SDM: The Qualifiers

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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.