Small is Beautiful

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"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat
"I don't much care where--" said Alice
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat
"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough"

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That rather neatly sums up my blogging. Aimless, but going strong.

My yesterday's story about teaching a Class of 1 to Suranjana for an entire semester had me thinking of several such 'Small is Beautiful' gatherings.

The most celebrated is of course that story about Chandrasekhar. I read that he used to drive 100 miles back and forth every other day to take a Class for Grad-students. In the end the whole Class got Nobel Prizes: 'Yang & Lee'.

There is this story about Rubenstein, the Polish Pianist, Made in America, told in Readers Digest (where else?):

While in Berlin, trying to launch a career in music, he failed and was hounded by creditors. Dejected, he hanged himself in his Hotel Room. But the rope gave and he fell down like a sack of coal. And, as he walked into the sweet sunshine of street and life, he said to himself: "Never Again!"

The morning after an overnight performance in NY, Rubenstein & Co were winding down in their Rented Music Hall, when a young man ran in and dropped down from exhaustion. It turned out that the he missed his 'connection' the previous evening and could reach the Hall only that morning, with a Ticket in his hand.

Rubenstein ordered refreshments, and when recuperated, seated him in the front row of the empty Music Hall and gave the young man a full 3-hour Performance!

[Aside: Book-Lover's Idea of Hell: An AC Room with ample food and drinks, and all walls covered by bookshelves filled with Back Numbers of Readers Digest and nothing else!]

Professor and Mrs Robin Mukherjee of IIT KGP were our samne badir
neighbors for a decade and half. Great family friends. Very nice and gentle folks with a wonderful sense of the beautiful and the best in life and arts. Well-maintained garden and home. Both were accomplished singers. Ex-AIR artists. Legend had it that they met first in the AIR Studios. Mrs Mukherjee narrated this story to me the morning after the event:

Those days (1985) Spring Fest at IIT KGP used to be a small and homely thing. All Faculty Members with families were invited to the Cultural Events at the OAT. That night Amzad Ali Khan, then a young and charming handsome man was scheduled to give his recital, starting 11 PM. Around 10 PM, there was one of those wild Nor'Westers that blew everything away of the AV System. The aficionado crowd waited till 3 AM and slowly dwindled till Prof & Mrs Mukherjee and a handful others were left alone refusing to quit.

Then Amzadjee asked his devotees to come on to the dais, and gave them a cozy and full performance till daybreak, sans any AV or other systems than his own Sarod and Tabla.

A day before I left KGP in August 2005, KK asked me to talk to him about any one of my favorite topics in Optics. I chose a paper that I, he, and that 'shy' one did a couple of decades back and which KK forgot all about:

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"Locating the extraordinary ray", Sastry, G. P.; Kumar, Krishna; Chakrabarty, S.
American Journal of Physics, Volume 55, Issue 7, pp. 659-661 (1987)

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I dragged him to our old M Sc Class Room, asked him to bring his pen and khata, talked about it for 15 minutes and made him work out all the steps of his own paper afresh for the next hour or so.

One-on-one Swan Song of gps@ his alma pater.

It is never easy to teach one's own son in Class XI. Adolescent rebelliousness on one side and fretful impatience on the other. A most difficult period for both.

So, I suggested that my son go to AD, my erstwhile student in the Phy Dept who did professional coaching. And forgot about it. At the end of Class XI, my son refused to continue there, as he was lagging behind and losing interest in Physics, which he was good at till then. Reason: "Lack of personal attention in a Class of 10 or so". My son was shy and burdened with keeping up the false reputation of his father. So, he couldn't ask questions and had to pretend to follow everything.

And he asked me to coach him myself.

I knew it wouldn't work out. So, I told him to bring along his best friend in his Class who was equally frustrated. Deepu's joy knew no bounds with my free offer of 'personal' JEE coaching.

Between the three of us, it went like swell. The two used to gather in our 'Guest Room' at 11 PM every night, solve all the Problems of H C Verma & Resnick-Halliday under my benign supervision, with healthy and friendly competition till 3 AM with a half hour break at 1 AM when my wife would feed us all hot hot aloo bhajee and chai.
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Very soon, Deepu became my best young friend and a darling extra son of my wife. He completed his Ph D in Computer Science at one of those Universities of California and is now a 'big bucks' earner. My son, wife and daughter-in-law flew to Cal to attend his marriage with another campus girl class mate of theirs; and they in turn gifted us the Micro-Oven in which I heat my 'Bowl of India' every midnight.

A very profitable 'symbiotic' arrangement. With my son alone, we would have got pissed off with each other in 10 minutes of one-on-one coaching.

DB & I shared the same supervisor SDM for five years and then the same Office Room for the next 20 years. But we never published anything together. Within a short time, we realized that our interests are mutually orthogonal; but 'complementary'. They sort of 'dove-tailed' to make a clean sweep of UG Physics.

We had 2 blackboards in our Room, one behind his seat and the other behind mine. When both of us would be reading or musing silently, one of us would get pesky about some issue that was bothering us and start attacking the blackboard. The other would be all attention and listen and make comments, ask for clarifications and make profitable nuisance. HoDs who would 'peep' in for some work or the other would be frightened by the tense and charged atmosphere and withdraw in silence. And then we would go for a cup of tea and gossip.

At the end of an year, his paper would have an Acknowledgment to me or vice versa.

Great time is had when one understands the other's interets and limitations.

A keen listener is enough sometimes even if he doesn't know all the intricacies of what you talk.

SDM once gave me a Certificate after talking about his Problem with me for an hour, all attention, but no comment:

"Discussions with you have always been fruitful!"

I used to recall with glee the story that Churchill used to go visit his stable and read out his Speech to his pet horse before delivering it in the Combined Houses of Parliament


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