I wonder whether the College is always in transition. It seemed to be through my five years 1968-73.
The number of students had been increasing. So while Morning Assembly was compulsory, only the innocent tried to meet their tutor once a week. No honours examinations were held till the end of second year. So one could spend half one's undergraduate years playing. The large room next to the Library was still a Reading Room, well stocked with periodicals. I remember an earnest ragger advising me to become better informed by visiting it more often. Any one entering the Dining Hall after Mr. Pearson in black robes had said grace had to walk to the High Table, catch his eye and bow before sitting down, often to join the chorus "Firangi ******." Yes, the college was still a bastion of tough-smoking males. Naxalites were on the rise, and the Revolution seemed just a bomb or two away.

Brilliant Tutorials were then unheard of. Physics was the course for those who did well in Mathematics in school. The College was still a nursery for the civil services. It admitted a large number of science students but did not quite know what to do with them. Honours classes were taught at the University departments, and the subsidiaries were necessary evils left to the College

Unable to understand what the year long practice of titration would teach me once I had learnt how to control the stopcock, I turned to other things the College had to offer. There was no Mathematics Society around, let alone a Centre for Mathematics. Nor was there a Science Society of any kind. So, I attended the meetings of the History Society, the Philosophy Society, the Informal Discussion Group, the Punjabi Society and the Bazm-e-Adab.
College students then seemed to be interested in books. Paperbacks cost less than ten rupees and we could buy scores of them. Galgotias, our favourite haunt, was still a bookstore and not a warehouse of management and computer manuals. French existential literature was the favourite and fitted well with the mood of the times, or perhaps with our age.
Thus, while I left College not too well-equipped to be a mathematician, I left it well-read and well-informed. Besides this, I was deeply influenced by the liberal, tolerant and cosmopolitan atmosphere that prevailed in College.
I remember reading in 1972 a long article by the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, explaining how his training in Marxism led him to his fundamental work in particle physics. (He predicted the existence of the meson, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.) The unplanned and haphazard reading I did in College perhaps did lead to an aesthetic sensibility because of which I could, after all, appreciate, understand, teach, and even create some Mathematics.
(Prof. Rajendra Bhatia, an eminent mathematician and a S. S. Bhatnagar Award winner, is presently at ISI, Delhi. He is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Centre.)

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