When a cool gentle breeze turned into a Tornado

Pal Pal Dil Ke Paas
Again it is an Agra tale.I really wonder. I left Agra in 1979 completing my MSc. It is 31 long years now. But I still "live" there. There is not a day in my life when I dont think about St: John's college, my Alma mater. This is no exaggeration and I speak with all my honesty. In the year 2000, I was there in Agra with my son Renjan and my colleague Prof C.O. Philip (COP), affectionately called Pochen, another St: John's college fanatic. I went there to attend the MSc(Physics) old student's meet. (Dr J.K Sharma was gracious enough to inform me of the function). COP had done his MA in English literature there long long back! When I told him that I was going to Agra, he jumped the band wagon without inquiring the purpose of the visit. See, for us so crazy of St: John's, being there itself was the purpose. During the function which was a very emotional reunion, I was asked to speak a few words. I was not prepared and I had not spoken in public before. Yet I walked to the dais and these words came spontaneously from from the bottom of my heart: "St: John's college to me is like an old Kishore Kumar song. PAL PAL DIL KE PAAS".

The Mother
Oh God! I had started off to tell another story.
1978. That year's Agra University convocation was held in St: John's college. A huge shamiana was erected on the lush green hockey court in front of the main building built in red stone with unmatched architectural splendour. The chief guest of the day was Mother Theresa. But I decided to stay back in my hostel theHaileybury House. I was down with severe viral fever. I thought I would complete the book I was reading, "Ninety minutes at Entebbe" by William Stevenson. The book depicted the unbelievable rescue operation by Israeli commandos nick named "Operation Thunderbolt".

On July 4, 1976 an Air France plane with 248 passengers was hijacked by PLO terrorists and was forcibly landed in Entebbe airport in Idi Amin's Uganda. At Entebbe all non-Jew passengers were freed. One French nun refused to leave saying she remain a hostage in return for a Jew who shall be freed. But she was thrown out. I have heard a similar story from Hitler's Germany. When the Nazi soldiers were stuffing a gas chamber with Jews, a Jesuit priest offered to go in, in return for a Jew.

The "Operation Thunderbolt" was carried out by 100 Israeli commandos flown in from Tel Aviv. During the 90 minute operation all the hijackers, 45 Ugandan soldiers and three hostages were killed. The commander Lt. Col Yonathan Netanyahu also was killed. (His brother Benjamin Netanyahu later became the Prime Minister of Israel). 103 hostages were rescued. Till date "Operation Thunderbolt' remains the greatest commando operation executed anywhere in the world.

Even as I was lying sick in my hostel and reading the book, I felt an inner voice urging me to go to the function to be addressed by Mother Theresa. When I reached there (some 50 meters from Haileybury House) , what I saw was an ocean of humans. I reached there just in time. The Mother was to start her speech. She spoke of love, care for others, universal brotherhood and a host of such things. She spoke of destitutes and the depressed. She spoke in a cool low tone. No high sounding words. No jugglery with words. No histrionics. It was plain simple language understood by all. People assembled there felt a cool gentle breeze of love and compassion flowing over them. People sat mesmerized by the divinity of her words. Believe me,at the end of the speech the audience forgot to clap. Rather, they couldn't. I saw many people wiping their eyes. A day I will never forget. The function came to a close.

You will not believe what I tell you now. This really happened. I am honest. I am not trying to mystify anything.

The mother had just left. All of us came out of the shamiyana. Suddenly a tornado came roaring and the shamiyana was tossed up in the air like a toy and it came down crashing. We all wondered, what would have happened if the tornado had occurred 15 minutes earlier. It is with horror I still remember this incident. Elders told us that a tornado or a strong wind never occurred during that time of the year. People remained perplexed. I am still clue-less.

BEYOND PERFECT TEN !!!

1976 Montreal Olympics is remembered as the Olympics of the 14 year old Romanian girl Nadia Comaneci. In gymnastics she created history by scoring the first ever Perfect Ten. The electronic score boards were not equipped to display a score of 10.0 . Thus the first ever perfect 10 was displayed as 1.00 !!!
That was long back. Come 2010. No gymnastics. No Nadia. Some down to the earth students at the George Sudarshan Centre (GSC), CMS college produced some marvelous results at the GATE 2010. Hold your breath. 9 students from GSC got qualified in the GATE 10 in Physics. Stupendous by any yard stick. But I was not excited. This time I had dreamt of a perfect 10. I had even designed a poster in my mind: "PERFECT 10 @ GATE 10".
Now a little statistics. ( History I shall elaborate in another post). Starting from2002 till 2010, 43 students qualified in GATE from GSC. 15 students were selected for UGC-lectureship and UGC-JRF. Of the 43, Prashanth Narayanan had a percentile score of 99.36 and an All India Rank (AIR) of 22. That was in 2005. And last year Rajany was among the top 25 of the UGC-JRF winners. Currently our students are there in the top academic and scientific centres in India like IIT, IISc, BARC, DRDO and IGCAR. Six of our former students are in various European Universities. (Surprisingly these victories are not celebrated in the college)

Coming back. With only 9 successes, the caption in my mind, ie, PERFECT 10 @ GATE 10" remained in my mind as a soft copy. But suddenly three girls from the final year BSc class sprang a surprise. They qualified in some national level examinations. Veena passed the JAM and joined IIT Madras. Roshni joined Pondicherry Central University and Devi got selected for the PG programme of the University of Hyderabad.

A Teacher's Dilemma: So from one short of a Perfect 10, it is now 9+3 = 12.
What shall I call it?

A "DAZZLING DOZEN"??

HOWZAAT ???

APPLICATIONS OF PHYSICS

Eating and drinking Physics

No man, you are mistaken. I am not going to speak on someone so dedicated to Physics that he/she eats or drinks Physics or does Physics even while eating or drinking.

This is an old story. Renjan was four or five then. One day we went to a tamilian vegetarian restaurant in Kottayam and we were seated on opposite sides of one of the unusually small tables there. The tables there were not broad enough for two people. I had this funny thought. If two strangers are seated on opposite sides, how will they manage without an "overlap of wave functions"? Anyway worrying about that was not our business. We settled down to our business and ordered two masala dosas. Dosa came flying, though it was assumed that various items are "manufactured" only as per order. Probably these people have a well defined statistics, borne out of experience. They might definitely have a very correct "distribution" of the orders for items enlisted in the menu. Otherwise how can those dosas that came flying along with the order be so hot? "These tamil people are great mathematicians" I told myself. Even as I was completing my soliloquy, I heard the supervisor shouting,"Ramanujan, "Antha front table Kleen Pannunko". Oh! It was chaos in my mind for a moment. I was thinking of mathematics and here the supervisor asking Ramanujan to clean up a table!! This often happens to me. It takes me a "very small but finite" time to come to grips with situations like these. Every "Aryas", Uduppi" kind of restaurant has a supervisor like this. These men seem to just walk the length and breadth of the hotels. But in fact they are wonderful "space-time" managers in these usually congested places.

HYDRODYNAMICS

I lost no time to enter the solemn duty entrusted with me. I was half way through my masala dosa when I noticed that Renjan has not started even. The boy was sitting there with pouted lips and tears rolling down his cheeks. Even before I asked anything, he said tremulously, "That uncle behind you is scaring me". Now how can I suddenly turn back to see this uncle? I gently massaged the back of my neck with my left hand and turned my head in slow motion as if I had pain or stiffness in my neck. Alas! the boy was right though for wrong reasons. I remained in that "semi peechae mood" position for some more time and realized what was happening. This man had a very peculiar way of eating. He took a fistful and stuffed his mouth with much more than its "permitted capacity". He chewed a lot and what followed was really frightening. His head came forward by three or four inches like that of a tortoise and I saw him applying some pressure somewhere in the "Northern Hemisphere" thereby sending the well chewed stuff down the throat in one shot. In this process his eyes came protruding out. And this was what frightened Renjan. "Poor boy" I said. I wanted to tell him, "Mon, this is what Pascal's principle is all about! It states that a change in pressure applied to an enclosed incompressible fluid is transmitted undiminished to every portion of the fluid and to the walls of the container". But then, the boy was too small to realize that eye-balls are very loose parts of the container!

OPTICS

I told Renjan to not look at the "bad uncle" any more. I started "concentrating" on the latter half of my dosa and there was a loud scream from the poor boy. I turned back to see what the man has done this time and seeing him I thought I was going to scream even louder. The man had turned into a Dracula. I told you earlier? Sometimes it takes me a moment to come to grips with what is happening. The gentleman was now drinking water from a glass. "So what?" did you ask? Then listen. With his mouth wide open almost half of the rim of the glass was inside his mouth. When he tilted the glass to drink, his front teeth in the upper jaw were now inside water. The curvature of the glass plus the water in the tilted position of the glass formed sort of a plano-convex lens. The gentleman's teeth got magnified beyond all proportions and had a devilish look. I wanted to tell the boy of the lens action. But then the boy was too small.

I felt sorry for the boy as he sat there with an all-lost feeling and an untouched masala dosa before him.

Physics is such a wonderful subject finding application every where. So you finally agree with me?

Prof. K. Sreenivasa Rao - The sharp shooter!

1986 was a very special year for me. That was the year when I could see some of the best brains in the world from very close quarters. Prof. E.C.G Sudarshan the world renowned physicist and the greatest alumnus of our college was in the CMS campus. He had with him two physicists - Prof K. Babu Joseph (CUSAT, Cochin) and Prof. K. Sreenivasa Rao (IMSc, Chennai)- whom he had entrusted with the task of establishing the "George Sudarshan Centre for Physics and Computer Science" in CMS college. A week long all India seminar on "Recent Developments in Theoretical Physics" was organised and the list of speakers read like the who-is-who of theoretical Physics in India. The proceedings of the seminar were edited by Prof. Rao and was published by Springer. Yes, such things were initiated in CMS college but tragically nothing happened thereafter. The George Sudarshan Centre was a great concept. But the baton of a wonderfully begun programme was handed over to the weak hands of unimaginative persons who later became very self seeking too. All that in another post.

The then principal Prof P.T Abraham had deputed me to be with Rao Sir wherever he went. And here starts the story.

I introduced myself to Rao Sir as a Physics teacher in CMS college. Without losing a moment came the question: "Have you read Resnick and Halliday"?
"No Sir". I replied politely.
"Then you are not a Physics teacher"!
That was the first salvo fired. Right on my temple. After all these years I believe that with that merciless bullet Rao Sir did me a great service. Not only that I read the book but I made hundreds of my students read it too. Again it was from him that I first heard of "Schaum series" books. And hundreds of my students read these books and benefited. Particularly two books one on Mechanics by Murray R Spiegel and another book on Electromagnetism by Edminister were greatly useful to the students.

A day of Shoot at Sight
I will not ever forget the next day with Rao Sir. The above title could well be replaced with "Rao on the Rampage"! I had mentioned about the national seminar. It was to be inaugurated by the then vice-chancellor of CUSAT, Dr. Gopalan. Rao Sir wanted some changes in the programme and went to Cochin (now Kochi) and I accompanied him (that was the best I could). He suggested the change in the programme and the vice-chancellor retorted:
"Too many cooks spoil the broth"
Even before I could say unto myself "Oh God what will happen now", the firing had already started:
"See Mr vice-chancellor, I am not a cook, I am a serious scientist. And wherever I am a cook, I am the chief cook".
The guns became silent and the vice-chancellor become wiser!

The scene now shifts to the regional office of HCL computers in Cochin city. They were the only suppliers of computers in India and their office had a very posh interior. The officers there were even more elegant in their looks. Though Rao Sir had crashed into the "wonderland", I was standing there on trembling feet. Those were the days when people in their thousands would have queued up battling all odds to just see the miracle machine called computer. Rao Sir had placed an order with the HCL for the supply of two computers. But the delivery date had passed without delivery. I told myself, " here I am to witness another blood bath". A top HCL official started like this:
"Sir, what has happened is that..."
The answer was interrupted and the firing started:
"What has happened is that nothing has happened"!!
The top official with an exotic look started perspiring inside the super cooled room.

In the evening we were back in Kottayam and Adv: Ninan took us to a restaurant called Jewel Box run by some elderly educated ladies. Adv. Ninan introduced Rao Sir to one lady and she very politely asked:
"where are you working Sir"?
Adv Ninan and I were bewildered to hear the answer:
"I can work anywhere in the world"!
I turned through "365 degrees" to find at least the mortal remains of the lady, but couldn't find any. All through the day I was with Rao Sir like R.K Lakshman's "common man" without ever opening my mouth.
People say that well begun is half done. The vice-chancellor had begun it all very well in the morning.

Very Witty Too
I conclude this story with two incidents (non-violent this time). Rao Sir was writing the names of the speakers for the inaugural function of the National seminar. I was beside him. He had to accommodate a particular person in the list, let us call him Mr X. I heard Rao Sir murmuring while writing " Now three minutes for Mr X's bla bla bla"!!!
Years later we were discussing the bye-law for a certain organization and I asked him "Sir, what do you mean by ex-officio member"?
Pat came the answer:
"That means whoever comes to that position has to be invited. For instance, if a monkey comes to that position you will have to invite it"!!
Only natural that I had no more doubts left!!!

NOTE: I have touched upon only the lighter aspects of the "phenomenon" I came across in 1986. The real Prof K Sreenivasa Rao is the Physicist or Physicist turned Mathematician. I am not the least competent to talk on this Prof KSR.