post card in an unknown hand from an unknown Moorty, who said he got my address from a friend of my friend. It turned out that Moorty didn’t do all that well in his B.A. (English) and so had to grab a seat in M. A. (Psychology) which was the only one available for his score at our alma mater at Waltair. And he didn’t do all that well in M. A. either and was footloose at the moment. He asked me if I could please find some opening for him at IIT KGP.
I was amused at Moorty’s temerity: IIT is an Institute of so-called National Importance in Science & Technology; not in Psychology!
I was inclined to trash the post card when it occurred to me that there IS a small service Department of Humanities, so why not make a trip. It turned out that just that year a young Faculty member in Industrial Psychology was recruited at IIT. I met the gentleman and showed him the post card half expecting a rebuke.
But the young man bade me sit down and asked me to immediately wire Moorty to come down with his original certificates. I came to know that this newcomer was bent on starting a one-year Diploma Course in Industrial Psychology that year itself. The minimum number of students required to run a course was an inflexible 4, but since this was a new course, the entry criteria could be relaxed. He could find 3 candidates in the short time available (they were young campus ladies), and was waiting eagerly for a fourth.
Rest is fairytale: the lean young boyish Moorty joined the brand new Diploma Course which paid a handsome stipend of Rs. 400 p.m., did well in the course work under his guide’s close supervision, did his Project studiously at the fledgling IIM Calcutta, got into IIM’s Fellowship Program, completed his Ph. D. in record time, was absorbed as Manager (H. R.) in the Paper Mill at Rajamundry, changed jobs quickly over a couple of years, landed the plum job of Personnel Manager in TVS at a tender age, got happily married, had an infant son, and all was hunky-dory except that something was gnawing his conscience:
Apparently, while at IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student, his fellowship fell a little short of the city expenses, and he had come down once to KGP (the local train fare being Rs. 3) to borrow from me Rs. 50….a thing I vaguely forgot.
That explained his ‘recruiting visit’ to KGP…. to redeem his long-standing debt with a whopping Interest!
There is a charming folklore in A. P. which goes like this: In the dead of the dark monsoon midnight when the Swati Constellation is at zenith in the sky, the thirsty oyster surfaces with its mouth wide open, waiting for a tiny rain drop to fall into it. Its thirst quenched, it clams up and dives down and goes hibernating. After 3 months, lo and behold, the rain drop turns into a glowing pearl of such purity and brilliance that no hi-tech-pearl-culture-technology can ever hope to match.
Moral: The chosen rain drop that finds the oyster’s waiting open mouth turns into a pearl; while its million unlucky friends miss it, slip into the water, merge into the sea, and get lost!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Majority Bullying
===========================================================================
“As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.”
- Mark Twain…70th Birthday Speech
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
...when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon -- they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!
- Mark Twain… Letter to Joseph Twichell, 19 Dec 1870
============================================================
There ought to be a law against Majority Bullying. What are the Human Rights Organizations doing? They ought to shut shop and go home in shame.
..gps…forever yours truly
===============================================================
My son doesn’t smoke; It is not that he tried and didn’t like it…..he never tried:
“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have smoked and quit
Than never to have smoked at all.”
….gps…..with apologies to Tennyson’s ‘In Memorium’
=================================================================================
My son’s colleagues are born smokers. I asked him what they do during the grueling 15-hour Trans-Atlantic flight where there is no ‘smoking zone’. He said that they puff 5 cigarettes before boarding and repeat it as soon as the flight lands.
This is blasphemy……every smoker knows it doesn’t work that way. It is worse than Hell to be put to so much suffering.
I am now no devotee of smoking…but I rebel against the authorities who don’t take care of the human rights of smokers.
Wine, spirits and alcohol flow freely, courtesy hospitality… during those 15 long hours.
Why?
Smoking can’t be a fire hazard. Technology can take care of it if it is. Alcohol is a worse flight hazard….ask our Maharashtrian Minister of yore who got ‘higher’ than the aircraft and mollycoddled the air hostess with such intense fervor that the cockpit crew had to leave the plane unattended trying to dissuade him.
Smoking should be ‘discouraged’ but not ‘prohibited’. No ‘prohibition’ ever works. The US Govt tried it with alcohol between the World Wars and failed miserably and gave it up forever. Ask the Gujerat Govt how far they have succeeded.
Our own Ramadoss tried to ‘ban’ smoking; Come to Hyderabad to see for yourselves how effective that ‘ban’ is. The silliest thing a Govt could do is to pass a law or decree that can’t be enforced. It becomes the laughing stock of the governed.
Compared to smoking, drinking is a far worse evil. During the past one year our Apartment Complex had to change 6 watchmen to get one who doesn’t drink, get high, beat up his wife and kids and become a terror to the maids. We haven’t yet succeeded.
But Ramadoss couldn’t care!
It is silly to argue that smokers suffer and die miserably of lung cancer in the long run. There is no part of this lousy human body which is not prone to cancer, suffering, and cruel death,
My best friend and ex-colleague, a goody-goody chaste Brahmin who never smoked nor drunk nor ate meat nor ever told a lie died at the tender age of 50 suffering long from prostate cancer. And my most revered ‘teacher of teachers’ is going strong at 85 following Mark Twain’s obiter dicta to the letter.
To say that smoking should be ‘banned’ as it inflicts death on ‘passive-smoking onlookers’ is equally silly. Pass a law that smokers should not smoke if anyone around objects. That is a law which can be enforced and is very civil to everyone.
This train of thought is due to something funny that happened today: I always take my delicious Iranian Chai here in a joint which displays boldly the mandatory slogan: ‘No Smoking….By Govt Order’. But everyone there smokes nonchalantly and no one ever complains. Today however, a gentleman occupied the seat opposite me, pulled out his stick, and said: ‘Ahem..may I please smoke?’.
I replied: “I come here only to enjoy free ‘passive smoking’ because my medico wife prohibited expensive ‘active smoking’ on our first wedding anniversary……thank you and please go ahead; and LONG LIVE SENSIBLE SMOKERS!”
“As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.”
- Mark Twain…70th Birthday Speech
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
...when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon -- they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!
- Mark Twain… Letter to Joseph Twichell, 19 Dec 1870
============================================================
There ought to be a law against Majority Bullying. What are the Human Rights Organizations doing? They ought to shut shop and go home in shame.
..gps…forever yours truly
===============================================================
My son doesn’t smoke; It is not that he tried and didn’t like it…..he never tried:
“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have smoked and quit
Than never to have smoked at all.”
….gps…..with apologies to Tennyson’s ‘In Memorium’
=================================================================================
My son’s colleagues are born smokers. I asked him what they do during the grueling 15-hour Trans-Atlantic flight where there is no ‘smoking zone’. He said that they puff 5 cigarettes before boarding and repeat it as soon as the flight lands.
This is blasphemy……every smoker knows it doesn’t work that way. It is worse than Hell to be put to so much suffering.
I am now no devotee of smoking…but I rebel against the authorities who don’t take care of the human rights of smokers.
Wine, spirits and alcohol flow freely, courtesy hospitality… during those 15 long hours.
Why?
Smoking can’t be a fire hazard. Technology can take care of it if it is. Alcohol is a worse flight hazard….ask our Maharashtrian Minister of yore who got ‘higher’ than the aircraft and mollycoddled the air hostess with such intense fervor that the cockpit crew had to leave the plane unattended trying to dissuade him.
Smoking should be ‘discouraged’ but not ‘prohibited’. No ‘prohibition’ ever works. The US Govt tried it with alcohol between the World Wars and failed miserably and gave it up forever. Ask the Gujerat Govt how far they have succeeded.
Our own Ramadoss tried to ‘ban’ smoking; Come to Hyderabad to see for yourselves how effective that ‘ban’ is. The silliest thing a Govt could do is to pass a law or decree that can’t be enforced. It becomes the laughing stock of the governed.
Compared to smoking, drinking is a far worse evil. During the past one year our Apartment Complex had to change 6 watchmen to get one who doesn’t drink, get high, beat up his wife and kids and become a terror to the maids. We haven’t yet succeeded.
But Ramadoss couldn’t care!
It is silly to argue that smokers suffer and die miserably of lung cancer in the long run. There is no part of this lousy human body which is not prone to cancer, suffering, and cruel death,
My best friend and ex-colleague, a goody-goody chaste Brahmin who never smoked nor drunk nor ate meat nor ever told a lie died at the tender age of 50 suffering long from prostate cancer. And my most revered ‘teacher of teachers’ is going strong at 85 following Mark Twain’s obiter dicta to the letter.
To say that smoking should be ‘banned’ as it inflicts death on ‘passive-smoking onlookers’ is equally silly. Pass a law that smokers should not smoke if anyone around objects. That is a law which can be enforced and is very civil to everyone.
This train of thought is due to something funny that happened today: I always take my delicious Iranian Chai here in a joint which displays boldly the mandatory slogan: ‘No Smoking….By Govt Order’. But everyone there smokes nonchalantly and no one ever complains. Today however, a gentleman occupied the seat opposite me, pulled out his stick, and said: ‘Ahem..may I please smoke?’.
I replied: “I come here only to enjoy free ‘passive smoking’ because my medico wife prohibited expensive ‘active smoking’ on our first wedding anniversary……thank you and please go ahead; and LONG LIVE SENSIBLE SMOKERS!”
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tight Rope Walk
=============================================================================
There is a stunning color photo in today’s Deccan Chronicle (19 October). A seven or eight year old girl with a serene face lit up by an almost yogic concentration. She is high up in the air balancing a column of 5 converging earthen pots on her tiny head. She is riding a single wheel grimly on a tight rope on the busy Punjagutta Road. A common enough sight in India.
The caption reads: “…For all the protestations about protecting children, especially the girl child, police and government officials were conspicuously absent”.
I am sure the ‘police’ kindly allowed the show with a ‘consideration’ for the ‘girl child’. And the ‘government officials’, if they were pressed into service would have dragged her away and put her in a school with ‘free and compulsory’ education.
Having seen these shows in my childhood village in the early 50s, I know all about the ‘Dommari’ tribe who make a living out of this hazardous family calling. I used o close my eyes when a months-old baby used to be flung from one end of the tight rope to the other in the safe hands of the sender father and the receiver mother. The training starts apparently from the womb……like Abhimanyu. The girls are not allowed to ‘ossify’ their bones…they remain as supple as rubber bands…they would break if not trained continuously from childhood.
Sad and cruel…..but what about Nadia Comaneci who made such news with her first ever perfect 10 point Gold Medal in the Montreal Olympics Gymnastics? Her training too started early in life and was even more rigorous and pitiless, with the Communist Rumanian Government bent on winning Olympic Gold Medals during the Cold War.
Put our tight rope walker in the school and she would be a fish out of water. A girl child forced to work for a meager living without any danger to her life as a maid servant in a posh household is one thing; and a born tight rope walker is quite another!
Without being facile, let us admit that life is a tight rope walk for more children than most. And that there are certain inborn genetic skills coming down from generations. The Hamiltons and the Bernoullis were cut out to do Science and nothing but science for generations; and the world is a better place for letting them do it. And there are girl children of weavers who astound one with their genes and early training and keep up our foreign exchange kitty in a floating condition. Gandhi knew all about it.
What a government ought to do is search for talent and encourage it from childhood; but not to force everyone into a straitjacket. Choice is the word! Alas, today’s front page story (with a photo of a smiling Sibaljee) is that he has decided to raise the cut-off of Class XII marks for IIT JEE to 80%.
The US knows all about what I am talking. So they have a Bill Gates who failed to complete his college,
I knew of a family of geniuses…..6 brothers who all did well except the last one (by the way, they too are all Sastrys-;). This last kid couldn’t ‘matriculate’. He was standing first in all subjects in the Board but English. He failed in it 3 times scoring 5, 8 and 5 marks out of 100. I am told he is running a Chess Academy to eke out a living. He would have been a brilliant mathematician but for the straitjacket.
I was a teacher for my living for a good 42 years willy-nilly. So I know that there is something called ‘aptitude’. While at IIT KGP one of my back-bencher students in Physics approached me in his Fourth Year for a recommendation letter. He wanted to quit Physics midway and take up his family calling which happened to be ‘business’. He went on to do his MBA in the US and turned out to be a wonderful entrepreneur earning millions of dollars for India exporting software packages and generating employment for many of our kids. Physics would have killed him.
Neither me nor my wife have an aptitude for music. So I taught my son shuttle badminton from an early age and he did turn out to be a ‘blue’ for his Hall at IIT KGP. But one day he came home from his KV school in Class X with a trophy. I asked him what he won it for and he replied: “Music”. I was stunned when he said he was playing Bongo for his House for a couple of years since they pressed him into service whenever needed.
I at once engaged a ‘tabla’ master for him, who used to visit our home late in the night. I asked his teacher why he turns up so late. He replied that throughout the day he is employed to ‘teach’ tabla to campus kids who have absolutely no aptitude for it but to please their parents and make a living for himself. So, before going home he comes to our place as the Port of Last Call because he doesn’t have to ‘teach’ my son…only show a couple of new beats and listen with rapture as my son repeated them effortlessly. He said he would do it for pleasure and not money!
And in Class XI I had to stop his tabla classes much to the chagrin of his teacher because I had to myself ‘coach’ my son for the bloody IIT JEE. He went on to do his M. Sc. in Industry Chemistry there but now earns his decent living doing software for which he turned out to have a FLAIR!
And on inquiry we found that his first cousin dropped out from college and grew up to be a professional percussionist visiting the US regularly and making a big splash and a great living…his mom was the late Principal of a renowned Music College.
After clearing his B. A. in English (failing in one paper for not reading an unreadable book on Amundsen’s ‘Expeditions to the South Pole’) R. K. Narayan was walking up the stairs of their University College with a filled-up application form for M. A. in English. Fortunately he was met by a senior of his coming downstairs who advised him to tear up the forms if he wanted to keep up his love for English.
Ask Shyamal about ‘aptitude’!
And then talk about Life as a ‘Tight Rope Walk’!!!
============================================================================================
There is a stunning color photo in today’s Deccan Chronicle (19 October). A seven or eight year old girl with a serene face lit up by an almost yogic concentration. She is high up in the air balancing a column of 5 converging earthen pots on her tiny head. She is riding a single wheel grimly on a tight rope on the busy Punjagutta Road. A common enough sight in India.
The caption reads: “…For all the protestations about protecting children, especially the girl child, police and government officials were conspicuously absent”.
I am sure the ‘police’ kindly allowed the show with a ‘consideration’ for the ‘girl child’. And the ‘government officials’, if they were pressed into service would have dragged her away and put her in a school with ‘free and compulsory’ education.
Having seen these shows in my childhood village in the early 50s, I know all about the ‘Dommari’ tribe who make a living out of this hazardous family calling. I used o close my eyes when a months-old baby used to be flung from one end of the tight rope to the other in the safe hands of the sender father and the receiver mother. The training starts apparently from the womb……like Abhimanyu. The girls are not allowed to ‘ossify’ their bones…they remain as supple as rubber bands…they would break if not trained continuously from childhood.
Sad and cruel…..but what about Nadia Comaneci who made such news with her first ever perfect 10 point Gold Medal in the Montreal Olympics Gymnastics? Her training too started early in life and was even more rigorous and pitiless, with the Communist Rumanian Government bent on winning Olympic Gold Medals during the Cold War.
Put our tight rope walker in the school and she would be a fish out of water. A girl child forced to work for a meager living without any danger to her life as a maid servant in a posh household is one thing; and a born tight rope walker is quite another!
Without being facile, let us admit that life is a tight rope walk for more children than most. And that there are certain inborn genetic skills coming down from generations. The Hamiltons and the Bernoullis were cut out to do Science and nothing but science for generations; and the world is a better place for letting them do it. And there are girl children of weavers who astound one with their genes and early training and keep up our foreign exchange kitty in a floating condition. Gandhi knew all about it.
What a government ought to do is search for talent and encourage it from childhood; but not to force everyone into a straitjacket. Choice is the word! Alas, today’s front page story (with a photo of a smiling Sibaljee) is that he has decided to raise the cut-off of Class XII marks for IIT JEE to 80%.
The US knows all about what I am talking. So they have a Bill Gates who failed to complete his college,
I knew of a family of geniuses…..6 brothers who all did well except the last one (by the way, they too are all Sastrys-;). This last kid couldn’t ‘matriculate’. He was standing first in all subjects in the Board but English. He failed in it 3 times scoring 5, 8 and 5 marks out of 100. I am told he is running a Chess Academy to eke out a living. He would have been a brilliant mathematician but for the straitjacket.
I was a teacher for my living for a good 42 years willy-nilly. So I know that there is something called ‘aptitude’. While at IIT KGP one of my back-bencher students in Physics approached me in his Fourth Year for a recommendation letter. He wanted to quit Physics midway and take up his family calling which happened to be ‘business’. He went on to do his MBA in the US and turned out to be a wonderful entrepreneur earning millions of dollars for India exporting software packages and generating employment for many of our kids. Physics would have killed him.
Neither me nor my wife have an aptitude for music. So I taught my son shuttle badminton from an early age and he did turn out to be a ‘blue’ for his Hall at IIT KGP. But one day he came home from his KV school in Class X with a trophy. I asked him what he won it for and he replied: “Music”. I was stunned when he said he was playing Bongo for his House for a couple of years since they pressed him into service whenever needed.
I at once engaged a ‘tabla’ master for him, who used to visit our home late in the night. I asked his teacher why he turns up so late. He replied that throughout the day he is employed to ‘teach’ tabla to campus kids who have absolutely no aptitude for it but to please their parents and make a living for himself. So, before going home he comes to our place as the Port of Last Call because he doesn’t have to ‘teach’ my son…only show a couple of new beats and listen with rapture as my son repeated them effortlessly. He said he would do it for pleasure and not money!
And in Class XI I had to stop his tabla classes much to the chagrin of his teacher because I had to myself ‘coach’ my son for the bloody IIT JEE. He went on to do his M. Sc. in Industry Chemistry there but now earns his decent living doing software for which he turned out to have a FLAIR!
And on inquiry we found that his first cousin dropped out from college and grew up to be a professional percussionist visiting the US regularly and making a big splash and a great living…his mom was the late Principal of a renowned Music College.
After clearing his B. A. in English (failing in one paper for not reading an unreadable book on Amundsen’s ‘Expeditions to the South Pole’) R. K. Narayan was walking up the stairs of their University College with a filled-up application form for M. A. in English. Fortunately he was met by a senior of his coming downstairs who advised him to tear up the forms if he wanted to keep up his love for English.
Ask Shyamal about ‘aptitude’!
And then talk about Life as a ‘Tight Rope Walk’!!!
============================================================================================
Monday, October 19, 2009
In Praise of Laziness
***********************************************************************************************
There is nothing like Pure Laziness….all laziness is work-specific. And what appears to be laziness may indeed be incessant activity….like that of the sleeping top. Those who speak ill of laziness are ill-advised, to say the least.
Compared with the busy bees, drones are proverbially the laziest in the insect species. But they do serve a noble purpose beyond the ability of bees. Anyone who read Maeterlinck’s ‘The Life of the Bee’ would like to be the fortunate drone rather than the worker bee. The chosen drone does only one thing in its blessed life….mating with the Virgin Queen mid-flight and dropping dead. An act which is the consummation of all sacrifice and virtue to keep the family going.
Among our epic folks Kumbhakarn of Ramayan appears to be lazy and slothful but anyone who read the epic between the lines would realize that in spite of his curse he was much wiser than his brother Ravan.
There is really no simple word which is the exact opposite of laziness (I Googled for it and the nearest is activity..a poor substitute). The ant is proverbially the symbol of unceasing activity. But what does it achieve? I am told by the learned poets that the anthills they build are home to serpents. And anyone who read Maugham’s ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ would rather be the lazy grasshopper than the ant. Maugham also wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Verger’, in which an illiterate who declined to learn reading and writing becomes a millionaire just by virtue of his choice not to learn.
That brings me to the work-specificity of so-called laziness. Some people who appear to be lazy most of the time suddenly become active when something interests them. Sherlock Holmes is the typical lazy bum, fiddling with his violin and getting dopy on his cocaine prick, but he is really charging his batteries for the next burst of relentless activity. He has an elder brother called Mycroft Holmes who is more talented than Sherlock but too ‘lazy’ to do detective work; but Sherlock has to appeal to him for clues when he himself is at a loss after his legwork.
In my experience my Ph. D. guide SDM was physically the laziest I have ever seen. He wisely chose a vocation that suits his laziness….Theoretical Physics. That requires no overalls and dirtying his hands with lab work. Indeed he was too lazy to use his leaky fountain pen. He would sit, stare, do a long calculation in his head and would grudgingly jot down the result on paper. But when he was visited by an admirer, he would drivel incessantly without giving a chance to the other. He once explained the reason to me: he could calculate in his head when he was talking…but not while listening. When he joined IIT KGP, many invited him with family to their homes for a social call. Within weeks he stopped visiting. He told me his reason charmingly: ‘I enjoy visiting people’s homes…but the drawback is that they return my visits’.
When I was younger, I keenly used to look forward to ‘doing’ the ‘Jumble’ (the word-picture puzzle in the daily newspaper). I would pick up my pen and turn to the Crossword Page and write up the four unscrambled words in the margin and do the final un-jumbling with a triumphant feeling. Nowadays I read the newspaper lying supine in my bed and so feel too lazy to get up, pick up a pen, write the words etc. Instead, I do the whole thing in my head….a pleasing accomplishment at my age (66+).
My son takes 3 hours of doing nothing after getting up from sleep and before walking to his job. I often wonder why their Company is paying a fat amount to this lazy lubber. Once I happened to read a testimonial from one of his juniors in his Peer Appraisal. It read that this lazy lubber can conduct an online meeting with his US customers for six continuous hours sitting in his chair without getting up, while the Americans on the other side and his team-mates here do job-rotating at least thrice during that time.
And my wife who works like a busy bee in her kitchen day in and day out (she loves it) refuses to give me her shopping list on a piece of paper because she is too lazy to pick up pen and paper.
And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile work?
...Posted by Ishani
*********************************************************************************************
There is nothing like Pure Laziness….all laziness is work-specific. And what appears to be laziness may indeed be incessant activity….like that of the sleeping top. Those who speak ill of laziness are ill-advised, to say the least.
Compared with the busy bees, drones are proverbially the laziest in the insect species. But they do serve a noble purpose beyond the ability of bees. Anyone who read Maeterlinck’s ‘The Life of the Bee’ would like to be the fortunate drone rather than the worker bee. The chosen drone does only one thing in its blessed life….mating with the Virgin Queen mid-flight and dropping dead. An act which is the consummation of all sacrifice and virtue to keep the family going.
Among our epic folks Kumbhakarn of Ramayan appears to be lazy and slothful but anyone who read the epic between the lines would realize that in spite of his curse he was much wiser than his brother Ravan.
There is really no simple word which is the exact opposite of laziness (I Googled for it and the nearest is activity..a poor substitute). The ant is proverbially the symbol of unceasing activity. But what does it achieve? I am told by the learned poets that the anthills they build are home to serpents. And anyone who read Maugham’s ‘Ant and the Grasshopper’ would rather be the lazy grasshopper than the ant. Maugham also wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Verger’, in which an illiterate who declined to learn reading and writing becomes a millionaire just by virtue of his choice not to learn.
That brings me to the work-specificity of so-called laziness. Some people who appear to be lazy most of the time suddenly become active when something interests them. Sherlock Holmes is the typical lazy bum, fiddling with his violin and getting dopy on his cocaine prick, but he is really charging his batteries for the next burst of relentless activity. He has an elder brother called Mycroft Holmes who is more talented than Sherlock but too ‘lazy’ to do detective work; but Sherlock has to appeal to him for clues when he himself is at a loss after his legwork.
In my experience my Ph. D. guide SDM was physically the laziest I have ever seen. He wisely chose a vocation that suits his laziness….Theoretical Physics. That requires no overalls and dirtying his hands with lab work. Indeed he was too lazy to use his leaky fountain pen. He would sit, stare, do a long calculation in his head and would grudgingly jot down the result on paper. But when he was visited by an admirer, he would drivel incessantly without giving a chance to the other. He once explained the reason to me: he could calculate in his head when he was talking…but not while listening. When he joined IIT KGP, many invited him with family to their homes for a social call. Within weeks he stopped visiting. He told me his reason charmingly: ‘I enjoy visiting people’s homes…but the drawback is that they return my visits’.
When I was younger, I keenly used to look forward to ‘doing’ the ‘Jumble’ (the word-picture puzzle in the daily newspaper). I would pick up my pen and turn to the Crossword Page and write up the four unscrambled words in the margin and do the final un-jumbling with a triumphant feeling. Nowadays I read the newspaper lying supine in my bed and so feel too lazy to get up, pick up a pen, write the words etc. Instead, I do the whole thing in my head….a pleasing accomplishment at my age (66+).
My son takes 3 hours of doing nothing after getting up from sleep and before walking to his job. I often wonder why their Company is paying a fat amount to this lazy lubber. Once I happened to read a testimonial from one of his juniors in his Peer Appraisal. It read that this lazy lubber can conduct an online meeting with his US customers for six continuous hours sitting in his chair without getting up, while the Americans on the other side and his team-mates here do job-rotating at least thrice during that time.
And my wife who works like a busy bee in her kitchen day in and day out (she loves it) refuses to give me her shopping list on a piece of paper because she is too lazy to pick up pen and paper.
And those who read this though are the laziest of all…no other worthwhile work?
...Posted by Ishani
*********************************************************************************************
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Future Castes
========================================================================
Like my father, my Ph. D. guide SDM was born during the First World War and grew up during the Second. Having seen the Freedom Struggle and the ‘Made in Britain’ Bengal Famine, SDM was fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial. But the only thing he was equipped to do in life was Research in Theoretical Physics. Other than this and a great talent for English he was as innocent as a babe in the woods throughout his life.
Soon after his marriage, SDM and his newly-wed bride were visiting his in-law’s village in charming rural Bengal. Having nothing else to do, he was pursuing an idea he had of finding a new class of solutions to the famous General Relativity Equations of Einstein. And while returning from an evening walk, he hit the jackpot. Coming home entirely flushed, he pulled his wife aside and ‘announced’ that her husband would soon be a ‘famous man’. (Upon which she chided him for returning so late after dusk and ordered him to quickly wash his hands and get ready for ‘sumptuous loochies’.)
On returning to Calcutta, he wrote up his ‘invention’ and, wanting to teach the ‘goras’ a lesson, submitted it to the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society just to show that Indian Science is no leaner and meaner than the Western.
To his bewilderment, his manuscript bounced from the Editor’s desk without as much as a ‘referee comment’. Disgusted, he sent it to the top class American Journal, Physical Review which accepted it without revision and published it urgently without the mandatory Abstract (the referee wrote it up himself!). Within a few months of its publication SDM did become a ‘famous man’ in Relativity circles and his outlandish work entered text books in no time.
Thereafter SDM never sent any of his papers to Indian Journals. To this day our Babu would promote only those candidates who publish in American Journals and trash all papers published in Indian Journals. This is God’s Truth. He would rather bring Harvard, Yale & MIT to India but not give academic and financial freedom to our own backyard IITs despite ‘intellectual’ hunger strikes.
SDM used to remark that the worth of any country is determined by the quality of its Physics Journals. And would say that China will never be any good because the ‘Acta Physica Sinica’ is worse than the ‘Indian Journal of Physics’.
During the Soviet regime USSR had the great good fortune of Landau and his school which lifted up the standards of Russian Physics Journals and also of the Communist East European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The post-war Japan also had good Physics journals. I doubt if it is true nowadays.
All worthwhile Scientific Research and Invention continue to be American with crumbs thrown here and there…..none to India and China, which are boasting of becoming World Powers in the near future.
Yes; the US, Europe and Japan are turning out to be nations peopled by the old, the retired and the sick, while China and India will profusely breed young blood which can be exploited as ill-paid manufacturing and intellectual labor force. This advantage will certainly make them rich Economic Powers, but not Scientific Powers.
I will be watching from up there soon when the ‘New Caste System Among Nations’ (NCSAN) will be as follows:
1. The US will be the poor sick but learned Obama Brahmins. All other nations will take their intellectual inputs from the Navi Brahmins paying them a pittance other than great reverence.
2. China will be the New Khatriyas with their burgeoning arms and ammunitions and a vast army of Yellow Soldiers bereft of freedom and ideas but only taking orders from the Top Manchurian Kings and Mandarins.
3. India will be the New Baniyas, full of tricks to make money and invest it here and there to pile it up without paying their slave labor more than enough to keep their body and soul in ‘working’ condition.
4. Rest of the World will be Shudras, apart from:
5. Africa which will be the New SC.
6. Britain, Canada and Australia will turn Buddhist Dalit erecting statues of Newton and Hawking.
7. Shorn of oil revenue (the US will find alternate sources of Energy) the oil-rich Sheikdoms will vanish from the Earth like Dinosaurs having no new ideas how to cope with life apart from jihad.
This is the ‘Prediction of gps’, Allah be kind to his soul!
=================================================================================
Like my father, my Ph. D. guide SDM was born during the First World War and grew up during the Second. Having seen the Freedom Struggle and the ‘Made in Britain’ Bengal Famine, SDM was fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial. But the only thing he was equipped to do in life was Research in Theoretical Physics. Other than this and a great talent for English he was as innocent as a babe in the woods throughout his life.
Soon after his marriage, SDM and his newly-wed bride were visiting his in-law’s village in charming rural Bengal. Having nothing else to do, he was pursuing an idea he had of finding a new class of solutions to the famous General Relativity Equations of Einstein. And while returning from an evening walk, he hit the jackpot. Coming home entirely flushed, he pulled his wife aside and ‘announced’ that her husband would soon be a ‘famous man’. (Upon which she chided him for returning so late after dusk and ordered him to quickly wash his hands and get ready for ‘sumptuous loochies’.)
On returning to Calcutta, he wrote up his ‘invention’ and, wanting to teach the ‘goras’ a lesson, submitted it to the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society just to show that Indian Science is no leaner and meaner than the Western.
To his bewilderment, his manuscript bounced from the Editor’s desk without as much as a ‘referee comment’. Disgusted, he sent it to the top class American Journal, Physical Review which accepted it without revision and published it urgently without the mandatory Abstract (the referee wrote it up himself!). Within a few months of its publication SDM did become a ‘famous man’ in Relativity circles and his outlandish work entered text books in no time.
Thereafter SDM never sent any of his papers to Indian Journals. To this day our Babu would promote only those candidates who publish in American Journals and trash all papers published in Indian Journals. This is God’s Truth. He would rather bring Harvard, Yale & MIT to India but not give academic and financial freedom to our own backyard IITs despite ‘intellectual’ hunger strikes.
SDM used to remark that the worth of any country is determined by the quality of its Physics Journals. And would say that China will never be any good because the ‘Acta Physica Sinica’ is worse than the ‘Indian Journal of Physics’.
During the Soviet regime USSR had the great good fortune of Landau and his school which lifted up the standards of Russian Physics Journals and also of the Communist East European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The post-war Japan also had good Physics journals. I doubt if it is true nowadays.
All worthwhile Scientific Research and Invention continue to be American with crumbs thrown here and there…..none to India and China, which are boasting of becoming World Powers in the near future.
Yes; the US, Europe and Japan are turning out to be nations peopled by the old, the retired and the sick, while China and India will profusely breed young blood which can be exploited as ill-paid manufacturing and intellectual labor force. This advantage will certainly make them rich Economic Powers, but not Scientific Powers.
I will be watching from up there soon when the ‘New Caste System Among Nations’ (NCSAN) will be as follows:
1. The US will be the poor sick but learned Obama Brahmins. All other nations will take their intellectual inputs from the Navi Brahmins paying them a pittance other than great reverence.
2. China will be the New Khatriyas with their burgeoning arms and ammunitions and a vast army of Yellow Soldiers bereft of freedom and ideas but only taking orders from the Top Manchurian Kings and Mandarins.
3. India will be the New Baniyas, full of tricks to make money and invest it here and there to pile it up without paying their slave labor more than enough to keep their body and soul in ‘working’ condition.
4. Rest of the World will be Shudras, apart from:
5. Africa which will be the New SC.
6. Britain, Canada and Australia will turn Buddhist Dalit erecting statues of Newton and Hawking.
7. Shorn of oil revenue (the US will find alternate sources of Energy) the oil-rich Sheikdoms will vanish from the Earth like Dinosaurs having no new ideas how to cope with life apart from jihad.
This is the ‘Prediction of gps’, Allah be kind to his soul!
=================================================================================
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Mehsud mehsud
==============================================================================
Mehsud mehsud
Dear Hakimulla Bhai:
I was delighted at your statement that after Islamizing Pakistan you will turn your attention to India.
I keenly look forward to the Day! To my utter disgust I find India a totally irreligious and corrupting civilization (if you can call it that). Our forefathers from Ghazni to Aurangzeb tried hard to achieve what you laudably propose to do, but utterly failed.
Instead, they settled down here and got themselves corrupted thoroughly. (Akbar, the Great,…[no not the Allah Ho Akbar]…, even proposed a new mongrel religion that is neither here nor there).
I have been living in Nizam’s own Hyderabad for over 5 years now and I am distressed to find our Hyderabadi Muslim Bhais participating whole-heartedly in Ganesh Puja, Durga Puja, Diwali and even Bathkamma Puja.
On the other hand, the non-Muslims of Hyderbad, chiefly the Kafir Hindus, after gorging their full meals throughout the day during the Holy Ramzan month, eagerly queue up at Iftar time at the famed Hyderabadi Haleem outlets and gobble up all the available delicious Irani Haleem, leaving nothing to our starving Muslim bhais. (They even sell Veg Haleem nowadays for pony-tailed Brahmins).
Please do something about this as early as possible. But make sure you won’t settle down in Hyderabad and take to its mysterious ways (in which case I offer to be your mentor in the Hyderabadi culture, such as it is).
Happy Diwali!
Mehsud mehsud
Dear Hakimulla Bhai:
I was delighted at your statement that after Islamizing Pakistan you will turn your attention to India.
I keenly look forward to the Day! To my utter disgust I find India a totally irreligious and corrupting civilization (if you can call it that). Our forefathers from Ghazni to Aurangzeb tried hard to achieve what you laudably propose to do, but utterly failed.
Instead, they settled down here and got themselves corrupted thoroughly. (Akbar, the Great,…[no not the Allah Ho Akbar]…, even proposed a new mongrel religion that is neither here nor there).
I have been living in Nizam’s own Hyderabad for over 5 years now and I am distressed to find our Hyderabadi Muslim Bhais participating whole-heartedly in Ganesh Puja, Durga Puja, Diwali and even Bathkamma Puja.
On the other hand, the non-Muslims of Hyderbad, chiefly the Kafir Hindus, after gorging their full meals throughout the day during the Holy Ramzan month, eagerly queue up at Iftar time at the famed Hyderabadi Haleem outlets and gobble up all the available delicious Irani Haleem, leaving nothing to our starving Muslim bhais. (They even sell Veg Haleem nowadays for pony-tailed Brahmins).
Please do something about this as early as possible. But make sure you won’t settle down in Hyderabad and take to its mysterious ways (in which case I offer to be your mentor in the Hyderabadi culture, such as it is).
Happy Diwali!
DC: Midas Touch
===========================================================
Sir:
This is with reference to the news item on Page 4 of DC, 17 October, stating that the TTD authorities are going ahead with gold-plating the sanctum sanctorum of Lord Venkateswara in spite of apprehensions that it will damage the ancient inscriptions on the temple walls.
Apparently we are determined to transmute Lord Balajee into King Midas.
G. P. Sastry
G-4 Sri Sai Apartments
6-3-596/21/9
Erramanzil
Hyderabad 500 082
G.P.Sastry
http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/
Sir:
This is with reference to the news item on Page 4 of DC, 17 October, stating that the TTD authorities are going ahead with gold-plating the sanctum sanctorum of Lord Venkateswara in spite of apprehensions that it will damage the ancient inscriptions on the temple walls.
Apparently we are determined to transmute Lord Balajee into King Midas.
G. P. Sastry
G-4 Sri Sai Apartments
6-3-596/21/9
Erramanzil
Hyderabad 500 082
G.P.Sastry
http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Sudhansu Datta Majumdar (The Genius Who Touched My Life)
=========================================================================
This is not Homage; this is my homage, if you make allowances for my congenital irreverence. The middle vowel is ever present here, more so to apologize for lapses.
These stories are my recollection of events thirty five years past. That is a long while. Most of the players are sadly no more; and the rest are like me, senior citizens on their way. Professor Majumdar was 55 then, a good 30 years my senior. And memory falters; names forgot, and truth colored by the soft glow of nostalgia for long-lost youth and exuberance.
Genius is a buzzword, and controversial. By Genius, I mean what James Gleick meant writing about Feynman (we are in good company). Genius is one whose artistic or intellectual outputs are enjoyed by many; but how he got there, no one has a clue.
Thurber owned more than forty dogs in his lifetime. His frugal sketches of his dogs and his pieces on them (in particular: 'How to Name a Dog') are some of the most celebrated works in American humor. He says that when he goes out to his garden chair and calls his dogs, all of them run to him and lick him, except his bloodhound. This creature slowly follows his trail from the bathroom via the garden steps and finally winds his way to his chair and sits there unconcerned.
Mortified, Thurber says that the fellow is least interested where he is; but only how he got there!
Apparently there are no ‘intellectual bloodhounds’ winding their way through the labyrinthine mind of a genius.
I will be rewarded if these files give at least an inkling of the genius of Professor Majumdar, and his simple, artless, but charming personality.
For help gratefully received in this effort, please do see Acknowledgments.
Lastly, I can’t resist quoting from the Guru Granth Saheb:
=====================================================
Special Thanks: Sayan Kar has been the Engine as well as Guard of this train of thoughts. I thank him and his editorial team.
Disclaimer: Please don’t expect these files to contain any profound physics. There is none; no equations, no figures, and no references. These are merely stories. Anyone with a nodding acquaintance of the jargon of physics should be able to make out. The style is chatty, personal and almost gossipy. However, I took care to avoid hearsay and confined myself to what I know and what SDM told me.
Abbreviations:
SDM: Professor S. Datta Majumdar
HNB: Professor H. N. Bose
DB : Professor D. Basu
Sudhansu Datta Majumdar
(The Genius Who Touched My Life)
by
G. P. Sastry
These stories are my recollection of events thirty five years past. That is a long while. Most of the players are sadly no more; and the rest are like me, senior citizens on their way. Professor Majumdar was 55 then, a good 30 years my senior. And memory falters; names forgot, and truth colored by the soft glow of nostalgia for long-lost youth and exuberance.
Genius is a buzzword, and controversial. By Genius, I mean what James Gleick meant writing about Feynman (we are in good company). Genius is one whose artistic or intellectual outputs are enjoyed by many; but how he got there, no one has a clue.
Thurber owned more than forty dogs in his lifetime. His frugal sketches of his dogs and his pieces on them (in particular: 'How to Name a Dog') are some of the most celebrated works in American humor. He says that when he goes out to his garden chair and calls his dogs, all of them run to him and lick him, except his bloodhound. This creature slowly follows his trail from the bathroom via the garden steps and finally winds his way to his chair and sits there unconcerned.
Mortified, Thurber says that the fellow is least interested where he is; but only how he got there!
Apparently there are no ‘intellectual bloodhounds’ winding their way through the labyrinthine mind of a genius.
I will be rewarded if these files give at least an inkling of the genius of Professor Majumdar, and his simple, artless, but charming personality.
For help gratefully received in this effort, please do see Acknowledgments.
Lastly, I can’t resist quoting from the Guru Granth Saheb:
A hundred moons may blossom
A thousand suns may blaze
In this dazzling brilliance
Without my Guru, there is pitch darkness.
=====================================================
Special Thanks: Sayan Kar has been the Engine as well as Guard of this train of thoughts. I thank him and his editorial team.
Disclaimer: Please don’t expect these files to contain any profound physics. There is none; no equations, no figures, and no references. These are merely stories. Anyone with a nodding acquaintance of the jargon of physics should be able to make out. The style is chatty, personal and almost gossipy. However, I took care to avoid hearsay and confined myself to what I know and what SDM told me.
Abbreviations:
SDM: Professor S. Datta Majumdar
HNB: Professor H. N. Bose
DB : Professor D. Basu
SDM & GR
==============================================================================
Professor Sudhansu Datta Majumdar, the genius I met and worked with for 5 years, was profoundly modest and artless.
His classic 1947 article titled: ‘A Class of Exact Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations’ was first submitted for publication to The Bulletin of The Calcutta Mathematical Society, and was promptly rejected (Thank you BCMS!). He re-sent the manuscript, without the Abstract, to Physical Review (because the first page of the manuscript containing its Abstract was soiled by stains of the reviewer's teacup). This time, however, the reviewer saw the audacious originality and importance of the paper, and wrote the abstract himself, so that it could be quickly published (those were the days of snail mail).
It was hailed as a great work abroad and was sometimes cited as Weyl-Majumdar Solutions (with which SDM was immensely pleased).
But soon, SDM left GR and shifted to QM and then to Molecular Spectroscopy, Group Theory and Electrodynamics.
Meanwhile, Papapetrou did work similar to SDM's work in GR, continued in GR and became a famous GR expert. Articles in GR started appearing with ‘Papapetrou-Majumdar’ solutions. This irritated SDM, and rightly so. If I am not mistaken, it was Papapetrou who chaired the Conference where Kerr was presenting his work, and alerted the audience to stop gossiping and listen seriously to Kerr. And everyone knows how path-breaking the Kerr Solution turned out to be for Black Hole Research.
Had SDM stuck to GR, many felt he would have done what Kerr did, and become famous much before Kerr. This is of course a guess, but from what I saw of SDM, there is a lot of truth in it. The Kerr Solution was JUST his cup of tea!
Meanwhile, QM Field Theory was entering GR. SDM showed me some article where the word 'Papapetron' was coined. SDM was furious and asked if 'Majumdaron' would be any less musical!
I often wondered how important one’s surname could be if it has to get tagged to a Field-Theoretic ‘-on’. This led to the following limerick, inspired by Arundhuti Ganguly.:
SDM & GR
His classic 1947 article titled: ‘A Class of Exact Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations’ was first submitted for publication to The Bulletin of The Calcutta Mathematical Society, and was promptly rejected (Thank you BCMS!). He re-sent the manuscript, without the Abstract, to Physical Review (because the first page of the manuscript containing its Abstract was soiled by stains of the reviewer's teacup). This time, however, the reviewer saw the audacious originality and importance of the paper, and wrote the abstract himself, so that it could be quickly published (those were the days of snail mail).
It was hailed as a great work abroad and was sometimes cited as Weyl-Majumdar Solutions (with which SDM was immensely pleased).
But soon, SDM left GR and shifted to QM and then to Molecular Spectroscopy, Group Theory and Electrodynamics.
Meanwhile, Papapetrou did work similar to SDM's work in GR, continued in GR and became a famous GR expert. Articles in GR started appearing with ‘Papapetrou-Majumdar’ solutions. This irritated SDM, and rightly so. If I am not mistaken, it was Papapetrou who chaired the Conference where Kerr was presenting his work, and alerted the audience to stop gossiping and listen seriously to Kerr. And everyone knows how path-breaking the Kerr Solution turned out to be for Black Hole Research.
Had SDM stuck to GR, many felt he would have done what Kerr did, and become famous much before Kerr. This is of course a guess, but from what I saw of SDM, there is a lot of truth in it. The Kerr Solution was JUST his cup of tea!
Meanwhile, QM Field Theory was entering GR. SDM showed me some article where the word 'Papapetron' was coined. SDM was furious and asked if 'Majumdaron' would be any less musical!
I often wondered how important one’s surname could be if it has to get tagged to a Field-Theoretic ‘-on’. This led to the following limerick, inspired by Arundhuti Ganguly.:
A lot is in a name
(with apologies to Shakespeare)
Bose was a small-town Bengaaly
Bose rhymed with Rose lovingly
He counted Photons
All hailed them Bosons
God’s great he wasn’t a Ganguly!
SDM: India vs. England
============================================================================
SDM told me that he was a great fan of Dirac. (Who isn’t? Anyone with a keen sense of English prose, even if he is a novice in QM, would become a Dirac fan just for the charming first Chapter of his ‘Principles of QM’). So, he wished to collaborate with Dirac. A Fellowship was offered, but SDM had to scrape the barrel to buy ‘passage’. This must be in the early fifties, before he submitted his doctoral thesis.
SDM told me that this trip was an ‘unmitigated disaster’. The problem which Dirac gave SDM turned out to be ‘nonsensical’. And, his few attempts to talk to Dirac about it must have been futile, knowing the celebrated silences of Dirac (compare Feynman’s failed efforts to goad Dirac to converse). SDM got vexed soon enough and started working on his own problems. He disliked the English weather, felt depressed and was ‘not making any headway’. That was the context in which he made his famous pronouncement to one and all: ‘Dirac went senile in his forties’. I am sure that the problem which Dirac posed SDM never saw light of the day.
Meanwhile the HoD of Glasgow University (I hope my memory isn’t failing me here.) invited SDM to give a lecture to his colleagues. SDM went all the way and gave his ‘lecture’, which was a mere ploy by the HoD to drag him to Glasgow. The HoD invited SDM for a cup of tea at his home. SDM was pleased at this rare gesture. HoD put SDM at ease and made him talk about his work. After half an hour, listening quietly to SDM’s musings, the HoD pulled out an envelope from the pocket of his long coat, handed it to SDM and bade him good bye. SDM went to his lodgings, opened the envelope and found to his dismay that what he had over a cup of tea was an ‘interview’, and the enclosure in the envelope was an ‘official’ offer letter for SDM to join as a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow (SDM tells me that ‘it is a very honorable position’, lest I didn’t know).
He politely declined the offer without hesitation as he was already pining for Calcutta. As he told me, he ‘returned empty-handed’ to India in every sense.
His creativity peaked as soon as he hit the shores of Bengal, and in a few months his thesis was ready for submission. Many people suggested that he submit his thesis for a D.Phil. in one of the U.K. Universities, but SDM scoffed and declared that a D.Sc. from the University of Calcutta was ten times more ‘honorable’ than a D.Phil. of Oxford or Cambridge.
He showed me his ‘thesis’. It was just about 40 pages of typed matter followed by several ‘sumptuous’ reprints. It was in 3 parts: GR, Molecular Spectroscopy and Angular Momentum. Quite unrelated topics, apparently. I read his thesis (but not the reprints!) and as he used to brag, it truly deserved a Degree for English Literature.
Wheeler was one of his thesis referees. SDM told me that the ‘operative’ sentence in Wheeler’s Report was: ‘This is the first doctoral thesis in which I learned some new Physics’.
Noblesse Oblige!
SDM: India vs England
SDM told me that this trip was an ‘unmitigated disaster’. The problem which Dirac gave SDM turned out to be ‘nonsensical’. And, his few attempts to talk to Dirac about it must have been futile, knowing the celebrated silences of Dirac (compare Feynman’s failed efforts to goad Dirac to converse). SDM got vexed soon enough and started working on his own problems. He disliked the English weather, felt depressed and was ‘not making any headway’. That was the context in which he made his famous pronouncement to one and all: ‘Dirac went senile in his forties’. I am sure that the problem which Dirac posed SDM never saw light of the day.
Meanwhile the HoD of Glasgow University (I hope my memory isn’t failing me here.) invited SDM to give a lecture to his colleagues. SDM went all the way and gave his ‘lecture’, which was a mere ploy by the HoD to drag him to Glasgow. The HoD invited SDM for a cup of tea at his home. SDM was pleased at this rare gesture. HoD put SDM at ease and made him talk about his work. After half an hour, listening quietly to SDM’s musings, the HoD pulled out an envelope from the pocket of his long coat, handed it to SDM and bade him good bye. SDM went to his lodgings, opened the envelope and found to his dismay that what he had over a cup of tea was an ‘interview’, and the enclosure in the envelope was an ‘official’ offer letter for SDM to join as a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow (SDM tells me that ‘it is a very honorable position’, lest I didn’t know).
He politely declined the offer without hesitation as he was already pining for Calcutta. As he told me, he ‘returned empty-handed’ to India in every sense.
His creativity peaked as soon as he hit the shores of Bengal, and in a few months his thesis was ready for submission. Many people suggested that he submit his thesis for a D.Phil. in one of the U.K. Universities, but SDM scoffed and declared that a D.Sc. from the University of Calcutta was ten times more ‘honorable’ than a D.Phil. of Oxford or Cambridge.
He showed me his ‘thesis’. It was just about 40 pages of typed matter followed by several ‘sumptuous’ reprints. It was in 3 parts: GR, Molecular Spectroscopy and Angular Momentum. Quite unrelated topics, apparently. I read his thesis (but not the reprints!) and as he used to brag, it truly deserved a Degree for English Literature.
Wheeler was one of his thesis referees. SDM told me that the ‘operative’ sentence in Wheeler’s Report was: ‘This is the first doctoral thesis in which I learned some new Physics’.
Noblesse Oblige!
SDM: Mompi & Angular Momentum
===========================================================================
Once SDM told me the following story:
It must be early fifties. Mrs. SDM was having problem with her only delivery. The doctors then decided to try maybe one of the earliest Caesarian Sections in Calcutta. She was in the OT for more than an hour. While SDM was waiting outside, he told me, pointing to his head, that 'it got solved'. He was referring to the 'Majumdar formula' for CG coefficients of the rotation group.
For youngsters who haven't heard of it, there are only four formulae for the CG coefficients of the rotation group: Weyl formula, Van der Warden formula, Racah formula, and Majumdar formula. Each looks different. But they are equivalent. The specialty of Majumdar formula is that it comes from calculus, while the others come from group theory. His is unique. He showed that the weird CG coefficients appear as the coefficients of expansion of a hypergeometric function in a Taylor series. This led to the entire later work of DB and SDM and their students on the ‘master analytic functions' (all of them more complicated hypergeometric functions) of more intricate and important groups, like the Lorentz Group. DB knows all about it.
These four formulae are listed in a Russian book he showed me. He was rightly beaming with pride to be ranked alongside such stalwarts. He was ‘invited' for a Professorship at IIT KGP by Professor H.N.Bose, the then HoD. But the rules of IIT said that he had to appear before a ‘duly constituted selection committee’. He was unhappy, but the then Director Professor S.R.Sengupta was a fan of SDM. So he tried to make light of the formality of an interview. But, one of the members asked SDM what his ‘achievements’ were. SDM told him brusquely to go to the Library, pick up the Angular Momentum book and turn to Page so and so to learn of one of his achievements.
Once he told me somewhat wryly that Mompi, his daughter, refuses to learn math from him. I asked him why. He said he found the prescribed calculus book of Class XI very inadequate, so he started teaching ‘Limits’ for a fortnight. Then she gave up, once for all.
Analysis was his forte. He was past master in that field. And tried to reduce all problems of Physics to Analysis.
Mompi & Angular Momentum
It must be early fifties. Mrs. SDM was having problem with her only delivery. The doctors then decided to try maybe one of the earliest Caesarian Sections in Calcutta. She was in the OT for more than an hour. While SDM was waiting outside, he told me, pointing to his head, that 'it got solved'. He was referring to the 'Majumdar formula' for CG coefficients of the rotation group.
For youngsters who haven't heard of it, there are only four formulae for the CG coefficients of the rotation group: Weyl formula, Van der Warden formula, Racah formula, and Majumdar formula. Each looks different. But they are equivalent. The specialty of Majumdar formula is that it comes from calculus, while the others come from group theory. His is unique. He showed that the weird CG coefficients appear as the coefficients of expansion of a hypergeometric function in a Taylor series. This led to the entire later work of DB and SDM and their students on the ‘master analytic functions' (all of them more complicated hypergeometric functions) of more intricate and important groups, like the Lorentz Group. DB knows all about it.
These four formulae are listed in a Russian book he showed me. He was rightly beaming with pride to be ranked alongside such stalwarts. He was ‘invited' for a Professorship at IIT KGP by Professor H.N.Bose, the then HoD. But the rules of IIT said that he had to appear before a ‘duly constituted selection committee’. He was unhappy, but the then Director Professor S.R.Sengupta was a fan of SDM. So he tried to make light of the formality of an interview. But, one of the members asked SDM what his ‘achievements’ were. SDM told him brusquely to go to the Library, pick up the Angular Momentum book and turn to Page so and so to learn of one of his achievements.
Once he told me somewhat wryly that Mompi, his daughter, refuses to learn math from him. I asked him why. He said he found the prescribed calculus book of Class XI very inadequate, so he started teaching ‘Limits’ for a fortnight. Then she gave up, once for all.
Analysis was his forte. He was past master in that field. And tried to reduce all problems of Physics to Analysis.
SDM: SDM & Molecular Spectroscopy
==========================================================================
SDM once showed me his article on Molecular Spectroscopy. I remember to have browsed through it. I saw a Table in it comparing the experimental values of some spectroscopic lines with his calculated values. That was perhaps one of the few papers in which his work had numerical calculations and comparison with experimental results. It was a remarkable work, reducing the solution of the complicated multi-dimensional Schrodinger equation to a one-dimensional Hill’s equation. He narrated to me how Coulson made him jump into his car and gave him a few minutes’ audience, during which Coulson suggested that he be careful about the BKW approximation he was using in the solution of the Hill’s equation. That work was the starting point of his entry into Group Theory.
He then drifted more and more towards pure theory. Even his Cherenkov work was heading for the unverifiable.
With my experimental physics background, I was trying to steer him towards predicting some of the experimental results and photos of Cherenkov rings obtained by Zrelov; but he was hesitant, a streak I could understand, but not appreciate. I wrote to Zrelov in Moscow to send me some photos of his Cherenkov rings in a uniaxial calcite crystal for inclusion in my thesis, with the promise that I would send him a copy of my thesis (costly those days, when no Xerox was available, and an extra copy had to be typed on the mechanical typewriter tap...tap...tap). Zrelov was pleased and sent me five sets of Black and White photos for my five copies of thesis and two big colored photos with rings along and perpendicular to the optic axis. I bought a stainless steel double-photo frame that made quite a hole in my pocket, inserted Zrelov's colored rings in it and gifted it to him. The ring diameter depends on the refractive index and hence dispersion in the optical region; therefore the rings are multicolored, like a rainbow, but elliptical, with a predictable angular distribution of intensity. He kept that photo frame on his refrigerator and used to show it off to one and all. So child-like innocent was he that he carried it wherever he went after retirement. And I was told by DB that the frame with the faded rings was still on his book shelf at Salt Lake just before he died.
In his later years, he himself wouldn’t touch anything to do with experimental results, a weakness which was to cost him dear in getting due recognition. And it was only after he left KGP that his students could extend his work into what IS experimentally verifiable in biaxial crystals (much more complicated but fascinating).
Most of his failings stem from his FIERCE independence (a trait I could guess he owes to India's Freedom Struggle through which that generation passed). .I watched SDM wince when he had to borrow any formula from anyone unless he happened to genuinely admire him. This meant that, while others were building Physics (as Fermi once said) one’s brick over his predecessor’s, SDM was plowing a lonely furrow.
Unfortunately, it works in Arts, but not Sciences. Sad!
SDM & Molecular Spectroscopy
He then drifted more and more towards pure theory. Even his Cherenkov work was heading for the unverifiable.
With my experimental physics background, I was trying to steer him towards predicting some of the experimental results and photos of Cherenkov rings obtained by Zrelov; but he was hesitant, a streak I could understand, but not appreciate. I wrote to Zrelov in Moscow to send me some photos of his Cherenkov rings in a uniaxial calcite crystal for inclusion in my thesis, with the promise that I would send him a copy of my thesis (costly those days, when no Xerox was available, and an extra copy had to be typed on the mechanical typewriter tap...tap...tap). Zrelov was pleased and sent me five sets of Black and White photos for my five copies of thesis and two big colored photos with rings along and perpendicular to the optic axis. I bought a stainless steel double-photo frame that made quite a hole in my pocket, inserted Zrelov's colored rings in it and gifted it to him. The ring diameter depends on the refractive index and hence dispersion in the optical region; therefore the rings are multicolored, like a rainbow, but elliptical, with a predictable angular distribution of intensity. He kept that photo frame on his refrigerator and used to show it off to one and all. So child-like innocent was he that he carried it wherever he went after retirement. And I was told by DB that the frame with the faded rings was still on his book shelf at Salt Lake just before he died.
In his later years, he himself wouldn’t touch anything to do with experimental results, a weakness which was to cost him dear in getting due recognition. And it was only after he left KGP that his students could extend his work into what IS experimentally verifiable in biaxial crystals (much more complicated but fascinating).
Most of his failings stem from his FIERCE independence (a trait I could guess he owes to India's Freedom Struggle through which that generation passed). .I watched SDM wince when he had to borrow any formula from anyone unless he happened to genuinely admire him. This meant that, while others were building Physics (as Fermi once said) one’s brick over his predecessor’s, SDM was plowing a lonely furrow.
Unfortunately, it works in Arts, but not Sciences. Sad!
SDM: SDM & Teaching
===================================================================
One of the facets of his 'much-misunderstood' and 'much-maligned' personality is that SDM never cared for teaching, or impressing an audience. His mind was always 'elsewhere'. I am sure while he was ‘taking’ a class he was cracking one of his absorbing research problems. He would drivel, and his audience smirks politely.
Any third grade teacher like me could talk on one of ‘his’ papers and get a big applause. He himself could never do it. But, if I or DB went to his room after his ‘lecture’ and sat down with him, he would go on for two hours about the Naxalite Menace, or Tolstoy or how he saw Dirac go senile at the age of 40 (he went to England to work with Dirac, and met his match in Dirac; both were 'elsewhere' at spatially separated world points). But in between (one has to wait and watch for those golden moments) he would pass such a profound remark or two about the intricacies of his paper, that we could easily churn out half a dozen papers as offshoots, if we wished to.
Once I was struggling to ‘prove’ a hunch I had about one step in our paper which was holding it up. He was to catch a train to Bangalore to talk about 'Unsolved Problems in Physics'. (I am sure the audience there had a tough time following him). I would go to him only when I was about to give up. I went to his Quarters and asked for help. He talked and talked about extraneous things and the rickshaw arrived. Not one to give up easily, I followed him to the railway station, bent on seeing him off. Just before the train left, he made a comment: ‘Doesn't it look like a tensor transformation?’ The train steamed off and as I bicycled back to my bachelor digs, I could see that his comment solved the problem.
By the time he returned after a fortnight, I wrote up the paper. I went to his office to give him my write-up. As usual, he talked on and on for two hours about the fine time he had at Bangalore and what a wonderful city it was and how he would love to settle there after retirement (not speaking a word about how his talk went). He then asked me to give him the unsolved step and he would ‘try’ it. Baffled, I told him that he had already solved it and reminded him of his comment that ‘it looked like a tensor transformation’. He told me that he was not aware of it at all!
There goes the 'genius' at work.
SDM & Teaching
One of the facets of his 'much-misunderstood' and 'much-maligned' personality is that SDM never cared for teaching, or impressing an audience. His mind was always 'elsewhere'. I am sure while he was ‘taking’ a class he was cracking one of his absorbing research problems. He would drivel, and his audience smirks politely.
Any third grade teacher like me could talk on one of ‘his’ papers and get a big applause. He himself could never do it. But, if I or DB went to his room after his ‘lecture’ and sat down with him, he would go on for two hours about the Naxalite Menace, or Tolstoy or how he saw Dirac go senile at the age of 40 (he went to England to work with Dirac, and met his match in Dirac; both were 'elsewhere' at spatially separated world points). But in between (one has to wait and watch for those golden moments) he would pass such a profound remark or two about the intricacies of his paper, that we could easily churn out half a dozen papers as offshoots, if we wished to.
Once I was struggling to ‘prove’ a hunch I had about one step in our paper which was holding it up. He was to catch a train to Bangalore to talk about 'Unsolved Problems in Physics'. (I am sure the audience there had a tough time following him). I would go to him only when I was about to give up. I went to his Quarters and asked for help. He talked and talked about extraneous things and the rickshaw arrived. Not one to give up easily, I followed him to the railway station, bent on seeing him off. Just before the train left, he made a comment: ‘Doesn't it look like a tensor transformation?’ The train steamed off and as I bicycled back to my bachelor digs, I could see that his comment solved the problem.
By the time he returned after a fortnight, I wrote up the paper. I went to his office to give him my write-up. As usual, he talked on and on for two hours about the fine time he had at Bangalore and what a wonderful city it was and how he would love to settle there after retirement (not speaking a word about how his talk went). He then asked me to give him the unsolved step and he would ‘try’ it. Baffled, I told him that he had already solved it and reminded him of his comment that ‘it looked like a tensor transformation’. He told me that he was not aware of it at all!
There goes the 'genius' at work.
SDM: SDM and his Beam Balance
==========================================================================
My Ph. D. thesis under the guidance of SDM had five papers.
The first two had his name as the first author.
Then on he was too busy with his other works while I was gaining more experience, and was going to him only once in a while to seek some help. When I wrote up the manuscript of our third paper and gave it to him for reading, it had his name as the first author. But, that evening I had one of those last minute inspirations all of us have, and in a ‘night-out’, I finished a long and beautiful calculation. I ran to his Qrs. next morning with my khata. He was having his morning cup of tea in the garden, and thought that I wanted to correct some error in our paper before it was too late. Then, he looked at the end results of my 30 page calculations cursorily, and okayed them in just two minutes (such was his intuition: ‘What looks beautiful is often true’, though not always, as we all know).
I begged him to include these results as the last section of our paper. He fell silent and agreed, but took out the manuscript, and quietly changed the order of the authors so that my name became first. I was glowing with pride to have SDM as the second author. (DB had this privilege often).
By the time I wrote up the fourth paper, he was getting more and more out of calculations in the problem ‘suggested’ by him. When I wrote up the manuscript and submitted it to him, he was silent for a few minutes and said that it should be split up into two papers (Part I and Part II) with his name as the first author in Part I and my name as the first author in Part II. I put my foot down. I reminded him of Solomon’s Judgment; he laughed uproariously. I told him it was going to be just one paper or none. He fell silent again and returned the manuscript deleting his name altogether, with a somewhat heavy heart (like Feynman, he published so few papers that losing one was never easy). He asked me not to forget acknowledging him, with a naughty smile.
The last paper arose from my own ideas. I did the calculation and got the result I intuited, provided I set the value of an integral to zero, without ‘proving’ it. I was hesitant and took my calculations to him and asked him if I was justified to do so. He looked at just that integral, and dismissed my qualms. He said we always set integrals that ‘oscillate at infinity’ to zero, Neumann or no Neumann! My mind was at peace. It was understood that it was going to be my ‘single-author’ paper (how does it matter?). I collected my khata and was leaving. Then he hailed me back. I was worried if something else was wrong. But, no! He simply ordered: ‘Don’t acknowledge me in your paper!’ I could see it was he who was worried (about the rest of my calculations which he didn’t see!).
O, Tempora, O, Mores!
SDM & His Beam Balance
My Ph. D. thesis under the guidance of SDM had five papers.
The first two had his name as the first author.
Then on he was too busy with his other works while I was gaining more experience, and was going to him only once in a while to seek some help. When I wrote up the manuscript of our third paper and gave it to him for reading, it had his name as the first author. But, that evening I had one of those last minute inspirations all of us have, and in a ‘night-out’, I finished a long and beautiful calculation. I ran to his Qrs. next morning with my khata. He was having his morning cup of tea in the garden, and thought that I wanted to correct some error in our paper before it was too late. Then, he looked at the end results of my 30 page calculations cursorily, and okayed them in just two minutes (such was his intuition: ‘What looks beautiful is often true’, though not always, as we all know).
I begged him to include these results as the last section of our paper. He fell silent and agreed, but took out the manuscript, and quietly changed the order of the authors so that my name became first. I was glowing with pride to have SDM as the second author. (DB had this privilege often).
By the time I wrote up the fourth paper, he was getting more and more out of calculations in the problem ‘suggested’ by him. When I wrote up the manuscript and submitted it to him, he was silent for a few minutes and said that it should be split up into two papers (Part I and Part II) with his name as the first author in Part I and my name as the first author in Part II. I put my foot down. I reminded him of Solomon’s Judgment; he laughed uproariously. I told him it was going to be just one paper or none. He fell silent again and returned the manuscript deleting his name altogether, with a somewhat heavy heart (like Feynman, he published so few papers that losing one was never easy). He asked me not to forget acknowledging him, with a naughty smile.
The last paper arose from my own ideas. I did the calculation and got the result I intuited, provided I set the value of an integral to zero, without ‘proving’ it. I was hesitant and took my calculations to him and asked him if I was justified to do so. He looked at just that integral, and dismissed my qualms. He said we always set integrals that ‘oscillate at infinity’ to zero, Neumann or no Neumann! My mind was at peace. It was understood that it was going to be my ‘single-author’ paper (how does it matter?). I collected my khata and was leaving. Then he hailed me back. I was worried if something else was wrong. But, no! He simply ordered: ‘Don’t acknowledge me in your paper!’ I could see it was he who was worried (about the rest of my calculations which he didn’t see!).
O, Tempora, O, Mores!
SDM: The Qualifiers
===============================================================================
Unlike DB, I joined the Physics faculty at KGP without a Ph. D.
Soon after that, I got sucked into the maelstrom of UG teaching. I was a carefree bachelor then, living in a raucous ‘bachelor faculty hostel’ (Visvesvarayya Niwas), smoking like a chimney, and practically living in the Library, till the night-duty attendants threw me out. Then I would go to my room and read till 2 A.M.
SDM once told me that there was a conviction in Calcutta intellectual circles that no creative work like Theoretical Physics could be done without smoking. Then he would stare at me with a naughty smile, even though I used to give a good 15 minute gap between smoking and entering his room. The wretched stink tells! I can’t stand it nowadays! He told me that he himself graduated from cigarettes to cigars and then on to pipes. I didn’t ask him why he left it, but I know now. Any addiction, as Oliver Wendell Holmes puts it, is less of a ‘sin’ and more of a ‘punishment’. It kills one’s freedom.
So, I had no time, nor inclination to do a Ph.D. This was because many of my senior colleagues used to invite me to work under them, with an ulterior motive, viz. research scholars can run away, but junior faculty can’t. That was why I had to hide in the Library. Neither them nor their problems interested me.
Prof. H.N. Bose was watching me ‘waste’ all my time. He had a soft corner for me (his daughter was in my Electrodynamics class). One day he summoned me and ordered me to go to SDM and join him in his work. I asked him whether SDM does experiments or theory (such was my isolation, although both SDM and me were five years old in the Dept, he as a senior Professor and me as a junior faculty). HNB replied that SDM does wonderful theory, analytical not numerical. That came as a plea for me to escape. I tried to excuse myself saying that my math was weak. HNB thundered that SDM would teach me all the math I needed. I was squirming, but ‘orders were orders’; from a well-wisher HoD.
I then peeped into SDM’s room. And I found a burly man sitting with his feet up and staring at the clean blackboard in front of him, unaware of my entry. After a couple of minutes I gently coughed and he came out of his trance and looked at me. He asked if I was the one who was sent by HNB. I said ‘yes’. He offered me a chair. He then asked me what my ‘achievements’ were. (This seemed to be a routine opening gambit those days). I was blushing and told him I came first in the Andhra University in the MPCE (E for English) group of Pre-University exam. He got curious and asked how many students took that exam. I told him about 2500. He gave a broad (and relieved) smile and mentioned that he himself came first in about a LAKH of students in the Calcatta University Matriculation Exam (Dhaka was included in Cal Univ those pre-partition days). I didn’t know what to say. But there was no need to say it.
He ordered me to get up and go to the blackboard. ‘Draw an ellipse’. That was easy. ‘Draw a straight line intersecting the ellipse’. That too was easy. Then he dictated from his head a complicated function. I wrote it on the board. ‘Collect the residues at the points of intersection’. That stunned me like a whiplash, and I stood staring at the board. He fell silent and went into one of his trances. (He told me much later that his concentration was almost yogic, and he felt he could solve ANY problem that interested him. That reminded me of Somerset Maugham’s description of one of ‘his’ drug-induced trances….he felt so powerful that he could solve ANY problem, but of course felt too lazy to do so!).
Minutes were ticking by and I was dying for a smoke. After quite a while, he took his pen and pulled out a paper from his drawer and scribbled something and pushed it back. He asked me to get my answer and meet him next morning. I took down the ghastly formula and flew like a bat out of hell to the canteen.
That evening I went to the Library and pulled the chit out of my pocket. I did hear of ‘collecting residues’ from my B.Sc. (Hons) days a decade back. We had a wonderful teacher (his name was Dr. Sangameswar Rao ….See, good teachers are remembered even after 50 years) who taught us Complex Variables. So some confidence crept back. I took down Copson and jotted down the residue formula for second order poles. After a night’s work, I got some answer and peeped into SDM’s room the next morning, and handed him my work sheet with a pounding heart. He quickly pulled out the rough sheet in which he scribbled his answer the day before, compared my answer with his, drawing the left index finger on my sheet and the right on his (he was ambidextrous) and declared that I got it right. Profusely sweating, I decided this was the ‘guide’ for me.*
Thus I passed my qualifiers gloriously, thanks to my teacher, Dr. Sangameswar Rao, who I learned had passed away before I could thank him.
Moral: Don’t delay your thanx; ‘here today and gone tomorrow, all flesh is as grass!’
He then pulled out a biscuit-colored reprint from PRS and passed it on to me for reading and asked me to meet him whenever I got stuck. I went to my room, caressing the reprint lovingly. To my great delight I found it was on Electrodynamics with which I had some familiarity; and not Group Theory. The Introduction was so well-written that I fell for his English prose. And then there was an Appendix in which J. L. Synge added an Addendum. Synge was an admirer of SDM, and his book on GR contains SDM’s classic GR work. Synge was my favorite too, because he wrote a wonderful popular booklet titled ‘Kendelman’s Krim’. This was about the ‘infinity’ in pure math. The characters were an Ork, a Kea, a lion and a Carpenter. The Carpenter was just a carpenter, but one of the other animals was a pure mathematician, who asks the Carpenter whether he knows the value of ‘pi’. Carpenter says ‘yes’: it is 3.14; and when he is in a hurry it is 3.
For the next 3 months I used to go to his room every evening, sit down at his feet and get my doubts cleared in working out his PRS paper.
Thereafter my work started ‘running’. I used to solve most of the problems he gave me largely on my own, taking his help only when ‘indispensable’. That suited him. He withdrew from Electrodynamics to concentrate on his Group Theory work with DB.
* I later learned that he was then doing his ‘independent’ paper on ‘Cherenkov Effect in Biaxial Crystals’. He had this thing about him: He should publish at least one ‘single-author’ paper every year, however many collaborators he had. DB knows it. And it was our effort to prise out ‘his’ problems and make them ‘ours’. We never gave up, nor did he. It was a perennial struggle for both.
The Qualifiers
Soon after that, I got sucked into the maelstrom of UG teaching. I was a carefree bachelor then, living in a raucous ‘bachelor faculty hostel’ (Visvesvarayya Niwas), smoking like a chimney, and practically living in the Library, till the night-duty attendants threw me out. Then I would go to my room and read till 2 A.M.
SDM once told me that there was a conviction in Calcutta intellectual circles that no creative work like Theoretical Physics could be done without smoking. Then he would stare at me with a naughty smile, even though I used to give a good 15 minute gap between smoking and entering his room. The wretched stink tells! I can’t stand it nowadays! He told me that he himself graduated from cigarettes to cigars and then on to pipes. I didn’t ask him why he left it, but I know now. Any addiction, as Oliver Wendell Holmes puts it, is less of a ‘sin’ and more of a ‘punishment’. It kills one’s freedom.
So, I had no time, nor inclination to do a Ph.D. This was because many of my senior colleagues used to invite me to work under them, with an ulterior motive, viz. research scholars can run away, but junior faculty can’t. That was why I had to hide in the Library. Neither them nor their problems interested me.
Prof. H.N. Bose was watching me ‘waste’ all my time. He had a soft corner for me (his daughter was in my Electrodynamics class). One day he summoned me and ordered me to go to SDM and join him in his work. I asked him whether SDM does experiments or theory (such was my isolation, although both SDM and me were five years old in the Dept, he as a senior Professor and me as a junior faculty). HNB replied that SDM does wonderful theory, analytical not numerical. That came as a plea for me to escape. I tried to excuse myself saying that my math was weak. HNB thundered that SDM would teach me all the math I needed. I was squirming, but ‘orders were orders’; from a well-wisher HoD.
I then peeped into SDM’s room. And I found a burly man sitting with his feet up and staring at the clean blackboard in front of him, unaware of my entry. After a couple of minutes I gently coughed and he came out of his trance and looked at me. He asked if I was the one who was sent by HNB. I said ‘yes’. He offered me a chair. He then asked me what my ‘achievements’ were. (This seemed to be a routine opening gambit those days). I was blushing and told him I came first in the Andhra University in the MPCE (E for English) group of Pre-University exam. He got curious and asked how many students took that exam. I told him about 2500. He gave a broad (and relieved) smile and mentioned that he himself came first in about a LAKH of students in the Calcatta University Matriculation Exam (Dhaka was included in Cal Univ those pre-partition days). I didn’t know what to say. But there was no need to say it.
He ordered me to get up and go to the blackboard. ‘Draw an ellipse’. That was easy. ‘Draw a straight line intersecting the ellipse’. That too was easy. Then he dictated from his head a complicated function. I wrote it on the board. ‘Collect the residues at the points of intersection’. That stunned me like a whiplash, and I stood staring at the board. He fell silent and went into one of his trances. (He told me much later that his concentration was almost yogic, and he felt he could solve ANY problem that interested him. That reminded me of Somerset Maugham’s description of one of ‘his’ drug-induced trances….he felt so powerful that he could solve ANY problem, but of course felt too lazy to do so!).
Minutes were ticking by and I was dying for a smoke. After quite a while, he took his pen and pulled out a paper from his drawer and scribbled something and pushed it back. He asked me to get my answer and meet him next morning. I took down the ghastly formula and flew like a bat out of hell to the canteen.
That evening I went to the Library and pulled the chit out of my pocket. I did hear of ‘collecting residues’ from my B.Sc. (Hons) days a decade back. We had a wonderful teacher (his name was Dr. Sangameswar Rao ….See, good teachers are remembered even after 50 years) who taught us Complex Variables. So some confidence crept back. I took down Copson and jotted down the residue formula for second order poles. After a night’s work, I got some answer and peeped into SDM’s room the next morning, and handed him my work sheet with a pounding heart. He quickly pulled out the rough sheet in which he scribbled his answer the day before, compared my answer with his, drawing the left index finger on my sheet and the right on his (he was ambidextrous) and declared that I got it right. Profusely sweating, I decided this was the ‘guide’ for me.*
Thus I passed my qualifiers gloriously, thanks to my teacher, Dr. Sangameswar Rao, who I learned had passed away before I could thank him.
Moral: Don’t delay your thanx; ‘here today and gone tomorrow, all flesh is as grass!’
He then pulled out a biscuit-colored reprint from PRS and passed it on to me for reading and asked me to meet him whenever I got stuck. I went to my room, caressing the reprint lovingly. To my great delight I found it was on Electrodynamics with which I had some familiarity; and not Group Theory. The Introduction was so well-written that I fell for his English prose. And then there was an Appendix in which J. L. Synge added an Addendum. Synge was an admirer of SDM, and his book on GR contains SDM’s classic GR work. Synge was my favorite too, because he wrote a wonderful popular booklet titled ‘Kendelman’s Krim’. This was about the ‘infinity’ in pure math. The characters were an Ork, a Kea, a lion and a Carpenter. The Carpenter was just a carpenter, but one of the other animals was a pure mathematician, who asks the Carpenter whether he knows the value of ‘pi’. Carpenter says ‘yes’: it is 3.14; and when he is in a hurry it is 3.
For the next 3 months I used to go to his room every evening, sit down at his feet and get my doubts cleared in working out his PRS paper.
Thereafter my work started ‘running’. I used to solve most of the problems he gave me largely on my own, taking his help only when ‘indispensable’. That suited him. He withdrew from Electrodynamics to concentrate on his Group Theory work with DB.
* I later learned that he was then doing his ‘independent’ paper on ‘Cherenkov Effect in Biaxial Crystals’. He had this thing about him: He should publish at least one ‘single-author’ paper every year, however many collaborators he had. DB knows it. And it was our effort to prise out ‘his’ problems and make them ‘ours’. We never gave up, nor did he. It was a perennial struggle for both.
SDM: Slap or Stimulus?
=========================================================================
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!’
SDM: The Night It Poured
==========================================================================
That was a Saturday Evening in August. I knew that SDM religiously took out his wife to the Saturday Evening Show at the Netaji Auditorium, without fail. This was perhaps the only outing the poor lady had in that desolate campus, sans TV, sans phones, sans eateries, sans any sign of civilization. To her, it was a great escape from the routine drudgery. To SDM, it just didn’t matter. Whether it was the sofa in his drawing room or the padded chair in Netaji, it made no difference where he sat. His work needed no pencil, paper or lighting…it was all up there. I read some such remark made by Einstein when he had to stand in a queue somewhere.
Next day was a Sunday, when India were playing Australia. Neither he nor I wanted to miss the ‘commentary’ on our humming pocket transistors. And, I was stuck for three days, unable to determine the limits of an integral that was foxing me in one of our joint efforts. By then I knew what the answer should look like, but I just couldn’t get the limits. Those were my ‘senior’ years with SDM, when he practically withdrew from active calculations, but was helping me when needed.
So, I took out my rusted push-bike and pedaled furiously to his Qrs. to catch him before his rickshaw left for the Netaji. I just made it and showed the thing to him and asked him how to fix the limits. He stared at it for a few minutes, while Mrs. SDM was looking daggers at me (she was a wonderful host and fed me sumptuous loochies in the evenings when SDM wouldn’t let go of me from his reminiscences, but now it was different; the show will start off soon).
He then gave me a hint to draw a parabola; and its intersections with a straight line should give me the limits. The rickshaw chap was hustling and ringing his bells like mad, with Mrs. SDM seated in it. Before boarding the rickshaw, SDM told me that if his suggestion works, I don’t have to report to him; but if it didn’t, I have to go to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M., when he would be back home from the cinema, so that he could have a second look at it. That was fine with me.
On my way back I saw what an ass I was and how such a simple trick didn’t strike me. His suggestion worked like a charm and the integral was done in half an hour and I proceeded with the rest of the calculation, got very satisfying results as per my hunch; ate my delightful dinner in the tasteless mess and slipped into bed with a Perry Mason trial court scene that I was dying to finish.
And then it started ‘pouring’. You know how it rains in KGP in August, when it decides to. Heavens simply open up. That was smug with me and it was just the weather for a fag or two.
At around 11.30 P.M. there was a knock on my door. I was curious who that could be, in such a foul weather. Opening the door, I found it was SDM himself, with a dripping umbrella and soaked from waist to foot like a wet sock. I asked him to come in, improvised a seat for him somehow, and asked him what the matter was. He asked if his ‘parabola’ worked. I replied that it worked like a wonder. He felt greatly relieved. I told him that I would have gone to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M. if it didn’t work as per our understanding. He then remarked that he was afraid his suggestion didn’t work, but probably I didn’t feel like going out in such a lousy weather to his Qrs. I was mortified by the misunderstanding and felt that I perhaps should have gone to his Qrs. anyway.
That was SDM!
I gave him a fresh towel, made some black coffee and we two shared some welcome hot drink in wettest weather. I took the opportunity to show him all the progress I made and he was pleased that everything was going swimmingly. We then talked of this and that and I escorted him back to his Qrs; both of us completely wet, but pleased as punch.
Do we have such ‘guides’ nowadays? I wonder!
Talking of drawing parabolas, I am reminded of a story SDM told me (apocryphal, no doubt). It was about a physics student doing his doctorate under a celebrity guide at Oxford. Apparently the two had only two meetings. The first was when the guide gave him a problem. The other was when the student was stuck at one step a year later. He took the problem to his guide, who looked at it and made a pithy remark: ‘Drop a perpendicular’, before hurrying to watch a cricket match. A year later, the student defended his thesis gloriously and, became a celebrity himself.
On the banks of the river Kaveri, the poet-musician-saint Thyagaraja sang that “There are any number of great people in this world”.
For every great one, there are a hundred greater ones. The really great people know this. And so, they are ever modest.
The Night It Poured
That was a Saturday Evening in August. I knew that SDM religiously took out his wife to the Saturday Evening Show at the Netaji Auditorium, without fail. This was perhaps the only outing the poor lady had in that desolate campus, sans TV, sans phones, sans eateries, sans any sign of civilization. To her, it was a great escape from the routine drudgery. To SDM, it just didn’t matter. Whether it was the sofa in his drawing room or the padded chair in Netaji, it made no difference where he sat. His work needed no pencil, paper or lighting…it was all up there. I read some such remark made by Einstein when he had to stand in a queue somewhere.
Next day was a Sunday, when India were playing Australia. Neither he nor I wanted to miss the ‘commentary’ on our humming pocket transistors. And, I was stuck for three days, unable to determine the limits of an integral that was foxing me in one of our joint efforts. By then I knew what the answer should look like, but I just couldn’t get the limits. Those were my ‘senior’ years with SDM, when he practically withdrew from active calculations, but was helping me when needed.
So, I took out my rusted push-bike and pedaled furiously to his Qrs. to catch him before his rickshaw left for the Netaji. I just made it and showed the thing to him and asked him how to fix the limits. He stared at it for a few minutes, while Mrs. SDM was looking daggers at me (she was a wonderful host and fed me sumptuous loochies in the evenings when SDM wouldn’t let go of me from his reminiscences, but now it was different; the show will start off soon).
He then gave me a hint to draw a parabola; and its intersections with a straight line should give me the limits. The rickshaw chap was hustling and ringing his bells like mad, with Mrs. SDM seated in it. Before boarding the rickshaw, SDM told me that if his suggestion works, I don’t have to report to him; but if it didn’t, I have to go to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M., when he would be back home from the cinema, so that he could have a second look at it. That was fine with me.
On my way back I saw what an ass I was and how such a simple trick didn’t strike me. His suggestion worked like a charm and the integral was done in half an hour and I proceeded with the rest of the calculation, got very satisfying results as per my hunch; ate my delightful dinner in the tasteless mess and slipped into bed with a Perry Mason trial court scene that I was dying to finish.
And then it started ‘pouring’. You know how it rains in KGP in August, when it decides to. Heavens simply open up. That was smug with me and it was just the weather for a fag or two.
At around 11.30 P.M. there was a knock on my door. I was curious who that could be, in such a foul weather. Opening the door, I found it was SDM himself, with a dripping umbrella and soaked from waist to foot like a wet sock. I asked him to come in, improvised a seat for him somehow, and asked him what the matter was. He asked if his ‘parabola’ worked. I replied that it worked like a wonder. He felt greatly relieved. I told him that I would have gone to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M. if it didn’t work as per our understanding. He then remarked that he was afraid his suggestion didn’t work, but probably I didn’t feel like going out in such a lousy weather to his Qrs. I was mortified by the misunderstanding and felt that I perhaps should have gone to his Qrs. anyway.
That was SDM!
I gave him a fresh towel, made some black coffee and we two shared some welcome hot drink in wettest weather. I took the opportunity to show him all the progress I made and he was pleased that everything was going swimmingly. We then talked of this and that and I escorted him back to his Qrs; both of us completely wet, but pleased as punch.
Do we have such ‘guides’ nowadays? I wonder!
Talking of drawing parabolas, I am reminded of a story SDM told me (apocryphal, no doubt). It was about a physics student doing his doctorate under a celebrity guide at Oxford. Apparently the two had only two meetings. The first was when the guide gave him a problem. The other was when the student was stuck at one step a year later. He took the problem to his guide, who looked at it and made a pithy remark: ‘Drop a perpendicular’, before hurrying to watch a cricket match. A year later, the student defended his thesis gloriously and, became a celebrity himself.
Epilogue
For every great one, there are a hundred greater ones. The really great people know this. And so, they are ever modest.
SDM: Acknowledgments
============================================================================
After my retirement, many of my well-wishers kept in touch with me, and this wonderful gesture on their part helped me overcome my retirement blues.
They also encouraged me to write this article on SDM, read drafts of these files, gave me feed back, and suggested improvements. All of them are either my ex-students or younger colleagues and friends. I thank all of them for their support. Here are their names in dictionary order:
Aniket Basu, Anushree Roy, Arundhuti Ganguly, Indrajit Mitra, Jogia Bandyopadhyay, Krishna Kumar, Pratik Khastgir, Samit Ray, Sayan Kar and Shyamal Chakrabarti.
Professor N. P. Rao (IE & M) was my contemporary and close friend at IIT KGP. All these tales were first told to him 35 years ago as and when these events unfolded, and are being retold to you now from long term memory. He saw SDM and perhaps talked to him too. I thank him for encouraging me, going through these files; suggesting important changes and implicitly vouching for their veracity.
Professor Amalendu Mukherjee (ME), Professor Mainak Sengupta (EE) and Dr. L. V. K. Moorthy (M.B.B.S.) read these files and gave their knowledgeable approval, for which I am indebted.
I am grateful to Professor K. L. Chopra for kindly going through these files and suggesting a much improved sub-title.
Thanks are also due to my wife Rukmini for her encouragement and my son Shreenath for help with the computer.
Acknowledgments
After my retirement, many of my well-wishers kept in touch with me, and this wonderful gesture on their part helped me overcome my retirement blues.
They also encouraged me to write this article on SDM, read drafts of these files, gave me feed back, and suggested improvements. All of them are either my ex-students or younger colleagues and friends. I thank all of them for their support. Here are their names in dictionary order:
Aniket Basu, Anushree Roy, Arundhuti Ganguly, Indrajit Mitra, Jogia Bandyopadhyay, Krishna Kumar, Pratik Khastgir, Samit Ray, Sayan Kar and Shyamal Chakrabarti.
Professor N. P. Rao (IE & M) was my contemporary and close friend at IIT KGP. All these tales were first told to him 35 years ago as and when these events unfolded, and are being retold to you now from long term memory. He saw SDM and perhaps talked to him too. I thank him for encouraging me, going through these files; suggesting important changes and implicitly vouching for their veracity.
Professor Amalendu Mukherjee (ME), Professor Mainak Sengupta (EE) and Dr. L. V. K. Moorthy (M.B.B.S.) read these files and gave their knowledgeable approval, for which I am indebted.
I am grateful to Professor K. L. Chopra for kindly going through these files and suggesting a much improved sub-title.
Thanks are also due to my wife Rukmini for her encouragement and my son Shreenath for help with the computer.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
gps’s ‘Depression’ One-liners for the Wise and the Otherwise
===========================================================================
1. Depression is not madness; it is life-threatening sadness.
2. Depression can hit introverts, extroverts, perverts; and even stalwarts like Lincoln.
3. All are prone to Depression: men, women, transsexuals, heterosexuals and metrosexuals; they just bide their chance.
4. Depression is as hereditary as libido or the lack of it.
5. Depression can hit the toothy as well as the toothless.
6. Post-Depression life is like the post-marital: once bitten twice shy.
7. Taken sportingly, Depression is cathartic and not pathetic.
8. Those who haven’t gone through Depression are like kids who haven’t yet known that the tool is a two-in-one device.
9. The rich are as prone to Depression as the poor, the bold, the beautiful and the ugly…...it is the greatest leveler after Death.
10. Mild Depression is like mild Virginity.…there is no such thing.
11. You can’t buy genuine Depression across the counter just like you can’t buy genuine Genius; it has to be bestowed!!!!
12. Have a nice Night!
=========================================================================
2. Depression can hit introverts, extroverts, perverts; and even stalwarts like Lincoln.
3. All are prone to Depression: men, women, transsexuals, heterosexuals and metrosexuals; they just bide their chance.
4. Depression is as hereditary as libido or the lack of it.
5. Depression can hit the toothy as well as the toothless.
6. Post-Depression life is like the post-marital: once bitten twice shy.
7. Taken sportingly, Depression is cathartic and not pathetic.
8. Those who haven’t gone through Depression are like kids who haven’t yet known that the tool is a two-in-one device.
9. The rich are as prone to Depression as the poor, the bold, the beautiful and the ugly…...it is the greatest leveler after Death.
10. Mild Depression is like mild Virginity.…there is no such thing.
11. You can’t buy genuine Depression across the counter just like you can’t buy genuine Genius; it has to be bestowed!!!!
12. Have a nice Night!
=========================================================================
Saturday, October 10, 2009
A Teacher is born, with a LESSON
====================================================================================
A Teacher is born, with a LESSON
The whiff of nascent Freedom wafting through the winds of the early fifties, the sandy, sleepy, seaside village of Muthukur saw me turn from a playful kid into a proper lad.
Muthukur had only three ‘Government Officials’: the benign-tyrannical Headmaster of the High School (my father), the Country Doctor ringed by his array of big bottles of colored concoctions, and the awesome Sub-Inspector, keys of his one-cell jail dangling from his starched ‘uniform’ pocket. They formed a loose team (I recall the evening the Headmaster and the Doctor, as august members of the Official Committee, rendered the convincing verdict that the dead chap in the jail did die of suicide).
As Headmasters go, my father was rather a micro-Arnold, and our School a nano-Rugby in fun and frolic if nothing else. (It is tough to write of one’s late father…..he sort of peers down one’s shoulders.). Truth and Justice were his fixes, but he tended to forget that kids have a partiality to ‘convenience’, and abstract morals are sparingly soluble in their tender hearts. Thus, there never was a day when my father didn’t invoke the Golden Rule: ‘Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child’. Indeed, the one piece of ‘furniture’ wantonly granted to the Headmaster from his ‘contingency’ fund was the 3-foot long Madras cane. Come Monday morning, the School Pupil Leader (a largely nominated idol) would read out the roster of culprits of the past week in the Assembly; and they would file one behind the other to take the allotted number of ‘canes’ from the H.M.: their Judge, Jury and the Executor. I sensed that some of the routine miscreants were rather pleased with this drill, and pushed up their palms cheekily, fancying that the little ladies of their school adored their nonchalance. Attention was all they craved; and this they got one way or the other.
Life is never normal for the son of a H.M. (I had the double trouble of graduating from a Headmaster’s son to a Principal’s nephew……frying pan to fire).
First the teachers: They fall into two sets. One would treat the son with embarrassing deference to try and curry favor with their boss. The other would taunt and bully him for the imagined wrongs of his father.
Then the classmates: One set would converge under the bowers of the cashew tree boisterously laughing and yelling, but would fall eloquently silent when the son tries and joins them. The other would tail him beseeching his attention willy-nilly. He could never hope to have true unalloyed friends, for what he was worth.
Same with the public.
The exception was the Village Master Tailor, Jaan Saab, a pious kindhearted Muslim. I was 13 and he was like 43. But, he treated me as I loved to be treated: just another naughty boy. Whenever I was free from play and more play, I was in his thatched shop housing two heritage Pfaff Sewing Machines, the older manned by his taciturn nephew and the gleaming new piece reserved exclusively for his use. Often, however, he would squat on the floor-mat and set about the delicate job of ‘cutting’ the cloth to order. The pleasing whirr of the pedaled wheel below, the purring whirl of the driven wheel above, the tic-tak, tic-tak, of the sewing needle, the fine brow of Jaan Saab, tape draped round his neck, pencil in his ear; the smooth curves of his colored chalks on the cloth, the hefty scissors waiting to follow, the tribal belles haggling over their bashful blouses, the messy oil oozing out of its wood-pecker can, the exotic scents of fabric fresh from mills, the colored strips and striped ribbons of wasted cloth littering the floor, the rag pickers racing for them…… it was all a heady feast for the surging senses of a growing kid.
Jaan Saab’s sewing machine witnessed my rites of passage into my teens. At first I would climb his stool awkwardly, feet not yet reaching the pedal, and gingerly turn the wheel and watch the needle settle into its dance, Jaan Saab gently warning: Nakore Baeta! Over the three years I ran his shop, my feet landed firmly on the pedal, and learned the subtle art of setting the wheel into its swinging motion. Very like yo-yo, it was a sexy affair. Soon I learned threading the needle, pushing the cloth and pulling it under it; and in general being a nuisance to Jaan Saab, with his constant remonstration: Nakore Baeta!.
After convincing the nephew that I can sew, I begged him to let me do the re-stitching: some works required double stitches for strength. The leading first stitch he would do, and let me do the follow-up job. This suited him as well; but Jaan Saab wasn’t amused; yet he was too mild to shoo me out.
Then came the day of my just deserts: One sultry somnolent afternoon, when the master and his nephew broke for their lunch, I was playing with the machine, stitching the borders of a silk hanky. And soon, the thread in the bobbin gave out, and needed refilling. I had often watched Jaan Saab and his nephew do this delicate task, but never dared do it myself. It called for sliding the palm under the sewing plate and pulling out the bobbin blindfold, deftly releasing it from its catch. I was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for the duo to finish their meal. I stuck in my hand and did some fingering. Failing to feel the release, I finally tugged at the bobbin. Something snapped and I found the broken bobbin staring at me in my palm.
My first instinct was to CUT and RUN. But, I was growing up, and that route didn’t appeal. Further, there was nowhere I could flee; I was all alone all the while: no alibi and the evidence tight. I had to sit it through and wait for the music. By and by, Jaan Saab returned and saw my ashen face. He was aghast looking at the broken bobbin. He let out a grief-stricken cry. And fell silent. And his nephew came in. And found us face to face fighting our emotions. And I gathered from their talk that the bobbin cost a good 14 annas, roughly a day’s earnings for the shop. And, it had to be got from Madras. And that meant a 3-day shutdown for the Master’s machine.
Jaan Saab looked at me and read my face. He mentioned to his nephew that the H.M. was an upright man and would surely fork out the 14 annas, but he would whack me black and blue: my father was hard up, with a platoon of young ones to feed and dress. And Jaan Saab was a pious man. But he couldn’t let it pass. A pristine quandary: A poor noble soul facing a stupid growing kid.
It is at such times that the brain marvels.
I recalled the chink in Jaan Saab’s armor: his son Rahim. Jaan Saab wanted Rahim to be a Government Official; not another tailor like himself. Rahim was a studious lad, all sold to realize his father’s dreams. But the catch was two-fold: English and Algebra. They foxed him. When he passed in the one, he failed in the other. And so, he got detained twice in Class IX losing two precious years. Jaan Saab used to visit my father imploring him to pass his son. But the H.M. was an upright man; and failed his own kids when rules ruled them out. And the Day of Judgment used to be a day of despair for son and the father. And, it was the third and last chance for Rahim.
I got down from the wretched stool and made my plea to Jaan Saab: If he keeps my misdeed all to himself forever, I would coach Rahim gratis for the next 3 months before his final exams.
I was a little precocious in English and Algebra. English came as liberation to me from my mother tongue Telugu. It had only half the alphabet, there were no convoluted conjuncts; the writing was smooth and cursive, not involving letters beneath letters and dots in their bellies; and was devoid of the absolutely mystical half-nulls. Algebra again was free from the interminable transactions of Arithmetic involving purchase and sale and profit and loss and the abominable Janus-faced Rule of Three with its double standards for Time and Work vs Time and Speed.
Jaan Saab jumped up and embraced me, and the deal was struck. I stopped visiting his shop.
From then on, my routine changed. Every evening, at 6 P.M., Rahim would come over to our home and I would curtail an hour or two of my precious playtime. I would take him upstairs and we two would try and find out what could be done. It was a little awkward at first: Rahim was a year or two older than me, bristles sprouting on his upper lip. And he was way bigger than me. But I soon found out that he was as charming as his quiet father. And a couple of weeks were all we needed to get the thing going.
The H.M. was too busy to notice the change in my routine. But my mother was mystified, but said nothing. After a couple of weeks, she apparently liked the change and would send up coffee for two.
The exams were done and I was back with my full-time playmates. But, it seemed I had grown up meanwhile and it would never be the same again.
One fine evening, Rahim ran to me in the foot ball field and dragged me home. And, there he was, Jaan Saab squatting on the floor, his loose limbs spread-eagled, and speaking courteously to the H.M., my mother peeping from the curtains. Apparently, Rahim passed in flying colors and the doors were again ajar for his father’s dreams. Jaan Saab pulled out the tape from his neck and bade me stand beside him. And, measurements were taken for my first FULL PANT and FULL SHIRT.
Jaan Saab knew my own ambition: to get out of the regulation Khakhi Knicker and Drill Bush Shirt, and join the exclusive club of grown ups’ outfit. Parents always lag behind others noticing the dawn of adolescence in their own kids. Apparently, Jaan Saab offered his deal to the H.M. He would stitch my full pant and full shirt for free if the H.M. foots the bill only for the cloth. A quick consultation between my parents settled the deal.
A week later, I walked over to Jaan Saab’s shop all dressed up to display his precious gift. He cuddled and blessed me with all the verses in the Holy Quran he knew.
Very soon, I left Muthukur for college studies. And my father left as H.M. for a bigger school some place else.
I never visited Muthukur again. And I haven’t heard of Jaan Saab and Rahim.
But they remain part of my life, such as it is.
First, I got to know that I could teach. And, Teach I did for the next half century for my bread and pleasure.
Next, I learned the lesson of my life: Never touch another’s gizmos that you can’t replace.
Jaan Saab’s shop saw the moth fly away.
May his tribe increase!
===============================================================================
A Teacher is born, with a LESSON
The whiff of nascent Freedom wafting through the winds of the early fifties, the sandy, sleepy, seaside village of Muthukur saw me turn from a playful kid into a proper lad.
Muthukur had only three ‘Government Officials’: the benign-tyrannical Headmaster of the High School (my father), the Country Doctor ringed by his array of big bottles of colored concoctions, and the awesome Sub-Inspector, keys of his one-cell jail dangling from his starched ‘uniform’ pocket. They formed a loose team (I recall the evening the Headmaster and the Doctor, as august members of the Official Committee, rendered the convincing verdict that the dead chap in the jail did die of suicide).
As Headmasters go, my father was rather a micro-Arnold, and our School a nano-Rugby in fun and frolic if nothing else. (It is tough to write of one’s late father…..he sort of peers down one’s shoulders.). Truth and Justice were his fixes, but he tended to forget that kids have a partiality to ‘convenience’, and abstract morals are sparingly soluble in their tender hearts. Thus, there never was a day when my father didn’t invoke the Golden Rule: ‘Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child’. Indeed, the one piece of ‘furniture’ wantonly granted to the Headmaster from his ‘contingency’ fund was the 3-foot long Madras cane. Come Monday morning, the School Pupil Leader (a largely nominated idol) would read out the roster of culprits of the past week in the Assembly; and they would file one behind the other to take the allotted number of ‘canes’ from the H.M.: their Judge, Jury and the Executor. I sensed that some of the routine miscreants were rather pleased with this drill, and pushed up their palms cheekily, fancying that the little ladies of their school adored their nonchalance. Attention was all they craved; and this they got one way or the other.
Life is never normal for the son of a H.M. (I had the double trouble of graduating from a Headmaster’s son to a Principal’s nephew……frying pan to fire).
First the teachers: They fall into two sets. One would treat the son with embarrassing deference to try and curry favor with their boss. The other would taunt and bully him for the imagined wrongs of his father.
Then the classmates: One set would converge under the bowers of the cashew tree boisterously laughing and yelling, but would fall eloquently silent when the son tries and joins them. The other would tail him beseeching his attention willy-nilly. He could never hope to have true unalloyed friends, for what he was worth.
Same with the public.
The exception was the Village Master Tailor, Jaan Saab, a pious kindhearted Muslim. I was 13 and he was like 43. But, he treated me as I loved to be treated: just another naughty boy. Whenever I was free from play and more play, I was in his thatched shop housing two heritage Pfaff Sewing Machines, the older manned by his taciturn nephew and the gleaming new piece reserved exclusively for his use. Often, however, he would squat on the floor-mat and set about the delicate job of ‘cutting’ the cloth to order. The pleasing whirr of the pedaled wheel below, the purring whirl of the driven wheel above, the tic-tak, tic-tak, of the sewing needle, the fine brow of Jaan Saab, tape draped round his neck, pencil in his ear; the smooth curves of his colored chalks on the cloth, the hefty scissors waiting to follow, the tribal belles haggling over their bashful blouses, the messy oil oozing out of its wood-pecker can, the exotic scents of fabric fresh from mills, the colored strips and striped ribbons of wasted cloth littering the floor, the rag pickers racing for them…… it was all a heady feast for the surging senses of a growing kid.
Jaan Saab’s sewing machine witnessed my rites of passage into my teens. At first I would climb his stool awkwardly, feet not yet reaching the pedal, and gingerly turn the wheel and watch the needle settle into its dance, Jaan Saab gently warning: Nakore Baeta! Over the three years I ran his shop, my feet landed firmly on the pedal, and learned the subtle art of setting the wheel into its swinging motion. Very like yo-yo, it was a sexy affair. Soon I learned threading the needle, pushing the cloth and pulling it under it; and in general being a nuisance to Jaan Saab, with his constant remonstration: Nakore Baeta!.
After convincing the nephew that I can sew, I begged him to let me do the re-stitching: some works required double stitches for strength. The leading first stitch he would do, and let me do the follow-up job. This suited him as well; but Jaan Saab wasn’t amused; yet he was too mild to shoo me out.
Then came the day of my just deserts: One sultry somnolent afternoon, when the master and his nephew broke for their lunch, I was playing with the machine, stitching the borders of a silk hanky. And soon, the thread in the bobbin gave out, and needed refilling. I had often watched Jaan Saab and his nephew do this delicate task, but never dared do it myself. It called for sliding the palm under the sewing plate and pulling out the bobbin blindfold, deftly releasing it from its catch. I was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for the duo to finish their meal. I stuck in my hand and did some fingering. Failing to feel the release, I finally tugged at the bobbin. Something snapped and I found the broken bobbin staring at me in my palm.
My first instinct was to CUT and RUN. But, I was growing up, and that route didn’t appeal. Further, there was nowhere I could flee; I was all alone all the while: no alibi and the evidence tight. I had to sit it through and wait for the music. By and by, Jaan Saab returned and saw my ashen face. He was aghast looking at the broken bobbin. He let out a grief-stricken cry. And fell silent. And his nephew came in. And found us face to face fighting our emotions. And I gathered from their talk that the bobbin cost a good 14 annas, roughly a day’s earnings for the shop. And, it had to be got from Madras. And that meant a 3-day shutdown for the Master’s machine.
Jaan Saab looked at me and read my face. He mentioned to his nephew that the H.M. was an upright man and would surely fork out the 14 annas, but he would whack me black and blue: my father was hard up, with a platoon of young ones to feed and dress. And Jaan Saab was a pious man. But he couldn’t let it pass. A pristine quandary: A poor noble soul facing a stupid growing kid.
It is at such times that the brain marvels.
I recalled the chink in Jaan Saab’s armor: his son Rahim. Jaan Saab wanted Rahim to be a Government Official; not another tailor like himself. Rahim was a studious lad, all sold to realize his father’s dreams. But the catch was two-fold: English and Algebra. They foxed him. When he passed in the one, he failed in the other. And so, he got detained twice in Class IX losing two precious years. Jaan Saab used to visit my father imploring him to pass his son. But the H.M. was an upright man; and failed his own kids when rules ruled them out. And the Day of Judgment used to be a day of despair for son and the father. And, it was the third and last chance for Rahim.
I got down from the wretched stool and made my plea to Jaan Saab: If he keeps my misdeed all to himself forever, I would coach Rahim gratis for the next 3 months before his final exams.
I was a little precocious in English and Algebra. English came as liberation to me from my mother tongue Telugu. It had only half the alphabet, there were no convoluted conjuncts; the writing was smooth and cursive, not involving letters beneath letters and dots in their bellies; and was devoid of the absolutely mystical half-nulls. Algebra again was free from the interminable transactions of Arithmetic involving purchase and sale and profit and loss and the abominable Janus-faced Rule of Three with its double standards for Time and Work vs Time and Speed.
Jaan Saab jumped up and embraced me, and the deal was struck. I stopped visiting his shop.
From then on, my routine changed. Every evening, at 6 P.M., Rahim would come over to our home and I would curtail an hour or two of my precious playtime. I would take him upstairs and we two would try and find out what could be done. It was a little awkward at first: Rahim was a year or two older than me, bristles sprouting on his upper lip. And he was way bigger than me. But I soon found out that he was as charming as his quiet father. And a couple of weeks were all we needed to get the thing going.
The H.M. was too busy to notice the change in my routine. But my mother was mystified, but said nothing. After a couple of weeks, she apparently liked the change and would send up coffee for two.
The exams were done and I was back with my full-time playmates. But, it seemed I had grown up meanwhile and it would never be the same again.
One fine evening, Rahim ran to me in the foot ball field and dragged me home. And, there he was, Jaan Saab squatting on the floor, his loose limbs spread-eagled, and speaking courteously to the H.M., my mother peeping from the curtains. Apparently, Rahim passed in flying colors and the doors were again ajar for his father’s dreams. Jaan Saab pulled out the tape from his neck and bade me stand beside him. And, measurements were taken for my first FULL PANT and FULL SHIRT.
Jaan Saab knew my own ambition: to get out of the regulation Khakhi Knicker and Drill Bush Shirt, and join the exclusive club of grown ups’ outfit. Parents always lag behind others noticing the dawn of adolescence in their own kids. Apparently, Jaan Saab offered his deal to the H.M. He would stitch my full pant and full shirt for free if the H.M. foots the bill only for the cloth. A quick consultation between my parents settled the deal.
A week later, I walked over to Jaan Saab’s shop all dressed up to display his precious gift. He cuddled and blessed me with all the verses in the Holy Quran he knew.
Very soon, I left Muthukur for college studies. And my father left as H.M. for a bigger school some place else.
I never visited Muthukur again. And I haven’t heard of Jaan Saab and Rahim.
But they remain part of my life, such as it is.
First, I got to know that I could teach. And, Teach I did for the next half century for my bread and pleasure.
Next, I learned the lesson of my life: Never touch another’s gizmos that you can’t replace.
Jaan Saab’s shop saw the moth fly away.
May his tribe increase!
===============================================================================
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