=================================================================
An Ode to the Newborn
by
Shyamal Chakrabarti
Her picture is on my desktop
I watch her parted lips,
She looks at her mom with awe
I wish I give her a kiss.
She is clothed in blue sweater
Cradled in her mom’s lap,
The centre of everyone’s joy
Must be in long hours of nap.
I won’t be there in this world
To see the bud to bloom
But I am sure she will dispel
From her family every gloom.
Her Grandpa will suffer no more
Any spell of depression,
She will fill his every moment
Becoming his obsession.
I too am her Grandpa and so
I send my hearty blessing
To the tiny cherub and pray for
Her health and well-being.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Missing Last Nail
============================================================
The continued bleats of the Pak PM Gilani asking for more conclusive evidence against the 26/11 plotters reminds me of the following story:
==================================================================================
Jack, the traveling salesman, suspects that his wife Jill is cheating on him during his absences, with Tom.
He hires the Detective Harry to spy on Jill the next day when he was out of town.
On his return, Harry is ready with his report:
1. Tom visits Jack's home at 11 A. M.
2. Takes Jill out for lunch at the Marriott.
3. And to the Theater at 2 P.M.
4. And to a cocktail party at 6 P.M. followed by dinner.
5. And a movie at 8 P. M.
6. They return to Jack's place at 11 P.M.
7. They enter the bedroom and undress.
8. They jump into bed.
9. They switch off the lights.
Harry rests his case triumphantly.
Jack: "I myself have seen things till that event many times. What happened AFTER that?"
==================================================
The continued bleats of the Pak PM Gilani asking for more conclusive evidence against the 26/11 plotters reminds me of the following story:
==================================================================================
Jack, the traveling salesman, suspects that his wife Jill is cheating on him during his absences, with Tom.
He hires the Detective Harry to spy on Jill the next day when he was out of town.
On his return, Harry is ready with his report:
1. Tom visits Jack's home at 11 A. M.
2. Takes Jill out for lunch at the Marriott.
3. And to the Theater at 2 P.M.
4. And to a cocktail party at 6 P.M. followed by dinner.
5. And a movie at 8 P. M.
6. They return to Jack's place at 11 P.M.
7. They enter the bedroom and undress.
8. They jump into bed.
9. They switch off the lights.
Harry rests his case triumphantly.
Jack: "I myself have seen things till that event many times. What happened AFTER that?"
==================================================
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
"Repaid with Interest"
=====================================================================
I am becoming famous, courtesy Shyamal! Either that or The Statesman has relaxed her British English Bhadralok (Bhadramahila) standards; and gone ahead and published the piece: "Rain Drops and Pearls" under the 'better' title: "Repaid with Interest" (dropping the "Moral").
Who wants Moralizing these days anyway! They have even dropped 'Moral Science' from schools.
Child coming home from her new School: "Mother, our new teacher is great; she has no morals!"
Here is the link:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=4&id=308487&usrsess=1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am becoming famous, courtesy Shyamal! Either that or The Statesman has relaxed her British English Bhadralok (Bhadramahila) standards; and gone ahead and published the piece: "Rain Drops and Pearls" under the 'better' title: "Repaid with Interest" (dropping the "Moral").
Who wants Moralizing these days anyway! They have even dropped 'Moral Science' from schools.
Child coming home from her new School: "Mother, our new teacher is great; she has no morals!"
Here is the link:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=4&id=308487&usrsess=1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, November 13, 2009
To Commute or not to Commute
===================================================================================
No, this is not about the wisdom or otherwise of renting your apartment near your workplace in Hyderabad.
This is about a gentleman called Rasik (I forget his surname).
During my University Days, one of the raging questions was the definition of ‘gentleman’ in the Indian context. Everyone knows the definition of an English gentleman (just look up OED).
Our social structure being so different than the English, the definition ought to be ours own.
I thought that the Hindu Indian gentleman is aptly described by: a ‘gentle’ man.
None of my classmates agreed it could be that simplistic.
But Rasik was a thoroughly ‘gentle’ man. During my 40 years in the Physics Department at IIT KGP, I never saw him lose his cool. He never was found drunk.
Since he was almost permanently posted in the X-ray Research Labs, I met him rarely; except when the Jumbo 10-day all-day ritual of JEE Spot Valuation was on in the Second Year Lab on the Second Floor for a decade or so.
Rasik was the permanent Tea-Provider. DB and myself used to join the Mela not for making good money (which we never did), but just for enjoying the Jamboree Picnic spirit.
Rasik guessed our jolly mood and was doling out Subsidized Tea every hour without asking.
I knew he was a good singer of folk tunes, because he was humming whenever he was free (indeed during his Farewell, which happened a few years before mine) he was asked to sing and he did oblige.
A few days before his retirement, I happened to visit the Physics Office one quiet noon when he was alone with Didi who was egging him on to sign the ‘Commutation Forms’.
He was declining to do what everyone without exception was doing.
Didi was explaining that by foregoing Y Rupees of pension per month, he would be getting 100 Y Rupees as a lump sum, which if he Fixes in any Bank, he would be getting the same Y Rupees per month as Interest; and the Principal would be intact forever (those were the golden decades of ‘tight money policies’ of the GOI and a stable whopping Interest Rate of 12% on FD).
Greed!
Rasik refused to listen to the details.
His logic was simple:
“Didi, if the Government (Shorkar) is offering a crazy (pagla) Scheme like that, it is for their own good; not for my good. No, thank you!”
He stuck to his guns and turned out to be one of the few who didn’t commute!
He said he needed his ‘Full Pension’ which he would like to enjoy and be rid of dependence from his children whom he didn’t trust an inch. And mush less the GOI!
By the time I retired, the Bank Interest Rates sank to 6% and Didi’s logic went phut!
And I am sure the ‘Commuted Amount’ which Didi said would be ‘intact forever’ would go to the Corporate Hospitals of Hyderabad, which will put me in ICU and refuse to discharge me till my PF, Commutation Amount, Leave Salary, Gratuity, my son’s savings, my daughter-in-law’s savings and my wife’s ornaments all go up in smoke; and then they would also offer loans with easy EMI’s to keep my brain-dead body clinically alive.
When we were young staying in the IIT Hostels, whenever any of our colleagues used to go to the B. C. Roy Hospital for admission, the others would sing in chorus the popular Film Song ‘O, Jaane wale, ho saketo lout ke aanaa!).
Same with the Corporate Hospitals of Hyderabad.
I don’t know what happened to Rasikda.
I do hope he is enjoying his Full Pension!
No, this is not about the wisdom or otherwise of renting your apartment near your workplace in Hyderabad.
This is about a gentleman called Rasik (I forget his surname).
During my University Days, one of the raging questions was the definition of ‘gentleman’ in the Indian context. Everyone knows the definition of an English gentleman (just look up OED).
Our social structure being so different than the English, the definition ought to be ours own.
I thought that the Hindu Indian gentleman is aptly described by: a ‘gentle’ man.
None of my classmates agreed it could be that simplistic.
But Rasik was a thoroughly ‘gentle’ man. During my 40 years in the Physics Department at IIT KGP, I never saw him lose his cool. He never was found drunk.
Since he was almost permanently posted in the X-ray Research Labs, I met him rarely; except when the Jumbo 10-day all-day ritual of JEE Spot Valuation was on in the Second Year Lab on the Second Floor for a decade or so.
Rasik was the permanent Tea-Provider. DB and myself used to join the Mela not for making good money (which we never did), but just for enjoying the Jamboree Picnic spirit.
Rasik guessed our jolly mood and was doling out Subsidized Tea every hour without asking.
I knew he was a good singer of folk tunes, because he was humming whenever he was free (indeed during his Farewell, which happened a few years before mine) he was asked to sing and he did oblige.
A few days before his retirement, I happened to visit the Physics Office one quiet noon when he was alone with Didi who was egging him on to sign the ‘Commutation Forms’.
He was declining to do what everyone without exception was doing.
Didi was explaining that by foregoing Y Rupees of pension per month, he would be getting 100 Y Rupees as a lump sum, which if he Fixes in any Bank, he would be getting the same Y Rupees per month as Interest; and the Principal would be intact forever (those were the golden decades of ‘tight money policies’ of the GOI and a stable whopping Interest Rate of 12% on FD).
Greed!
Rasik refused to listen to the details.
His logic was simple:
“Didi, if the Government (Shorkar) is offering a crazy (pagla) Scheme like that, it is for their own good; not for my good. No, thank you!”
He stuck to his guns and turned out to be one of the few who didn’t commute!
He said he needed his ‘Full Pension’ which he would like to enjoy and be rid of dependence from his children whom he didn’t trust an inch. And mush less the GOI!
By the time I retired, the Bank Interest Rates sank to 6% and Didi’s logic went phut!
And I am sure the ‘Commuted Amount’ which Didi said would be ‘intact forever’ would go to the Corporate Hospitals of Hyderabad, which will put me in ICU and refuse to discharge me till my PF, Commutation Amount, Leave Salary, Gratuity, my son’s savings, my daughter-in-law’s savings and my wife’s ornaments all go up in smoke; and then they would also offer loans with easy EMI’s to keep my brain-dead body clinically alive.
When we were young staying in the IIT Hostels, whenever any of our colleagues used to go to the B. C. Roy Hospital for admission, the others would sing in chorus the popular Film Song ‘O, Jaane wale, ho saketo lout ke aanaa!).
Same with the Corporate Hospitals of Hyderabad.
I don’t know what happened to Rasikda.
I do hope he is enjoying his Full Pension!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Cracking the Grand Viva (Sonoo’s Tip)
============================================================
Cracking the Grand Viva
(Sonoo’s Tip)
Disclaimer: The following hint is based on the imaginary experience of an imaginary student facing an imaginary Grand Viva in an imaginary Department of an imaginary IIT.
Grand Viva is defined as the unpleasant experience of a lone student with a giant blackboard on one side and a bunch of at least 10 combative teachers on the other.
The first thing you should know is that the Grand Viva Room is a Battle Field where 11 egos fight one another.
As such, your entry into the War Room is fraught with palpable tension.
It is a cauldron of intellectual boiling soup which you are cordially invited to plunge in.
The thing is to ‘dodge’.
Let me explain: Each salvo that each teacher fires, it is hoped, mortally wounds the other 9 (the victim should try and stay an innocent bystander). If there is 1 question allowed for each teacher, this makes for a clash of 90 egos (literally a blood bath, if my math is right).
So the first step is: ‘Release this Unbearable Tension’.
This is done as follows:
Enter and clean the blackboard (strewn with the remains of your predecessor).
Turn around and coolly await the first bullet.
You should NEVER try to face this virginal assault frontally:
Look out the window.
Then stare at the blackboard pleadingly, with your back to the Inquisitors.
Turn around and look down (tears optional).
Rub your chin poignantly.
Stand on the other leg.
Look straight into the eyes of the assaulter.
Shake your dumb-head slowly like a cucumber swaying in a storm.
Utter the golden words: “THIS, I don’t know”.
You won the battle!
All the tension has dissolved.
You are up by one grade.
Rest is up to you.
At the end, slowly utter the words: “May I please try the first question?”
They’ll say: ‘Not needed’.
You are up by one more grade.
You are through!
Celebrate!
Cracking the Grand Viva
(Sonoo’s Tip)
Disclaimer: The following hint is based on the imaginary experience of an imaginary student facing an imaginary Grand Viva in an imaginary Department of an imaginary IIT.
Grand Viva is defined as the unpleasant experience of a lone student with a giant blackboard on one side and a bunch of at least 10 combative teachers on the other.
The first thing you should know is that the Grand Viva Room is a Battle Field where 11 egos fight one another.
As such, your entry into the War Room is fraught with palpable tension.
It is a cauldron of intellectual boiling soup which you are cordially invited to plunge in.
The thing is to ‘dodge’.
Let me explain: Each salvo that each teacher fires, it is hoped, mortally wounds the other 9 (the victim should try and stay an innocent bystander). If there is 1 question allowed for each teacher, this makes for a clash of 90 egos (literally a blood bath, if my math is right).
So the first step is: ‘Release this Unbearable Tension’.
This is done as follows:
Enter and clean the blackboard (strewn with the remains of your predecessor).
Turn around and coolly await the first bullet.
You should NEVER try to face this virginal assault frontally:
Look out the window.
Then stare at the blackboard pleadingly, with your back to the Inquisitors.
Turn around and look down (tears optional).
Rub your chin poignantly.
Stand on the other leg.
Look straight into the eyes of the assaulter.
Shake your dumb-head slowly like a cucumber swaying in a storm.
Utter the golden words: “THIS, I don’t know”.
You won the battle!
All the tension has dissolved.
You are up by one grade.
Rest is up to you.
At the end, slowly utter the words: “May I please try the first question?”
They’ll say: ‘Not needed’.
You are up by one more grade.
You are through!
Celebrate!
Friday, November 6, 2009
A Season of Limericks and Lampoons
==============================================================================
A Season of Limericks and Lampoons
To use a well-worn Dickensian cliché, it was a winter of despair and a spring of hope.
I am referring to the winter of 2008 and the spring of 2009.
There was the world-wide recession, the Bombay carnage, the tanking of Sensex and tumbling of the real estate, followed by Obama’s Presidential Election, and our own hilarious General Elections.
For a pensioner like me sitting in Hyderabad, it was the time of my life: just watching the ‘News at 9’ and scanning the newspapers spawned more than a hundred limericks and lampoons in 2 months.
I collect here a clutch of them in no particular order:
I. International: 1. Satyam: Lehman laid, Goldman Sacked; Merril Lynched, Price Watered; Morgan Chased – nothing happened; But when Satyam lied; poor Raju is jailed! 2. Bush shoe-ting: Bush had a thing; Sent Osama hiding; Embraced our Singh; Let Obama be King; What an expert at ducking! 3. Lincoln watches Obama: His dream come true; He dropped down to view; When on his Bible, The novice did fumble; He smiled and withdrew. 4. Britain’s ban: Britain bans clicking its bobbies; To save them from terrorists; Indian should follow; So we can allow, Our Police to freely PRACTICE! 5. Obama bans outsourcing: (with apologies to Raj Kapoor) Mera jootha hai yeh Cheeni; Yeh pathloon Hindusthani; Sar pe lal topee Brazili; Phir bhi dil hai Mike Obami. 6. Vatican embraces Darwin: We are so pleased and gratified; That Darwin’s theory is sanctified; Both Pope and us, Came from Apes; And Sir Charles is to be beatified. 7. Report that most Britons falsely claim to have read Tolstoy: I too tried ‘Peace and War’; Found it an unreadable bore; But I read all of Shakespeare; Songs & Sonnets and King Liar; But most I love my Bertie; Shaken to his foundations, He said with honesty: “Hamlet is full of quotations!”. 8. Obama says no to foreign nurses: Gone is the Iron Curtain, Goner is the Bamboo Curtain; Busy are the Obamas, Behind their hungamas, Knitting a see-through Lace Curtain. 9. Dickens’ former home ‘Bleak House’ at Broadstairs, Kent is up for sale: The stairs may be broad but the house is bleak; The walls are broke and the roof will leak; The buyer will be taunted, That the house is haunted, By the ghosts of Winkle, Weller & Mr. Peekweek. 10. Queen & the Cauliflower: Folks kneel before me and the Pope; But these Yankees hug me and grope; This Michelle Obama, Like Spencer Diana, Brims with the ‘Audacity of a Dope’.
II. Bengal Special: 1. ‘Slight’ of hand; all except the Left consult palmists before elections: “I am the Hand of Maradona; And I that held up Indiramma; All get me read, Save those of the red; Buddha, Bosu & Brindamma”. 2. Bardhan slams Congress for adopting ‘Jai Ho’: Bardhan’s best at pitching, Into his opponents hitching, Onto bandwagons; But these shenanigans, Amount to ‘slumbitching’. 3. Humpty-Dumpty of Bengal: Buddha-Mamata fought on a wall; Buddha-Mamata had a great fall; Not all their wits, Nor their big sticks, Can lure Tata back to their stall. 4. Mamata’s Bloody Pledge: “Boats sail on rivers; Ships sail on seas; But Tata’s cute Nano, Stolen by Narendro, Sails on the blood of W.Bees”. 5. Nano makes a splash: Nano comes in 3 colors: Blue, white and red; A splash in Mamata’s metaphors, Turns them all Bloody Red. 6. Buddha: ‘Post election Math will decide Chemistry: To Maya born under a sal tree; Ditching his son and wedded stree; Of maya-mamata to get free; Penanced under a peepal tree; But can’t get rid of either stree; Now seeks power and pelf in Chemistry!
III. Rest of India: 1. Every dog its day! : Pet dog, Lap dog, Bull dog, Watch dog, Hot dog, Top dog; Better rear a Slumdog. 2. Slumdog’s fallout: Bombay was our melting pot; In November it was boiling hot; What Taliban tried to do; Our slumdog did undo; Bombay’s again a tourist resort. 3. 26/11 Forgot! : Abhinav Bindra shooting away, So many Oscars on our way; Ring a Ring a Roses! Pocket full a poses; …Time to bury Bombay! 4. King’s last resort: One Bill I had in pocket, The other Bill in my jacket; With Satyam waylaid, All bills unpaid; I’d get a Lok Sabha ticket. 5. Language goes to dogs: ‘Slumdog’ offends Slums; ‘Top Dog’ offends Muslims; Alien lingoes, Upset jingoes; As ‘Big Dog’ smiles down heavens. 6. Burn & Dance: Couple o’ weeks ago, Dharavi let go!; It torched, It scorched, Danny & Co. Now O Saya!, Oscars aagayaa; It sings, It swings; Rahaman ki Maya! 7. Hillary mulling a Deal with Taliban: “You gobble Afghanistan, Pakistan; Hindustan, Ceylon & Iran; But leave Europe & US, In Everlasting Peace”; Smirks the Ghost of Chamberlain. 8. Amma is fast…ing!: Amma’s instincts are always right; To fight for her voters’ basic rights; What’s a day’s fast?; It can’t last; She can more than make it up at night!. 9. Proof of Rebirth Theory: Take a look at Laloo: Photo-milking his buffaloo; So much wit and GRIST; Can anyone hope to get?; And beget it at one GO! 10. Advani’s Challenge: My name is Advani; Hindu, Hindi, Hindustani; I dare anyone debate me; Sikh, Isai, Islambhai; Except Uma that SANYASINI!; My name is L. K. Advani. 11. As You Like It! Former IAS Officer complains to CEO about Purandareswari’s Book Release violating Poll Code: (With apologies to Shakespeare): Books thrown in running brooks, Tongues tied firmly in cheeks, Sermons greeted by pelted stones; And Poll Code violated in Everything! 12. Out of Thin Air!: Air Deccan Founder takes electoral plunge: (with apologies to Emerson) They reckon ill that leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings; I am the voter who voted me out; And I the flier who singed his wings. 13. Tweedledum & Tweedledee: When one was in, the other was out; Then both were in, now both are out; Both are now locked in embrace; But one says Aye, the other Nay; Both are Yadavs out and out. 14. Chairman Mao’s Karat(e) guide: Give them food, they ask sex; Give them sex, they ask house; Give them house they ask job; Give them job, they ask News; Give them news, they ask Vote; Then Freedom, that’s your doom; DON’T GIVE THEM FOOD! Learn from My Lai & Dalai; Food is ticket for Tibet! 15. Advani’s Confession..sorry Confusion: “I meant to say Osama; It came out as Obama; My tongue didn’t slip; It’s a Freudian slip; I’m told both are Musalmana”.
IV. Gandhijee: 1. Gandhi’s auction: "Gandhijee, O Father of
Our Nation!; We all vow to stall thy auction; We swear by Thee!, Who made us Free, To loot this nation!”. 2. Lage Raho Munna Bhai! MRPS workers damaged the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and broke its hands and legs: Raama, Buddha, Christ and Gandhi; Sure will survive your banter and bandy; Don’t be furious; They are mere IDEAS!; Cash in on them like our Munnabhai dandy! 3. Tipsy Gandhi: “Gandhi in Heaven, did you watch?; I just bought your specs and watch”. Gandhi smiles; A tipsy smile; “Here’s is a Heaven’s Brew, smartly catch! 4. Gandhi’s latest Will: Special Police Officer K. S. Raju succumbs to his injuries trying to save Gandhi Bhavan set on fire by MRPS activists: “All people are born to die; Police & Army are paid to die; Jihadis prefer to die; Several times I tried to die; Yet I wish…hic…..; Rajus get a speck; Of that $ 1.8 million pie”. 5. Gandhi couldn’t care! “I have drops of Gandhi’s blood and his ashes up for deal, sale or auction”…..James Otis : Otis: “Here is thy blood and here thine ashes; This is our wine, and these molasses”….. “Gandhi”: ‘But I am a Hindoo; None of this voodoo; I am the Spirit transcending Judasses; 30 pieces of silver, Is the price of Jackasses”. 6. Unhappy Pauper: Gandhi’s statue couldn’t be unveiled due to Model Code of Conduct: (with apologies to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince) “Swallow swallow, little swallow!; Lift the veil, it’s too hot”; “I can’t do it, I’ll be caught; dragged before EC, maybe shot”; “Tell me at least what’s on”; “All make merry with booze and biryan”; “Who will win and who will lose?”; “Whoever wins, you’ll lose; First you get a flowery noose; Then your limbs broken loose!”
.
====================================================================================
A Season of Limericks and Lampoons
To use a well-worn Dickensian cliché, it was a winter of despair and a spring of hope.
I am referring to the winter of 2008 and the spring of 2009.
There was the world-wide recession, the Bombay carnage, the tanking of Sensex and tumbling of the real estate, followed by Obama’s Presidential Election, and our own hilarious General Elections.
For a pensioner like me sitting in Hyderabad, it was the time of my life: just watching the ‘News at 9’ and scanning the newspapers spawned more than a hundred limericks and lampoons in 2 months.
I collect here a clutch of them in no particular order:
I. International: 1. Satyam: Lehman laid, Goldman Sacked; Merril Lynched, Price Watered; Morgan Chased – nothing happened; But when Satyam lied; poor Raju is jailed! 2. Bush shoe-ting: Bush had a thing; Sent Osama hiding; Embraced our Singh; Let Obama be King; What an expert at ducking! 3. Lincoln watches Obama: His dream come true; He dropped down to view; When on his Bible, The novice did fumble; He smiled and withdrew. 4. Britain’s ban: Britain bans clicking its bobbies; To save them from terrorists; Indian should follow; So we can allow, Our Police to freely PRACTICE! 5. Obama bans outsourcing: (with apologies to Raj Kapoor) Mera jootha hai yeh Cheeni; Yeh pathloon Hindusthani; Sar pe lal topee Brazili; Phir bhi dil hai Mike Obami. 6. Vatican embraces Darwin: We are so pleased and gratified; That Darwin’s theory is sanctified; Both Pope and us, Came from Apes; And Sir Charles is to be beatified. 7. Report that most Britons falsely claim to have read Tolstoy: I too tried ‘Peace and War’; Found it an unreadable bore; But I read all of Shakespeare; Songs & Sonnets and King Liar; But most I love my Bertie; Shaken to his foundations, He said with honesty: “Hamlet is full of quotations!”. 8. Obama says no to foreign nurses: Gone is the Iron Curtain, Goner is the Bamboo Curtain; Busy are the Obamas, Behind their hungamas, Knitting a see-through Lace Curtain. 9. Dickens’ former home ‘Bleak House’ at Broadstairs, Kent is up for sale: The stairs may be broad but the house is bleak; The walls are broke and the roof will leak; The buyer will be taunted, That the house is haunted, By the ghosts of Winkle, Weller & Mr. Peekweek. 10. Queen & the Cauliflower: Folks kneel before me and the Pope; But these Yankees hug me and grope; This Michelle Obama, Like Spencer Diana, Brims with the ‘Audacity of a Dope’.
II. Bengal Special: 1. ‘Slight’ of hand; all except the Left consult palmists before elections: “I am the Hand of Maradona; And I that held up Indiramma; All get me read, Save those of the red; Buddha, Bosu & Brindamma”. 2. Bardhan slams Congress for adopting ‘Jai Ho’: Bardhan’s best at pitching, Into his opponents hitching, Onto bandwagons; But these shenanigans, Amount to ‘slumbitching’. 3. Humpty-Dumpty of Bengal: Buddha-Mamata fought on a wall; Buddha-Mamata had a great fall; Not all their wits, Nor their big sticks, Can lure Tata back to their stall. 4. Mamata’s Bloody Pledge: “Boats sail on rivers; Ships sail on seas; But Tata’s cute Nano, Stolen by Narendro, Sails on the blood of W.Bees”. 5. Nano makes a splash: Nano comes in 3 colors: Blue, white and red; A splash in Mamata’s metaphors, Turns them all Bloody Red. 6. Buddha: ‘Post election Math will decide Chemistry: To Maya born under a sal tree; Ditching his son and wedded stree; Of maya-mamata to get free; Penanced under a peepal tree; But can’t get rid of either stree; Now seeks power and pelf in Chemistry!
III. Rest of India: 1. Every dog its day! : Pet dog, Lap dog, Bull dog, Watch dog, Hot dog, Top dog; Better rear a Slumdog. 2. Slumdog’s fallout: Bombay was our melting pot; In November it was boiling hot; What Taliban tried to do; Our slumdog did undo; Bombay’s again a tourist resort. 3. 26/11 Forgot! : Abhinav Bindra shooting away, So many Oscars on our way; Ring a Ring a Roses! Pocket full a poses; …Time to bury Bombay! 4. King’s last resort: One Bill I had in pocket, The other Bill in my jacket; With Satyam waylaid, All bills unpaid; I’d get a Lok Sabha ticket. 5. Language goes to dogs: ‘Slumdog’ offends Slums; ‘Top Dog’ offends Muslims; Alien lingoes, Upset jingoes; As ‘Big Dog’ smiles down heavens. 6. Burn & Dance: Couple o’ weeks ago, Dharavi let go!; It torched, It scorched, Danny & Co. Now O Saya!, Oscars aagayaa; It sings, It swings; Rahaman ki Maya! 7. Hillary mulling a Deal with Taliban: “You gobble Afghanistan, Pakistan; Hindustan, Ceylon & Iran; But leave Europe & US, In Everlasting Peace”; Smirks the Ghost of Chamberlain. 8. Amma is fast…ing!: Amma’s instincts are always right; To fight for her voters’ basic rights; What’s a day’s fast?; It can’t last; She can more than make it up at night!. 9. Proof of Rebirth Theory: Take a look at Laloo: Photo-milking his buffaloo; So much wit and GRIST; Can anyone hope to get?; And beget it at one GO! 10. Advani’s Challenge: My name is Advani; Hindu, Hindi, Hindustani; I dare anyone debate me; Sikh, Isai, Islambhai; Except Uma that SANYASINI!; My name is L. K. Advani. 11. As You Like It! Former IAS Officer complains to CEO about Purandareswari’s Book Release violating Poll Code: (With apologies to Shakespeare): Books thrown in running brooks, Tongues tied firmly in cheeks, Sermons greeted by pelted stones; And Poll Code violated in Everything! 12. Out of Thin Air!: Air Deccan Founder takes electoral plunge: (with apologies to Emerson) They reckon ill that leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings; I am the voter who voted me out; And I the flier who singed his wings. 13. Tweedledum & Tweedledee: When one was in, the other was out; Then both were in, now both are out; Both are now locked in embrace; But one says Aye, the other Nay; Both are Yadavs out and out. 14. Chairman Mao’s Karat(e) guide: Give them food, they ask sex; Give them sex, they ask house; Give them house they ask job; Give them job, they ask News; Give them news, they ask Vote; Then Freedom, that’s your doom; DON’T GIVE THEM FOOD! Learn from My Lai & Dalai; Food is ticket for Tibet! 15. Advani’s Confession..sorry Confusion: “I meant to say Osama; It came out as Obama; My tongue didn’t slip; It’s a Freudian slip; I’m told both are Musalmana”.
IV. Gandhijee: 1. Gandhi’s auction: "Gandhijee, O Father of
Our Nation!; We all vow to stall thy auction; We swear by Thee!, Who made us Free, To loot this nation!”. 2. Lage Raho Munna Bhai! MRPS workers damaged the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and broke its hands and legs: Raama, Buddha, Christ and Gandhi; Sure will survive your banter and bandy; Don’t be furious; They are mere IDEAS!; Cash in on them like our Munnabhai dandy! 3. Tipsy Gandhi: “Gandhi in Heaven, did you watch?; I just bought your specs and watch”. Gandhi smiles; A tipsy smile; “Here’s is a Heaven’s Brew, smartly catch! 4. Gandhi’s latest Will: Special Police Officer K. S. Raju succumbs to his injuries trying to save Gandhi Bhavan set on fire by MRPS activists: “All people are born to die; Police & Army are paid to die; Jihadis prefer to die; Several times I tried to die; Yet I wish…hic…..; Rajus get a speck; Of that $ 1.8 million pie”. 5. Gandhi couldn’t care! “I have drops of Gandhi’s blood and his ashes up for deal, sale or auction”…..James Otis : Otis: “Here is thy blood and here thine ashes; This is our wine, and these molasses”….. “Gandhi”: ‘But I am a Hindoo; None of this voodoo; I am the Spirit transcending Judasses; 30 pieces of silver, Is the price of Jackasses”. 6. Unhappy Pauper: Gandhi’s statue couldn’t be unveiled due to Model Code of Conduct: (with apologies to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince) “Swallow swallow, little swallow!; Lift the veil, it’s too hot”; “I can’t do it, I’ll be caught; dragged before EC, maybe shot”; “Tell me at least what’s on”; “All make merry with booze and biryan”; “Who will win and who will lose?”; “Whoever wins, you’ll lose; First you get a flowery noose; Then your limbs broken loose!”
.
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Thursday, November 5, 2009
Greed is too Good!
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Greed is too Good!
My online Webster defines ‘greed’ as: ‘A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed’.
Noah Webster is clearly ‘hedging’ (which he defines as: ‘evading the risk of commitment especially by leaving open a way of retreat’).
The vexed ‘Umbrella Devotee’ of R. K. Narayan fumes: ‘I have five umbrellas because I like to have five; I have as much right to have five umbrellas as you have five fingers on your hand’. And he is ever wary of parting with any of them.
Is he greedy? The burden of RKN’s essay is that he is not.
Webster keeps open his ‘way of retreat’ in his last word: ‘need’. The Umbrella Devotee thinks he ‘needs’ his five.
‘Need’ varies from person to person. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said: ‘Give me the luxuries of life; and I will dispense with its necessities’.
I myself ‘badly need’ just what the witches in the forest gifted Goopy Gayen-Bagha Bayen; I will be content and ask no more. Or, just the one wish-fulfilling statuette ‘Paathaal Bhairavi’ (I don’t wish to be reminded that, after much murder and mayhem, the goddess in the movie is urged to please take back the accursed thing).
Am I greedy? Well, the charming Goopy and Bagha are the epitome of Bengali ‘greedlessness’ (like Humpty Dumpty, I define it as the opposite of the Harshad Mehta syndrome).
HM shocked my Bengali Theoretical Physicist friend and room mate numb: for days on end he just couldn’t digest that figure of ‘Rs. 4000 Crores’!.
Rs. 4000 crores is passé these days. Today’s headlines say that an unnamed ex-chief minister amassed that much in less than six months and also stashed away an unknown amount in Swiss Banks.
Well, the currency of ‘greed’ varies. In the Wonderland of Academics, it is counted in how many ‘papers’ one publishes and how many Ph. D.’s one guides. I hear of an Academic the bound volume of whose CV is twice as bulky as a typical Ph. D. thesis.
The Nobel-winning Feynman had only 30 odd papers to his credit and was reluctant to guide any Ph. D. students after his first (once bitten twice shy!). But he concedes that his greed for ‘fame’ was insatiable; he was snubbed by his colleague Abraham Pais: ‘Publicity is a whore’!
When I retired after 40 years in Bengal and tried settling down in Hyderabad in its boom time, the daunting Malls here were aglow with flashing Neon Signs: ‘Greed is Good!’. And there was no standing room for venerable Senior Citizens like me in their stalls.
It is a different matter that all those beckoning lights dimmed and died in a couple of years; and I can now squat in these Malls and swat flies.
In my late teens I had a friend who did his Diploma in Civil Engineering and was just then employed as a small time Supervisor of Constructions. Within six months he used to talk of everyone’s Bank balance in terms of how many ‘houses’ they could buy.
The famous Tolstoy story: ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’, ends with the pithy sentence: ‘Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed’. And his admirer Gandhijee hinted: ‘Mother Earth has enough to quench each one’s need but not their greed’.
In one of those days of the real estate Big Bang, a Hyderabadi ‘know-all’ urged me to quickly buy a 2-BHK flat of 1000 sft at the going rate of Rs. 50 lakhs in his middle class locality because the prices of land, steel, cement and the works were hitting the roof and would touch the sky within a couple of months.
But God gave me only Rs. 15 lakhs as my Retirement Fund. Within six months the prices tumbled to Rs. 18 lakhs; and still no takers. The Banks are vying with one another begging even me to take a ‘Dream-Home-Loan’ on ‘Reverse Mortgage’.
I am demurring, ‘dreaming’ that they would touch down the Rs. 15 lakhs rock bottom line one of these days.
Am I greedy? I should ask Noah Webster.
Last Laugh: We now come to Noah Webster’s bracketed dirty word: ‘Money’: Today’s newspaper has this piquant item:
“The Columbian cocaine baron, Escobar on the run, is said to have burned over $ 1.5 million in hard cash in one night just to keep his daughter warm in a cold mountain hideout”.
He couldn't have burned houses and gold though...
Money has many uses and can be heart-warming! What do you say, Noahjee?
======================================================
Greed is too Good!
My online Webster defines ‘greed’ as: ‘A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed’.
Noah Webster is clearly ‘hedging’ (which he defines as: ‘evading the risk of commitment especially by leaving open a way of retreat’).
The vexed ‘Umbrella Devotee’ of R. K. Narayan fumes: ‘I have five umbrellas because I like to have five; I have as much right to have five umbrellas as you have five fingers on your hand’. And he is ever wary of parting with any of them.
Is he greedy? The burden of RKN’s essay is that he is not.
Webster keeps open his ‘way of retreat’ in his last word: ‘need’. The Umbrella Devotee thinks he ‘needs’ his five.
‘Need’ varies from person to person. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said: ‘Give me the luxuries of life; and I will dispense with its necessities’.
I myself ‘badly need’ just what the witches in the forest gifted Goopy Gayen-Bagha Bayen; I will be content and ask no more. Or, just the one wish-fulfilling statuette ‘Paathaal Bhairavi’ (I don’t wish to be reminded that, after much murder and mayhem, the goddess in the movie is urged to please take back the accursed thing).
Am I greedy? Well, the charming Goopy and Bagha are the epitome of Bengali ‘greedlessness’ (like Humpty Dumpty, I define it as the opposite of the Harshad Mehta syndrome).
HM shocked my Bengali Theoretical Physicist friend and room mate numb: for days on end he just couldn’t digest that figure of ‘Rs. 4000 Crores’!.
Rs. 4000 crores is passé these days. Today’s headlines say that an unnamed ex-chief minister amassed that much in less than six months and also stashed away an unknown amount in Swiss Banks.
Well, the currency of ‘greed’ varies. In the Wonderland of Academics, it is counted in how many ‘papers’ one publishes and how many Ph. D.’s one guides. I hear of an Academic the bound volume of whose CV is twice as bulky as a typical Ph. D. thesis.
The Nobel-winning Feynman had only 30 odd papers to his credit and was reluctant to guide any Ph. D. students after his first (once bitten twice shy!). But he concedes that his greed for ‘fame’ was insatiable; he was snubbed by his colleague Abraham Pais: ‘Publicity is a whore’!
When I retired after 40 years in Bengal and tried settling down in Hyderabad in its boom time, the daunting Malls here were aglow with flashing Neon Signs: ‘Greed is Good!’. And there was no standing room for venerable Senior Citizens like me in their stalls.
It is a different matter that all those beckoning lights dimmed and died in a couple of years; and I can now squat in these Malls and swat flies.
In my late teens I had a friend who did his Diploma in Civil Engineering and was just then employed as a small time Supervisor of Constructions. Within six months he used to talk of everyone’s Bank balance in terms of how many ‘houses’ they could buy.
The famous Tolstoy story: ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’, ends with the pithy sentence: ‘Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed’. And his admirer Gandhijee hinted: ‘Mother Earth has enough to quench each one’s need but not their greed’.
In one of those days of the real estate Big Bang, a Hyderabadi ‘know-all’ urged me to quickly buy a 2-BHK flat of 1000 sft at the going rate of Rs. 50 lakhs in his middle class locality because the prices of land, steel, cement and the works were hitting the roof and would touch the sky within a couple of months.
But God gave me only Rs. 15 lakhs as my Retirement Fund. Within six months the prices tumbled to Rs. 18 lakhs; and still no takers. The Banks are vying with one another begging even me to take a ‘Dream-Home-Loan’ on ‘Reverse Mortgage’.
I am demurring, ‘dreaming’ that they would touch down the Rs. 15 lakhs rock bottom line one of these days.
Am I greedy? I should ask Noah Webster.
Last Laugh: We now come to Noah Webster’s bracketed dirty word: ‘Money’: Today’s newspaper has this piquant item:
“The Columbian cocaine baron, Escobar on the run, is said to have burned over $ 1.5 million in hard cash in one night just to keep his daughter warm in a cold mountain hideout”.
He couldn't have burned houses and gold though...
Money has many uses and can be heart-warming! What do you say, Noahjee?
======================================================
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Autocrat of the Dining Floor
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Autocrat of the Dining Floor
(with apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes)
This is all about my grandmom (Ammamma).
She was born more than a century ago and lived a proud life of 85 years: the wife of a Revenue Official in British India.
We were a dozen or more of her grandkids clinging to her lovingly in the 1950s.
(Padma Bhushan) Ramachandra Guha calls the 1950s a ‘special’, nay, an ‘innocent’ decade of Free India. So were we.
An orthodox South Indian Brahmin family, we were brought up on enormous mounds (or so it seemed to us in our voracious outdoor childhood) of curry, sambar, chutney, rasam, and curd admixed with rice, serially, with ghee as the ‘killer lubricant’.
Whenever she visited one of her children, Ammamma would capture and rule over their kitchen like a benign despot. ‘Breakfast’ started with all her grandkids squatting in a semicircle around her. She would craft giant size perfectly round morsels which would be ‘dealt’, like playing cards, along the ring of our waiting hands. Anyone with an unfinished morsel in their hands would be rebuked as a slow and sloppy eater, and threatened with a ‘bypass’. So, none could waste their time in unholy chit-chat. Concentrated ‘upload’ was the motto. That saw us through five hours of play.
When I joined College, Ammamma used to visit my uncle’s place where I was living. Since my ‘University Bus’ left promptly at 9.30 A.M. it was hustle and bustle for her. At the stroke of 9 I would fetch my plate and squat mercilessly on her kitchen floor.
First would come steaming rice with curry as the breather, and the rest of the items would descend on my plate one by one as the cooking progressed. Since I had to run to catch the bus (I had to walk 5 km if I missed it), I was in no mood to ‘relish’ my lunch (that ‘happy hour’ was reserved for the night meal). Just shovel and scram!
But she was a proud cook and insisted on my ‘feedback’ on each item (I was the day’s guinea pig; orthodoxy forbade her to taste the food before everyone in her family had theirs). I used to say ‘delicious’ in reply to her serial queries. And she would taunt me as an ‘indiscriminate ignoramus’ (as opposed to a ‘connoisseur’). I had little time to argue.
But one day, I had more time than usual at my disposal and I ventured to suggest that the curry could perhaps do with a little less salt. That was it! I was scolded for my ‘lay’ tastes, lectured on the importance of salt as the spice of life and food, and in general brushed off. I ‘had’ it either way.
But, in truth, she was a marvelous cook, and ‘delicious’ was the right word, scolding or no scolding.
Much later when she once complained of a wee giddiness, her physician son brought out his gleaming B. P. kit and discovered that she was running a steady 250/150. He forthwith forbade her from having ‘any salt’ whatsoever.
By then she had acquired the services of a cook, but would herself decide on every detail of every recipe, and supervise the cooking closely.
And strict instructions would be given loudly (for public consumption) that excessive salt is bad for health though good for taste, and so only a ‘sprinkling’ of it should be used in every dish. That ‘healthy’ food would be served for all on the dining floor.
My mother reported that, after the entire family was fed, and fled, Ammamma and her cook would squat face to face for their leisurely meal adding a ‘splash’ of salt hither and thither ‘just for a hint of taste’.
And she lived to a ripe and healthy old age with no ‘side effects’ whatever of a soaring B. P. apart from its nuisance value; while many of her grandkids became unduly health conscious and ceased relishing food what with indigestion, dyspepsia, acidity, sugar and so on before they turned 40.
Ammamma was truly made of sterner stuff!
===================================================================
Autocrat of the Dining Floor
(with apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes)
This is all about my grandmom (Ammamma).
She was born more than a century ago and lived a proud life of 85 years: the wife of a Revenue Official in British India.
We were a dozen or more of her grandkids clinging to her lovingly in the 1950s.
(Padma Bhushan) Ramachandra Guha calls the 1950s a ‘special’, nay, an ‘innocent’ decade of Free India. So were we.
An orthodox South Indian Brahmin family, we were brought up on enormous mounds (or so it seemed to us in our voracious outdoor childhood) of curry, sambar, chutney, rasam, and curd admixed with rice, serially, with ghee as the ‘killer lubricant’.
Whenever she visited one of her children, Ammamma would capture and rule over their kitchen like a benign despot. ‘Breakfast’ started with all her grandkids squatting in a semicircle around her. She would craft giant size perfectly round morsels which would be ‘dealt’, like playing cards, along the ring of our waiting hands. Anyone with an unfinished morsel in their hands would be rebuked as a slow and sloppy eater, and threatened with a ‘bypass’. So, none could waste their time in unholy chit-chat. Concentrated ‘upload’ was the motto. That saw us through five hours of play.
When I joined College, Ammamma used to visit my uncle’s place where I was living. Since my ‘University Bus’ left promptly at 9.30 A.M. it was hustle and bustle for her. At the stroke of 9 I would fetch my plate and squat mercilessly on her kitchen floor.
First would come steaming rice with curry as the breather, and the rest of the items would descend on my plate one by one as the cooking progressed. Since I had to run to catch the bus (I had to walk 5 km if I missed it), I was in no mood to ‘relish’ my lunch (that ‘happy hour’ was reserved for the night meal). Just shovel and scram!
But she was a proud cook and insisted on my ‘feedback’ on each item (I was the day’s guinea pig; orthodoxy forbade her to taste the food before everyone in her family had theirs). I used to say ‘delicious’ in reply to her serial queries. And she would taunt me as an ‘indiscriminate ignoramus’ (as opposed to a ‘connoisseur’). I had little time to argue.
But one day, I had more time than usual at my disposal and I ventured to suggest that the curry could perhaps do with a little less salt. That was it! I was scolded for my ‘lay’ tastes, lectured on the importance of salt as the spice of life and food, and in general brushed off. I ‘had’ it either way.
But, in truth, she was a marvelous cook, and ‘delicious’ was the right word, scolding or no scolding.
Much later when she once complained of a wee giddiness, her physician son brought out his gleaming B. P. kit and discovered that she was running a steady 250/150. He forthwith forbade her from having ‘any salt’ whatsoever.
By then she had acquired the services of a cook, but would herself decide on every detail of every recipe, and supervise the cooking closely.
And strict instructions would be given loudly (for public consumption) that excessive salt is bad for health though good for taste, and so only a ‘sprinkling’ of it should be used in every dish. That ‘healthy’ food would be served for all on the dining floor.
My mother reported that, after the entire family was fed, and fled, Ammamma and her cook would squat face to face for their leisurely meal adding a ‘splash’ of salt hither and thither ‘just for a hint of taste’.
And she lived to a ripe and healthy old age with no ‘side effects’ whatever of a soaring B. P. apart from its nuisance value; while many of her grandkids became unduly health conscious and ceased relishing food what with indigestion, dyspepsia, acidity, sugar and so on before they turned 40.
Ammamma was truly made of sterner stuff!
===================================================================
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Seven Ages of a Lying Man
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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!
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 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!’
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