Fourfold Way

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Lemma: Without doubt SDM was the most INTERESTING person I ever met.

Proof: No one has written as many thousands of words as I have about him; nor I about anyone else.

He was also a most difficult person to understand and appreciate in his entirety.

He was like the proverbial Elephant; and many half-blind men touched him.

I know only four such blind men whose views of the Elephant I give below:

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HNB:

HNB knew the Elephant's legs and was 'guiding' him to his watering holes at IIT KGP so that he comes to no harm.

As HoD he brought SDM to KGP when SDM was languishing in Calcutta to say the least.

And tolerated his eccentricities (including SDM's needless quarrels with HNB as a Senior Professor 4 years older to HNB as well as a neighbor).

It was out of a sense of 'Appreciation' although HNB knew next to nothing of SDM's work or abilities closely. HNB was an out and out Experimental Physicist who worked almost exclusively in Luminescence at KGP for 25 years.

He was like the father of a prodigy. And he discharged his paternal duties marvelously.

Proof: SDM told me many times that his decade at KGP was his most enjoyable.

An envious HoD could easily have made SDM's life miserable.

And HNB, the man with the most ability to read others, gifted DB and imposed gps on SDM both against SDM's will (SDM preferred someone else in the Interview as DB himself told me...and accepted me unwillingly since Research Scholars he was given were running away).

But for HNB, SDM would have been mired in Calcutta and his career would have been in ruins both as a Person and as a Researcher.

DB:

To DB, SDM was God: Because DB saw only the Elephant's head and it looked very like Ganeshjee's.

Anyone who criticized SDM (there were many at Cal, KGP, and Visvabharati) was not loved by DB, no way, to put it mildly.

DB didn't care at all about SDM's weaknesses because he shared many of them (I loved them).

By the time DB joined him, SDM was already fed up with bread-and-butter Theoretical Physics like GR, QM & Molecular Spectroscopy and was concentrating on Exact Mathematics of Continuous Groups imperative to certain branches of Particle Physics,.

If SDM was God to DB, DB was the most-beloved Devotee to SDM: There was no doubt about it. No one else could actively collaborate with SDM in Group Theory.

None!

Their interests as well as abilities in the subject matched perfectly. The collaboration continued for some years even after SDM left KGP.

But SDM taught DB Group Theory in the beginning and enabled DB to launch his own boat later on till he breathed his last.

From 1971 to 2009, DB published little else than in Group Theory of the type not done by any other Indian Physicist.

DB's absorption was so complete in the subject that it resulted in his Book.

Certainly it was an Intellectual Love Affair.

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gps:

I am truly on the very periphery of SDM's Research Interests.

Before joining SDM I didn't even know much of Algebra (Matrices and Tensors) or Anaysis (Real or Complex).

SDM taught me the little Math I needed for the Cherenkov Radiation that we did together.

SDM got interested in this topic purely by chance at Cal. When Cherenkov Radiation got a Nobel in 1958 (after its discovery in 1934!) SDM was at Cal. And some Physicists there, as expected, joined the Cherenkov Bandwagon soon. A Research Scholar working with some other Professor used to meet SDM for 'sideline' guidance. Since SDM was an expert in Relativity, he changed the Game by jumping to the Particle Rest Frame and solving the Problem there.

So SDM's interest in the subject was not the Physics of Cherenkov Radiation (no Poynting Vector at all!) but Relativistic aspects of it. Everyone else in the world stuck to the Medium Rest Frame that was more Physical (cameras and counters) but less intricate (and beautiful).

I, on the other hand, was always interested in only those aspects of Physics that can be observed; like Newton's Rings and Rainbow that I took a quarter century to understand to my satisfaction.

So, after my second year with SDM, I constantly dragged him towards observable predictions, like the Cherenkov Rings on the photographic plates, their size, shape, intensity distribution etc in uniaxial and biaxial crystals.

I am happy that I made SDM agree to include some Diagrams in our Papers....none else could do it. And he loved them when I gifted him some color photographs from the Russian School at JINR, Dubna that I got from the stalwart Zrelov.

And SDM kept that photo-frame on his Table till he breathed his last.

Although (or Because?) I was not in the Mainstream of his Interests and therefore not intellectually intimate like DB, I served another quaint purpose to SDM:

He could talk about his views freely with me, which he couldn't with many.

The number of hours he logged with me is phenomenal. He could easily air his intellectual grievances which he wouldn't with others; he knew I was more mature than many.

I saw the Elephant's trunk moving this way and that periodically towards DB and me: We were his only collaborators in the Phy Dept at KGP.

To me SDM was no God.

I call him Guru...the difference is that God is ethereal but Guru eats, sleeps, takes bath, rides his wobbling bicycle...all the time talking, or instructing when needed (mostly by hints), and telling stories when in the mood....

I learned how to write crisp English Prose from SDM; before that I tended to write junk.

To SDM, I was perhaps more of a Science Journalist: As I said, I wrote exhaustively on all aspects of SDM...in many words interesting enough to Students of Physics who never saw SDM.

This brings me to the Leader of that Tribe: Aniket.

Aniket must have heard a lot about SDM from DB: I don't know. By the time Aniket was meeting DB regularly in his Class Room and perhaps outside, I moved out of our Double Room C-239 and DB's circle.

But I found the normally quiet Aniket's curiosity about SDM insatiable: SDM simply turns him on.

So, I arm-twisted Aniket to write what he thought of his SDM; I can't follow Bengali Poetry that well but I guess he saw the Elephant's soul; while most other Calcutta contemporaries of SDM saw only its wee tail.

And this is what he wrote a little while ago:

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Aniket:

Dear Sir,

I am kanjoos with words, to be precise.

If the topic is SDM, then only a stanza of Tagore would suffice:

bohu din dhore bohu krosh dure
bohu byay kori bohu desh ghure
dekhite giyachhi parbatmala,
dekhite giyachhi sindhu |

dekha hoy nai chokshu melia
ghor hote shudhu dui pa felia
ekti dhaner shisher upore
ekti shishirbindu ||

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