Reminiscences of M.S.Narasimhan (possibly more about myself):
I joined TIFR as a research student in 1964 eleven years after Narasimhan. Though he was much senior and already a star, he was friendly from the beginning. Both of us being students of Fr. C. Racine in Loyola college may have some thing to do with it. Sometimes, he used to attend/oversee our first year courses. One incident, I remember is that the lecturer in algebra confused all of us while explaining tensor products. Then Narsimham took me to his office offering to explain and he too made a mess of it. I assumed that he was big picture man as Raghunathan told me at some stage that Narasimhsn explained the essentials of Kodaira-Spencer work in an hour during seaside walks near the TIFR canteen.
Having browsed Hausdorff's Set Theory in college, I was already committed to learning Topology and in spite of Narasimhsn's diverse interests, I chose an area in which he was not an expert. He did try to get me interested in the topology of moduli spaces. But my interest was more towards general theories rather than specific calculations. Our acquaintance which slowly developed in to a sort of brotherly guidance continued. Around my third year or so, we occasionally had beer together on Saturdays. I do not remember what we talked about, it must have been about general things and some about mathematicians rather than mathematics. The actual mathematical discussions were with M.S. Raghunathan and S.Ramanan who were both interested in topology.
Meanwhile there were visiting professors and I particularly liked the lectures of John Stallings whose papers I read earlier. I enjoyed learning mathematics and was not sure or care whether I could do a ph.d. And TIFR gave great opportunity to learn without pressure of publishing papers or doing a ph.d. There was always the possibility of teaching in a college in Guntur area if one could not do a ph.d. I also enjoyed reading Milnor, Browdrer, Zeeman, Serre's Thesis and various Cartan seminars on topology. Towards the end of his stay, Stallings said that Papakyriakopoulos did some great work in three dimensional topology. After Stallings left, I started studying Papa's papers though I did not have any background in 3-manifolds. It soon led to some minor work which became part of my thesis.
Then came a crucial intervention from Narasimhan at the beginning of 1968. He heard of Nuffield Foundation Fellowships and thought that I had some chance of getting it and went about organising my application. By that time I had 3-4 papers and he thought that it would be good if I had specific place in mind. I read several papers of CT.C. Wall who was in Liverpool. He organised sending my papers to Wall and a letter of support from Wall. He coached me on preparations for the interview. Since I was generally like a bull in China shop reflecting my village farmer background, he advised me about being polite to the interviewers. It seemed to have worked. One Kothari asked me name the greatest theorems in topology. I replied that it was a silly question. Apparently, I came back and told Narasimhsn that I followed his advice since I said that the question was silly instead of saying that it was stupid. To my surprise, I got the fellowship snd the visit to Liverpool proved to be very useful in terms of what I learnt there which was used in later research and the start of acquintance with Peter Scott which resulted much later in a long collaboration.
He was supposed to be one of those persons who understood me. Kalyan Mukherjea told me once that he told MSN that I was planning to quit TIFR. He asked MSN to guess what I wanted to do. Apparently, the reply was that I was planning to go back to Guntur which was correct.
Narasimhan went on to bigger things both mathematically and as an administrator in the development of mathematics in India. He was slso Head of the Mathematics group at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste from 1992–1999.
I was not in touch with him during some periods. But I remember gratefully his visits to Delhi during 1982-86. This was a difficult period for me and his visits both to my office and home offered some succour. We renewed correspondence after he moved to Bangalore. I visited him a few times in Bangalore and was looking forward to visiting him again when the sad news came.
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