Miscellaneous

To be blessed with a sharp focus in life is given to only a few in this world. I am not one of them. This allows me to do only 'sketches' rather than finished perfections in whatever I undertake. Clearly, this is unfortunate. It is also fortunate: I am freed of the need to concentrate. I can hang loose and dip into that which pleases at a given moment. Here, in the relative safety of this appendix-like nook of my web page, it is my intention to launch into the web objects I have collected outside of science. I do this with a comforting feeling of irresponsibility. Please enjoy these objects if they give you joy. Their authorship is not important. They should be looked at as found objects, not objects made by some one. And please, it is best not to communicate with me about them.

Faces I Have Met

1962-64

The staccato noise of the ferryboat between Agassaim and Cortalim that day in 1962 is clear in my ear. My father was engaged in conversation with a short crisp-looking man and the language was Portuguese. I was looking at the churning waters of the Zuari and thinking of Masefield’s sea fever (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky...”). For I fancied myself a
poet in those days and, as a young man will, lived in a state of obsession on that basis, a state that was a mixture of romance, emotion, and unknowing intellectual self-deceit. I spent long evening walks on Rua d’Ourem and by Beira-Mar in Fontainhas with my poet-in-arms friend Tony Gomes and once tricked my more left-brained friend Frank Braganza (with whom the walks and talks were
more rational) into heaping much praise on silly lines I had written which I still remember: “Like that setting sun sinking slowly into the depths of the sea, is my last hope dying... And like that blood-filled water, is my heart all bleeding...” before he knew they were mine. He knew even then that I was a subtle bag of pretense. In this shrewd evaluation he has been joined with the passage of
time, slowly but surely, by many close to me, ending, painfully, with myself--one is always the last one to know such things about oneself. In any case I was sure those days, with a degree of certainty natural to fifteen-year olds, that there were two kinds of people in this world, the writers (or poets) and the mathematicians (or scientists), and that I belonged clearly to the former. As, leaning over the rail, trying desperately to see worthwhile poetry in the chaos (didn’t Masefield say something about blown spume, and couldn’t I do likewise?), I enjoyed the turbulent currents our ferryboat produced in the river by its passing, my father touched my arm and asked me to join in the conversation. “I understand you do not like mathematics, young man.” Thus started the stranger, eloquent, resourceful and engaging. Stubborn as I used to be, I was quickly caught in an intriguing net he wove around me of what mathematics really was, and, before I knew it, I had been ensnared. The man said that he was going to teach me trigonometry among other disciplines within a month when Dhempe College would start for the first time ever, taking in students. Liberation of Goa from the Portuguese had just occurred only a few months earlier. Habits of 400 years were changing. Why not my conviction which was only a dozen years old (less than my age surely) that mathematics was for the birds? Within a quarter hour of conversation, the stranger had cast his spell of mathematics and had changed the course of my life to come. The stranger’s name was Joe Menezes.

Dhempe College gave my friends and me many other dedicated teachers: Nadkarni teaching mathematics in a systematic way turning corollaries and lemmata from foes to friends, Harite converting impossibly difficult concepts in organic chemistry to digestible chunks, Sukhtanker centering on the mysteries of physics and stopping students from running away from centrifugal forces, Antão,Vaz and Lawande (junior Lawande to be exact--since there was also senior Lawande, the friendly despot, our beloved Principal, whose booming voice in college corridors and NCC fields still reverberates in my ear) and Ashataee and Daliyataee, one who could discuss P. G. Wodehouse as well as physics, the other who could command and march sternly in parades when not teaching physics.

Memories crowd also about colleagues: other students who have since disappeared completely from circles accessible to me. Among them two other K’s: Kosambi who would always beat me in chess no matter how hard I tried, and Kirtani who always wrote everything neatly in his beautiful handwriting no matter how fast he had to take notes. I wonder where they are now. And I
remember, with heart-wrenching pangs I cannot dispel, a few who have departed from this world, I cannot understand why: Subhash Rao, the handsome young man who became my brother-in-law but not for long, and Marina Flores, my childhood friend who married my dear friend Tony Gomes and then one day decided to leave him and us all.

Everything in Dhempe College was magical. The tall doors and long classrooms of the college buildings which were but the vacated edifices of the Liceu Nacional Afonso de Albuquerque, the beautiful trees in the quadrangle, and the dashing spiraling steps that dropped down to the Corte d’Oiteiro. Even as we struggled to learn mathematics and language, science and art, intoxicating youth was enveloping us all. We fell in love, often secretly. We wrote poetry, affected philosophy, discussed everything under the sun. And then the two years passed. To many others I am sure they did take twice three-hundred-and-sixtyfive days. My own conviction is that they were over in two days. Or in another sense that they were the only life I have ever led: they were an eternity. Time is quite unclear in my mind about those charming, spell-binding, unreal, dream years from 1962 to 1964.

What has happened since? Not much, I am afraid. The next four years I spent in IIT Bombay, studying Electrical Engineering, and then three years in Stony Brook in the USA doing Theoretical Physics. A career doing research in physics, teaching, trying to pay back in some strange indirect manner some of what I was given by wonderful teachers in my Dhempe College. I live in the USA
but my career has led me to many countries in Europe and South America in particular, allowed me to enjoy many cultures, face many situations. Multifaceted personalities have crossed my path, some kind, some vicious. From all I have tried to learn (whenever I have been ‘awake’ enough to learn): from the good ones what to do, from the others what not to do. I have erred more often than not. As a kid, I used to think that every day and every year, I would improve as a person: that I would turn into a better student, a better professional, a better person. That, alas, has not happened. At fifteen and sixteen I knew it all. Now I am not sure of anything at all. But through all this
growing up, what brings a pleasant half smile to the face (in the language of the Theravada Buddhist) is memories of those two years 62-64 in my Dhempe College.

Carpet Weaving

I recall a comment made by a physicist colleague many years ago that a quality lacking in today’s graduate students was the ability to stay on the job until the carpet was woven completely. This chance remark has stayed with me over the years. My profession at the university demands that I train graduate students to become practicing physicists. To be a good practicing physicist requires a multitude of qualities, tendencies, and skills, as I am sure to be a good practicing individual in any field of endeavor does. There is devotion to the subject, basic intelligence, curiosity, careful observation, intellectual honesty, creativity, and hard work. But there is one more with which I have always had trouble in my own development: refusal to be content with small achievements. The subtlety of the situation arises from the fact that the ability to be content with small achievements is also an important prerequisite to success as a practicing physicist. If one is always seeking after the grandiose, deep frustrations descend, in no time engulfing the individual in depression. One must learn to enjoy the little berries one picks in the field even as one prepares to hunt big game. What makes this whole business of training oneself or one’s students fascinating is that side by side with developing contentment with small achievements one must develop dissatisfaction with them. It is subtle. The contentment must come from their being achievements, however small. The dissatisfaction from their being small, even though they are achievements. One must enjoy every little joke but must not stop until the entire story is written. One must derive contentment from every little integral that is evaluated but not stop until the entire theory is constructed.

This ability to enjoy each thread but not rest until the entire carpet is woven is very rare indeed. My own considerable capacity for enjoyment of work means that I can derive endless pleasure from noticing every morning afresh, and on my own, that exponentials and trigonometric functions are connected. Pleasure that keeps me going. But pleasure also that distracts me from the sure fact that these are, from the point of view of my own creative work, very useful trivialities. A John Bardeen does not stop until he has explained superconductivity, a Michelangelo until he has finished the Sistine Chapel. I am distracted by this little memory function, which through its singularity explains a little but does not have the staggering breadth and detail of a fully woven carpet.

What is true of a physicist’s requirement is true of anyone else’s, of course. To be merely driven by the finished carpet would be terrible, perhaps impossible – or so I think. Rome was not built in a day. What did each day mean to the builder? Laying a brick here, raising part of a pillar there. If you do not know how to enjoy and excel at these, you cannot even live through the construction of Rome. And yet, if like mine, your contentment with the single brick well laid is, in effect, an obstacle in the way of the finished Coliseum, you are fated to remain a happy but smalltime player. In the language of the artist, you are forever limited to doing sketches rather than finished drawings. As I look within myself, I discover that I do not like to draw, only to sketch—leaving paintings unfinished is an obsession with me. This certainly gives me opportunity to immerse myself in a variety of experiences, and to perceive my surroundings in multiple ways. At the same time, it robs me of focus and makes of me a butterfly. Worse, it does not allow me to instill in my students the desire to weave carpets.

Faced with this quandary, there is a prescription I have followed throughout my mentoring career. I share the totality of these thoughts about carpet weaving with my students, particularly in the last stages of their apprenticeship, realize that, after all, they teach themselves whatever skills they have, and, as they go out into the world to live on their own, whisper to myself that my own job in their training, however insignificant, is now truly at an end.

Father

When I prepare a lecture, I talk to myself. I go for long walks where no one can hear me or see me mouthing my oratory. The spontaneity helps and the thoughts form themselves into a structure that is loosely held in memory. Typically two such attempts are sufficient. The first to form the lecture, the second to time it. My friends have often asked me where I came by this mode of preparation. The other day the answer came in a flash. A long forgotten picture arose from childhood memory. Sitting on the middle bar of a bicycle, held securely by my Father riding, a strong moist wind against my cheeks, the last remnants of twilight disappearing, streetlamps zooming by us one by one, their speed determined by Father's pedalling. Lovely sleep sitting heavy on my eyelids, making it a battle to remain awake so as not to fall off the bike, an occasional infrequent car swooshing by, water from the road thrown onto the bicycle, and, through it all, Father talking to himself preparing his lecture for the next day.

My father held two jobs, as a draftsman in the Public Works Department and as a teacher in the Portuguese lyceum, a secondary school. By training he was an artist -- a painter. As a student of Fine Arts he lived steeped in the works of Rembrandt and Velazquez, Rubens and da Vinci. As a man interested in acquiring a living, he found none of that of help. Art as livelihood has seldom been lucrative anywhere in the world. Goa, then a small Portuguese colony in India, provided no exception to the rule. He could have made a passable living by staying in Bombay, a large Indian city where he had acquired his art training and where most of his fellow students settled. But idealistic views of bettering art appreciation in his native Goa came in the way. Earning money as an artist was impossible in Goa. He used caricatures of his true profession to make a living, working first as a photographer, then as an occasional tutor, a draftsman, and finally as a teacher of drawing and mathematics. He came from a family of master story tellers, honest to a fault, and largely uninterested in money. They seemed to be particularly proud of being men of their word rather than men of the world. Father would tell us that my grandfather's word was used as idiom in those parts for the ultimate promise. My grandfather as well as my uncle -- Father's oldest brother -- were cloth merchants. Notoriously unsuccessful businessmen, in their later years they lost whatever money they had made in the earlier ones. My uncle sold the cloth shop and lived as a clerk in that very shop working for the new owners until the end of his life.

My grandfather died many years before I was born. I know little about him although Father, who had named me after my grandfather, half the time thought of me as him returned from the next world. However, I remember my uncle, a peace-loving man who would laugh at every opportunity and from whom affection flowed naturally and malice was unimaginable. I have heard it said that he raised his voice not once in his life. He told me many stories particularly at siesta time after the afternoon meal. I would lie in bed with him. The afternoon heat meant that he slept without his shirt. He had thick grey hair on his chest. I would rest my head in that whiteness, hearing his heartbeat while he told me stories which were skilful in the telling and skilful in the planning -- they would marvelously end just as he would begin to snore. He told me many stories of all kinds but the one that stands out clearest in memory is about a sleeping giant who was so large that men traveling towards his ears to sound the waking alarm lost their way and fell into his nostrils, and were then trapped for weeks disoriented in the vast spaces. Desperation descended upon them when they encountered another group of men in that darkness who told them that they had been trying to find a way out for more than a year! My uncle introduced me to photography by buying me a small camera. The first picture I took with it was his while he napped, the second my mother's while she ground spices. Both persons have passed away. Both photographs are lost in my papers.

Like his oldest brother, Father had a flair for telling stories. His forte, however, lay in making them up. Many of our cousins would come spend the summer holidays with us specifically so that they could curl up around Father at night while he invented heroes and villains, created magic sounds of the forest through which they travelled, spoke of tablets of concentrated food that kept them from going hungry... every evening was a feast for the children. Father also had an unusual zest for life. He took the family for day picnics when such outings were unknown in the society around. From time to time he made arrangements for the family to spend 'mudanças' in distant villages. On one such occasion I remember helping him paint kilns in the day time and joining him learn canoeing from the fishermen at night time. My helping Father paint meant carrying the paraphernalia and squeezing paint tubes to fill his palette -- burnt sienna, burnt umber, vermillion, those were the wondrous names of the painter's colors. Our learning canoeing from the fishermen meant sitting with one of them in his ancient canoe watching him row in the moonlight, the silence broken only by oars splashing in the water, magic stripes of darkness and light interweaving on the lake.

Father had an unusual approach to minor upsets in life. He insisted they were there to learn from. I remember the series of buses we missed once leaving us two stranded in Bardês, a region in the North of Goa. He walked miles with me in the scorching sun, easily making me forget the heat and the aches in my legs through his cheerful words and specific instructions on how to turn upsets into enjoyable experiences. I remember at the end of the long walk he found acquaintances in the village of Candolim who served us a hearty lunch and sent us on our way. 'Transtornos', he called such upsets, using a Portuguese word. It was Father who taught me Portuguese, the official language of Goa. He had an exceptional ear for languages. Under his tutelage I learnt to speak with a perfect Portuguese accent. While he himself would speak in the distinctive Goan style, paying respect to the popular notion that Goan adults who spoke like the Portuguese were show-offs, he wanted his son to speak the 'correct' way. His insistence on proper enunciation came from his interest in acting. He was an exceptionally gifted amateur actor, having played many leading roles on the Marathi stage including Chandrasena (Hamlet) in Agarkar's translation of Shakespeare's play. He imparted some of that love of the stage to some of his children. I remember him training me do dialogues in the role of Tanaji, the brave knight who gave his life for his king, and of Sambhaji, the drunkard king who repented his vice-ridden ways in his death cell. Every word had to be mouthed to perfection. Once the words were mastered, facial expression of emotion came next. It was hard training.

Curiosity for all things characterized him. He would travel with engineer colleagues to distant sites of construction, sketching bridges and hydraulic plants. He would attend by special permission surgical operations conducted by his physician friends so he could observe and sketch those operations. My brother tells me that in the last year of his life he would try to walk every day to the beach to watch the sunsets, to store their multiple patterns in his mind. Father taught his children many things. To think for themselves. To take nobody's word as gospel, whether a teacher's, a parent's or a priest's. His style of teaching did not always rely on word. It was often based on deed. And sometimes on a remarkable sense of humor. I will never forget a train ride we took from Ghataprabha to Belgaon, in which, quite uncharacteristically of him, he allowed me to buy first class tickets. The two of us were the only occupants of the rail compartment. The train rocked on the tracks as it sped. Suddenly getting up from his seat, Father said with a smile, “Come let us dance to the music, watch how we can become one with the train.” For half an hour he and I danced, joyously but seriously, mentally merging with the train.

Father died in 1984 after being in a coma for 3 months, a consequence of a stroke he suffered. I did not travel to see him while he was dying. I claimed it was because I wanted to remember him as he was in life, not in death.

Rama's Pig

Gods with bows letting loose enchanted arrows in search of evil monsters and demons formed the cultural heritage of my childhood: mythological figures of the Hindus lived daily with me, Rama with his archery, Maruti with his strength, Krishna with his chakra. For my uncle and father were master story tellers, and my mother extremely well read: she transmitted her love of books to me. But our house was also physically surrounded by huts in which Christian neighbors lived with their pigs who roamed freely. If you combine in a six-year-old's fancy dark pigs that runt and run, with demons that yell and flee the arrows of a Rama, you have explosive potential. Into such a situation entered one day around 1952 a gift given to me by my brother, eleven years older than myself. He was very fond of me. I would look forward to his return from college on vacations with great excitement. Once he brought me jeans. To a person in the Americas (where I live now) the word means merely something to wear: a pair of rugged pants. For us at that time jeans were wondrous. They had to be folded at the ankle end and had to be blue, and went with something to wear like a shirt--called a jersey. Wearing jeans transformed one into a cowboy and not just any ordinary cowboy, but into the fastest gun alive.

On the occasion I am writing about, however, my brother had brought me something much more exciting than jeans or jersey. It was a bow and a set of arrows which could be placed in a quiver and strapped around the shoulders. Little wonder then that little Rama was out immediately looking for evil monsters to bring down with his archery. Maruti was created in a flash and went ahead scouting. I sighted a demon posing as a cocoanut tree trunk. Before he could transform back into his hideous form I had already shot my arrow into him. My brother watched and smiled to himself. Clearly he had brought a nice present for his little brother. He went into the house. I went after bigger demons. I had my arrow already fitted to my bow and sighted a worthy monster: dark, large, moving quickly. Long snout, evil nostrils moving in derision at my bow. Surely to slay these monsters is what Rama's birth was for. Moving on his four legs, the monster passed ten feet in front of me. Where was he going? To abduct Sita? To ruin Vishwamitra's sacrifices? I had to stop him. The twang of the bow and the scream of the pig sounded together. The poor beast, expecting none of this pointed treatment, was screaming. The arrow was sharp. While it did not kill the pig, it certainly hurt him. I knew Laxmana would hear the cries of the demon and leave Sita, and then Ravana would abduct Sita. No, I had to do better this time. This was an opportunity to correct the mistake recorded in the Ramayana. I quickly got another arrow from my quiver. A second scream of the pig who ran away with two of my brand new arrows protruding from his hide quickly ended my adventure. For the neighbor came running out of the hut to find out what had hurt his pig. The rest of the event is a blur in my mind. Heated discussions among the adults, apologies, and spanking which at that time certainly did not seem deserved at all, come back vaguely from the deep recesses of memory. I do remember that my bow and arrow were taken away from me and Rama had to go through the rest of his incarnation with imaginary weapons.

Eating a Mango

When I was a child growing up among the pouring monsoons, the lush vegetation, and the tropical fruit of Goa, I knew of three ways of eating a ripe mango. The most civilized "the dullest" of the three began with the mango served to you in a dish, four neat cuts already made in it with a knife by someone else. A tiny one to slice stem from fruit, two broad slashes to separate the flat seed from the two fleshy halves, and two more cuts, perpendicular to the slashes, one on each half of the mango. You found yourself staring "pink flesh of the fruit peeking from under the green yellow red skin cover, sweet aroma filling your nostrils" at five edible units. A messy seed and four neat slices.

If you were truly civilized, or what was the same in our eyes, a sissy, you ate only the four slices. For this you pulled one of them off, ripping the tiny part of the skin that attached it to the bottom end, the one away from the stem, and placed it, fleshy side down, in your mouth. Heaven rested briefly on your tongue. Your teeth sank into the juicy pulp as you held the end of the skin in your fingers and pulled it out. Your teeth left rake marks on the underside of the skin while sweet juice and delicious fruit deposited themselves in your mouth. You turned what you pulled out by one hundred and eighty degrees and repeated the raking action. A few more of the same, changing the angle, and you had in your hands a spent skin, stripped of pulp and juices, its underside like a paddy field before rice seeds are sown.

You did this four times, then stopped if you were either fussy or lazy. If a connoisseur, you now proceeded to attack the core. Holding the seed with its flat sides exposed, your teeth peeled the narrow skin ribbon in the shape of a U and subjected it quickly to the same treatment as the slices. Now the naked seed settled in the crook of your thumb and first finger, its flat sides parallel to your palm. With lips fastened at the crook, you squeezed the trigger, the milking action pouring the most wonderful liquid flavor and fibrous taste into your mouth. You adjusted the seed in your palm every possible way to divest it of all its treasures. Of course you made a fruity mess in your palm, which you licked or washed depending on your level of eating sophistication. If you were good at this, when you flung the spent seed "which looked now like an old man's wrinkled face with disshevelled hair" at the neighbour's waiting pig, he grunted crossly at you because all you left for him was a dry seed to crack in his jaw.

There was a nicer way to eat a mango which started with you pilfering the fruit directly from the basket where it was left to ripen, or perhaps from the tree itself. It was important to wash it and then to puncture it slightly at the stem end and squeeze out the few acidic drops. Then you held the mango in both your hands, put your mouth at the punctured end, breathed in deeply, shut your eyes for concentration, and sucked. Juices came into your mouth. You squeezed. Fibrous fruit flesh filled you with the ultimate pleasure in life. You squeezed the mango in multiple ways feeling the flat seed through the emptying skin bag. When you were satisfied, you popped the seed out of the skin, tearing the skin in the process, much as in the emergence of a new-born. The more sophisticated among us turned the skin inside out and finished it using the teeth raking technique, and the seed using the trigger squeezing procedure.

But the most savage and fulfiling of the three ways was simply to tear the skin of the whole intact mango piece by piece, divest each piece of its riches first, and then, one's entire being focused into one's teeth and tongue, bite into the yellow red fibrous pulp, sweetness dripping from the corners of one's mouth, no thought or premeditation interfering with the spiritual experience of melding mango and oneself.

Horizontals versus Verticals

Intense conflicts, intellectual and otherwise, have occurred over the centuries among the followers of Shiva and of Vishnu. In the South under the name of Iyers and Iyangars. Elsewhere as Smarthas and Vaishnavas. In the little society of Goa, as the Horizontals and Verticals, as per the direction of the mark of the vibhuti applied to the forehead. I am told that the conflicts in some regions have at times been fierce, involving battles and bloodshed. In my childhood I have overheard my aunt deriding the (Goan) Vaishnava custom of placing one's glass of water on the right of one's plate while eating. "People with inferior logic," she would say, twisting her striking face into a form so critical that were I a Vaishnava, I might never drink water again at my meal. My aunt's attitude was shared by many persons of either group in the little community of Goa,—I speak of the Hindu half of the Goan population. The Horizontals thought of the Verticals as at least slightly flawed, and the Verticals responded in kind. I do not know of events in Goa involving violence between the two, and it certainly was not every day that as good Horizontals we contemplated the obvious defects of the Verticals while being similarly pitied or insulted in their families, but there was an underlying dormant feeling of conflict. For instance, it was invariably with reluctance that one gave one's daughter's hand in marriage to a suitor from the opposite camp.

Conflicts abound everywhere. But their absurdity is brought home to me most vividly in the Shaiva-Vaishnava context. Shaivas and Vaishnavas are both Hindus. Whether one finds appealing the ascetic representation of God in a form covered with ashes, or deems attractive the charm of another decked with garlands and ornaments, whether the noise of the thunderous damaroo (drum) and the march of Virabhadra are associated with one's devotional practices, or the soothing music of the flute and the soft flow of the Yamuna, these are both, ultimately, paths to the same concept. What matters is the reunion of the Atman with the Brahman, whether the primary instrument is disciplined meditation or loving devotion. Why then a conflict that has the potential to create hatred? Every time I shudder at the atrocities inflicted throughout the world by warring ideologies on each other, in history or at the present, I think of the conflict of the Verticals versus the Horizontals. Arabs blow up Jews. Irish catholics kill their protestant counterparts. Jews bomb Palestinians. Hindus war against Muslims. Al-Qaida fighters uproot American skyscrapers by flying airplanes into them. Americans rip to shreds the Taliban in response. Yes, of course, some of us are convinced some of these actions are retributions, even perhaps justifiable retributions. But has retribution ever quenched hatred in the history of mankind? Violence requires hatred to fuel it, and isn't it true that retribution always begets more hatred?

Where does the hatred come from? From conviction on each side. Conviction of what? Of a model in one's mind of the Universe? Of whether there is or isn't a Creator? Of whether the Creator does or does not take personal form? Of whether it is proper to call Him Allah, Bhagawan or Christ? Why does it matter so much whether it is important to address Him by the first, second or third letter of the alphabet? Is this enough difference to kill?

I am a physicist by profession. We are always engaged in conflicts about the way we think about the structure of a nucleus or the origin of a spectral line. Being human, we are unreasonably and egoistically attached to our convictions. We argue with passion. We rave and rant. But to defend or promulgate our beliefs, we never kill. And yet, the moment we divest ourselves of our scientists' hats and replace them with our religious trappings, calling ourselves a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, or a Christian, we become maniacal, homicidal. I have always been mystified by how this transformation occurs.

In the American city I live in, a number of well meaning friends wish to build a Hindu temple. They have a very natural and understandable wish to worship as they have seen their fathers, mothers and uncles do, back when they were growing up in India. They want a place with walls to which they can go to attend harikathas, join in bhajans, listen to discourses on the Vedas. I am delighted to see this awakening of interest in religious roots. Yet, I oppose this temple building with every ounce of my strength. My friends who have heard me frequently coax them to steep themselves in their philosophical heritage, are astounded. They do not understand. They accuse me of arbitrariness in thinking. "Are you opposed to temples?" they ask me. "No, only to building walls which separate," I answer them. I urge my friends to band together, to sing bhajans, to discuss the Upanishads. But to do nothing which discourages a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew from participating. We do not build universities in which only wave mechanics may be investigated or the Schroedinger equation discussed and put barriers to keep out those who would expound matrix mechanics and indulge in operator algebras. We do not construct edifices to exclude those who uphold the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe and include only those who would pledge loyalty to the theory of continuous creation. Why then encourage artificial and dangerous segregation of the Hindus within temple walls? The peril is particularly great these days when we hear of separatist movements mushrooming everywhere. I fear the deadly poison in these mushrooms.

There is no doubt in my mind that the essence of Hindu thought is tolerance. Perhaps tolerance not for its own sake but for the stand it takes against stultification of thought. "We, Hindus, will lose through this tolerance," retort my friends. They point out the mosques, the churches and the synagogues around. "They all proliferate their places of worship," they say, "and it is for that reason that we also should." Nothing frightens me more than this confession. It is precisely this sentiment that convinces me that I cannot join my friends in their construction activity despite the fact that I too love listening to discourses on the Vedas and being surrounded by bhajans. Even Vishnu and Shiva, the two inseparable elements in the Hindu Trinity, can inspire their worshippers to hurl insults, ridicule, and worse at one another and remain locked in struggle for centuries. What hope is there then for peace to reign among followers of the diverse faiths in the world?

Fifteen Opportunities for Doing Good

Fifteen times in these twenty-five years I have been given a chance. A chance in each case to help a young bright man learn, convert himself from fresh green student to experienced researcher. Actually the number of opportunities has been a little larger. But fifteen young men have succeeded in going the last mile with me. Seventeen if I count the one whom I am pretending to teach at present, and also another one who almost finished with me but saw at the penultimate moment, last year, the error of his ways. They have all been intelligent and able in multiple ways. Almost all of them have met with visible success in academics or closely related fields. They have all given me the pleasure of pretending to be their teacher.

A Ph. D. thesis advisor is privileged to be the mentor of young minds and to learn even as he teaches. What did I teach these seventeen persons of considerable talent? A way of looking at academic pursuit even if not necessarily the best way. Confidence in themselves, but balanced carefully with insistence on high standards. And simple tricks of the trade that are better learnt from a person than from a book or from one’s own failed efforts. Not much more. When I look back on the seventeen cases, I do not think I added much to their ability to become theoretical physicists. But I did spend long hours thinking of how I could be of help to them, in ways individually different for each of them. I instituted for them a traditional sparring event, ‘the Bundolo’ in which they could fence with one another and with me, honing intellectual attacking skills, clear thinking, and stage presence. (The name came from the professed word for ‘kill’ in the language of apes and of Tarzan.) I went for long walks with them—at least until gout attacked me in midlife. During those walks I discussed with them everything under the sun. Books like Shibumi and the Passover Plot were as much a subject of our conversations as transport theory and Master equations. I also tried to teach them to communicate: through the written word in their manuscripts as well as through the spoken word in their professional talks.

Did the seventeen learn from my efforts? Can I claim success for my teaching? I am not sure at all. I sometimes feel they would have done well with any mentor. There are other times, very seldom I must confess, when I feel they have derived some small benefit. One of the seventeen is analytically my superior any time. Another is more inventive in science. Yet a third has superb mastery over the English language. Several of them have delightful sense of humor on the strength of which they are well equipped to go through the vicissitudes of life. I therefore wonder: did I really have anything special to give to them? It is not as if I were a Feynman or a Gauss whose mind’s wondrous ways the disciples could watch and emulate. In fact, one of the very special features of my teaching (called Socratic by a few friendly colleagues) has always been that I insist that we should all, they and I, think aloud, refusing to be embarassed by our own errors of thought. This feature has surely made them see their poor teacher’s faulty intellect much more easily than might be normal in other teacher-student groups. When asked, they all say they learnt much and, on most occasions, they thank the mentor. But it is not clear to me at all whether they really did.

What did I learn from them? Much. Not only in the human element but even technically. I learnt from one of them computer programming, from another asymptotic methods, from yet another his systematic study habits. I have watched in wonder one of them prove theorems I could not and another crack long-standing puzzles that had floored all of us in the field. And I have also derived immense pleasure from the idea, even if it has been part pretense, that I have been of use to them. I have also suffered from interactions with them. A sense of betrayal in a couple of cases, erratic responses to well- intentioned gestures in a couple of others. Shades of (intellectual) Oedipus complex on at least one occasion. ‘They have to break the egg shell, to be born,’ has been said to me as explanation. Perhaps.

I was born Hindu. One may therefore ask of me if in my next life I would want to become, again, a University Professor mentoring Ph. D. students. Yes, I certainly would.