It's a Friday afternoon in one of the monsoon months -- I can't remember which -- and there is the stern principal with this prim and propah lady in her late forties on stage, looking down at some one thousand-odd students from standards 4-10, seated on the floor. Yes sir, we didn't enjoy the luxury of wooden chairs in the late 1970s. The lady is introduced to us as an ace mathemagician and we're invited to try and trap her with some very difficult arithmetic.
From the far end of the hall, there is this dimunitive little voice that stands up to reveal one of the more intelligent girls in school, the type that has made it more than a habit to walk away with the first prize at the end of each academic year. She has a real riddler. Supposing you had a chessboard and put one grain of rice on the first square and doubled the number on each subsequent square, then (a) how many grains would you have on the sixty-fourth square and (b) How many would you have in all?
I didn't even bother to try after the first few squares, and am sure everyone else, including our shrewish math teacher and the principal wouldn't have tried either. But I remember clearly, and with a great deal of astonishment, that it didn't take more than a few seconds for Shakuntala Devi to rattle off the answer to Vidya Chatterjee. A stunned Miss Chatterjee nodded in assent even as her jaw dropped down in sheer disbelief. As if too reinforce her skills, Shakuntala Devi rattled off the number of grains on random squares, each time asking Vidya to verify the correctness of her claim. And poor Vidya would simply nod her head like one of those wooden dolls that are up for sale on railway station platforms.
There were several other posers, most of which had been very intelligently crafted, but none that could ever put the lady in a corner. It was as if even after you gave her a 50 per cent handicap in a 100-metre dash, she'd still emerge a clear winner. Wonderful.
And then there was one that finally stumped her. Someone asked her, quite innocently and without any malice, I am sure, where she acquired her skills, and could we, the students aspire to get ourselves educated there after doing the 10+2. There was pin-drop silence for a few seconds after which Shakuntala Devi replied in a choked voice that she had received no formal education at all, and had not even completed high school, let alone getting a college degree. It was was one the biggest regrets of her life that she had to develop her skills on her own instead of going to school, and then become somewhat of a star -- and possibly a money-spinner -- in her dad's circus.
She also shared her love for cooking with us, speaking about it at length, and left that day with some advice on why it was not necessary to emulate her, but to focus on education and become a more rounded personality. And then she said something that really touched the heart: I know you are all overawed about me, but you do not know how overawed I am about you. One day, you will all be graduates, something that I am not today, nor will ever be.
The first thing I did that evening, when I got home, was try and figure out if I could get the right answers on my dad's calculator, to the two questions that Vidya had posed. We didn't have desktops and laptops those days, remember? I was foxed to learn that the machine did not even have the capacity to calculate beyond thirty squares on the chessboard -- matching Shakuntala Devi on speed was totally out of the question.
Anyway, that Friday at school was the first and last time I saw her in person. I did, of course, see her on television on several occasions after that function, where she would display both her calculation and her culinary skills.
Fastforward to last week. April 22, to be precise. I learn from the newspapers, that the mathemagician has just passed away. My mind goes back to Vidya Chatterjee's questions. Instinctively, I reach for the laptop and try figuring out how many grains of rice there are. Thirty-five years later, I finally have the answer on my screen, but there is absolutely no way to embed it in my grey cells. In any case, even the computer isn't cent-per-cent accurate. The last five of the 19 or 20 digits that make up the answers to both questions are zeros, indicating that there is some degree of approximation here.
That is when the enormity of what this country had in terms of talent all these years, and what it lost on April 21 dawned on me.
From the far end of the hall, there is this dimunitive little voice that stands up to reveal one of the more intelligent girls in school, the type that has made it more than a habit to walk away with the first prize at the end of each academic year. She has a real riddler. Supposing you had a chessboard and put one grain of rice on the first square and doubled the number on each subsequent square, then (a) how many grains would you have on the sixty-fourth square and (b) How many would you have in all?
I didn't even bother to try after the first few squares, and am sure everyone else, including our shrewish math teacher and the principal wouldn't have tried either. But I remember clearly, and with a great deal of astonishment, that it didn't take more than a few seconds for Shakuntala Devi to rattle off the answer to Vidya Chatterjee. A stunned Miss Chatterjee nodded in assent even as her jaw dropped down in sheer disbelief. As if too reinforce her skills, Shakuntala Devi rattled off the number of grains on random squares, each time asking Vidya to verify the correctness of her claim. And poor Vidya would simply nod her head like one of those wooden dolls that are up for sale on railway station platforms.
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A male student then asked her to give the dates of all the Sundays in the year, starting from January. She did it with such speed, that he just wasn't able to flip the sheets of the calendar in sync with her replies and was fumbling to get to the finishing line much after she had dated all the fifty-two Sundays.
There were several other posers, most of which had been very intelligently crafted, but none that could ever put the lady in a corner. It was as if even after you gave her a 50 per cent handicap in a 100-metre dash, she'd still emerge a clear winner. Wonderful.
And then there was one that finally stumped her. Someone asked her, quite innocently and without any malice, I am sure, where she acquired her skills, and could we, the students aspire to get ourselves educated there after doing the 10+2. There was pin-drop silence for a few seconds after which Shakuntala Devi replied in a choked voice that she had received no formal education at all, and had not even completed high school, let alone getting a college degree. It was was one the biggest regrets of her life that she had to develop her skills on her own instead of going to school, and then become somewhat of a star -- and possibly a money-spinner -- in her dad's circus.
She also shared her love for cooking with us, speaking about it at length, and left that day with some advice on why it was not necessary to emulate her, but to focus on education and become a more rounded personality. And then she said something that really touched the heart: I know you are all overawed about me, but you do not know how overawed I am about you. One day, you will all be graduates, something that I am not today, nor will ever be.
The first thing I did that evening, when I got home, was try and figure out if I could get the right answers on my dad's calculator, to the two questions that Vidya had posed. We didn't have desktops and laptops those days, remember? I was foxed to learn that the machine did not even have the capacity to calculate beyond thirty squares on the chessboard -- matching Shakuntala Devi on speed was totally out of the question.
Anyway, that Friday at school was the first and last time I saw her in person. I did, of course, see her on television on several occasions after that function, where she would display both her calculation and her culinary skills.
Fastforward to last week. April 22, to be precise. I learn from the newspapers, that the mathemagician has just passed away. My mind goes back to Vidya Chatterjee's questions. Instinctively, I reach for the laptop and try figuring out how many grains of rice there are. Thirty-five years later, I finally have the answer on my screen, but there is absolutely no way to embed it in my grey cells. In any case, even the computer isn't cent-per-cent accurate. The last five of the 19 or 20 digits that make up the answers to both questions are zeros, indicating that there is some degree of approximation here.
That is when the enormity of what this country had in terms of talent all these years, and what it lost on April 21 dawned on me.