SUDHANSU DATTA MAJUMDAR: The Genius Who Touched My Life

a tribute by Prof. G.P. Sastry (Dept. of Physics, IIT-Kharagpur)

INTRODUCTION

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 cant 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 the Guard of this train of
thoughts. I thank him and his editorial team.

Disclaimer: Please dont 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: Prof. Sudhansu Datta Majumdar
HNB: Prof. Harsh Narayan Bose
DB: Prof. Debabrata Basu
Qrs: Quarters

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 ones surname could be if it has to get tagged to a Field-
Theoretic -on. This led to the following limerick, inspired by Arundhati 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
Gods great, he wasnt a Ganguly!
SDM: INDIA VS ENGLAND

SDM told me that he was a great fan of Dirac. (Who isnt? 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 Feynmans 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 isnt 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 SDMs 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 didnt 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
Wheelers Report was: This is the first doctoral thesis in which I learned some new Physics.

Noblesse Oblige!

MUMPI & 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 Mumpi, 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 & 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 Hills 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 Hills 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 wouldnt 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) ones brick
over his predecessors, SDM was plowing a lonely furrow.

Unfortunately, it works in Arts, but not Sciences. Sad!

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 & 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
(notebook). 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 Solomons 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: Dont acknowledge me in your paper! I could see it was he who was
worried (about the rest of my calculations which he didnt see!).

O, Tempora! O, Mores!
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 cant stand it nowadays! He told me that
he himself graduated from cigarettes to cigars and then on to pipes. I didnt 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 ones 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 cant. 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 SDMs 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 Calcutta University Matriculation Exam (Dhaka was
included in Calcutta University those pre-partition days). I didnt 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 Maughams 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 nights work, I
got some answer and peeped into SDMs 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: Dont delay your thanks; 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 SDMs classic GR work. Synge
was my favorite too, because he wrote a wonderful popular booklet titled Kendelmans 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.
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 Sastrys math is kaatcha (weak or immature). 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. (Didnt 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 didnt 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 shouldnt play games with referees, when
there is no need to do so.)

Then onwards he tried to propagate in equal measure that Sastry has a great insight into
math. That was SDM for you! Very even-handed. Silly, but, of course it didnt 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 Sneddons tome and my transcripts. I was excused from attending classes and
taking the exams.

Then I went to the German teacher, a soft spoken bhadralok (gentleman) 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 didnt 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 19th century. I cant 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!
THE NIGHT IT POURED

That was a Saturday Evening in August. I knew that SDM religiously took out his wife to
the Saturday Evening Show at the Netaji Auditorium, without fail. This was perhaps the
only outing the poor lady had in that desolate campus, sans TV, sans phones, sans eateries,
sans any sign of civilization. To her, it was a great escape from the routine drudgery. To
SDM, it just didnt matter. Whether it was the sofa in his drawing room or the padded chair
in Netaji, it made no difference where he sat. His work needed no pencil, paper or lightingit
was all up there. I read some such remark made by Einstein when he had to stand in a
queue somewhere.

Next day was a Sunday, when India were playing Australia. Neither he nor I wanted to miss
the commentary on our humming pocket transistors. And, I was stuck for three days,
unable to determine the limits of an integral that was foxing me in one of our joint efforts.
By then I knew what the answer should look like, but I just couldnt get the limits. Those
were my senior years with SDM, when he practically withdrew from active calculations, but
was helping me when needed.

So, I took out my rusted push-bike and pedaled furiously to his Qrs. to catch him before his
rickshaw left for the Netaji. I just made it and showed the thing to him and asked him how
to fix the limits. He stared at it for a few minutes, while Mrs. SDM was looking daggers at
me (she was a wonderful host and fed me sumptuous loochies in the evenings when SDM
wouldnt let go of me from his reminiscences, but now it was different; the show will start
off soon).

He then gave me a hint to draw a parabola; and its intersections with a straight line should
give me the limits. The rickshaw chap was hustling and ringing his bells like mad, with Mrs.
SDM seated in it. Before boarding the rickshaw, SDM told me that if his suggestion works,
I dont have to report to him; but if it didnt, I have to go to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M., when he
would be back home from the cinema, so that he could have a second look at it. That was
fine with me.

On my way back I saw what an ass I was and how such a simple trick didnt strike me. His
suggestion worked like a charm and the integral was done in half an hour and I proceeded
with the rest of the calculation, got very satisfying results as per my hunch; ate my delightful
dinner in the tasteless mess and slipped into bed with a Perry Mason trial court scene that
I was dying to finish.

And then it started pouring. You know how it rains in KGP in August, when it decides to.
Heavens simply open up. That was smug with me and it was just the weather for a fag or
two.

At around 11.30 P.M. there was a knock on my door. I was curious who that could be, in
such a foul weather. Opening the door, I found it was SDM himself, with a dripping umbrella
and soaked from waist to foot like a wet sock. I asked him to come in, improvised a seat for
him somehow, and asked him what the matter was. He asked if his parabola worked. I
replied that it worked like a wonder. He felt greatly relieved. I told him that I would have
gone to his Qrs. at 9.30 P.M. if it didnt work as per our understanding. He then remarked
that he was afraid his suggestion didnt work, but probably I didnt feel like going out in
such a lousy weather to his Qrs. I was mortified by the misunderstanding and felt that I
perhaps should have gone to his Qrs. anyway.
That was SDM!

I gave him a fresh towel, made some black coffee and we two shared some welcome hot drink
in wettest weather. I took the opportunity to show him all the progress I made and he was
pleased that everything was going swimmingly. We then talked of this and that and I
escorted him back to his Qrs; both of us completely wet, but pleased as punch.

Do we have such guides nowadays? I wonder!

Talking of drawing parabolas, I am reminded of a story SDM told me (apocryphal, no doubt).

It was about a physics student doing his doctorate under a celebrity guide at Oxford.
Apparently the two had only two meetings. The first was when the guide gave him a problem.
The other was when the student was stuck at one step a year later. He took the problem to
his guide, who looked at it and made a pithy remark: Drop a perpendicular, before hurrying
to watch a cricket match. A year later, the student defended his thesis gloriously and,
became a celebrity himself.

EPILOGUE

On the banks of the river Kaveri, the poet-musician-saint Thyagaraja sang that There
are any number of great people in this world.

For every great one, there are a hundred greater ones. The really great people know
this. And so, they are ever modest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

After my retirement, many of my well-wishers kept in touch with me, and this wonderful
gesture on their part helped me overcome my retirement blues.

They also encouraged me to write this article on SDM, read drafts of these files, gave me
feed back, and suggested improvements. All of them are either my ex-students or younger
colleagues and friends. I thank all of them for their support. Here are their names in
dictionary order:

Aniket Basu, Anushree Roy, Arundhuti Ganguly, Indrajit Mitra, Jogia Bandyopadhyay,
Krishna Kumar, Pratik Khastagir, Samit Ray, Sayan Kar and Shyamal Chakrabarti.

Professor N.P. Rao (IE&M) was my contemporary and close friend at IIT KGP. All these tales
were first told to him 35 years ago as and when the events took place, and are being retold
to you now from long term memory. He saw SDM and perhaps talked to him too. I thank
him for encouraging me, going through these files; suggesting important changes and
implicitly vouching for their veracity.

Professor Amalendu Mukherjee (ME), Professor Mainak Sengupta (EE) and Dr. L.V.K.
Moorthy (M.B.B.S.) read these files and gave their knowledgeable approval, for which I am
indebted.

I am grateful to Professor K.L. Chopra for kindly going through these files and suggesting a
much improved sub-title.