Saturday, March 27, 2021

Remembering my father-2

 Remembering my father-2

Today there was some discussion of a bit of weirdness in our family. May be it started with my father. He came from a family of lower middle class farmers; his father had six acres of land and had 3 sons and 2 daughters. Their village Avanigadda was the Taluk headquarters and a high school was started there. My grandfather promised send any son who finished school to college and my father was the only one who completed. He was sent to study in Masulipatnam about 50 miles away by bus. He started with Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry (MPC) group in his Intermediate. Then he found the lecturer in Logic was popular with students and started attending Logic classes instead of Mathematics classes without informing anybody. After several months the College Principal found out about this and took him to task. But strangely, there was also an LPC group those days ( he finished his B.Ed in 1941 and so this must be about 1936) and he was shifted to LPC group. I did similar things in college but that is another story.

The bus fare was about one half rupees then and one could also walk 30 miles to reach  Masulipatnam. In the holidays he used to come home, work on the farm, and carry bags of lentils and other food stuff and go back by walking. Compared to that we had it much easier. Probably Sambasivarao Kolli knows more about my father than me.

An earlier story here https://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com/2007/06/remembering-my-father.html

Thursday, March 18, 2021

Doing mathematics

 Like many other things, doing mathematics may be just a question of working hard and staying power. I complained to Peter “I still do not have good command of the stuff. Your answer shows that I was wrong I one case. I have to work some more.” He responds “It definitely takes a while to get into it. I worked on section 11 for many months, maybe more than a year. But the last time I worked on it was before I retired (3 years ago), and probably 4 or 5 years ago!” And having collaborators helps, some thing I discovered at the age of 53 or so. I will be 80 this June.