Related Papers and Articles:

    1. Glimpses from the Life and Work of Dr. C.R.Rao: A Living Legend in Statistics, by Anil K. Bera and Priyasmita Ghosh (October, 2020)

    2. Rendezvous with Nobel Laureate Prof. Kenneth J. Arrow, by Anil K. Bera (April 16, 2021)

    3. Tagore's Shah Jahan and Essay on Gandhi, by Anil K. Bera (March 17, 2021)

    4. Letter from America, by Anil K. Bera (February 10, 2021) 

    5. Remembering Prof Atindra Mohan Goon, by Anil K. Bera (January 21, 2021)

    6. Made in Calcutta University - Memories of an Epic Oral Test, by Anil K. Bera (September 9, 2020)

    7. Nobel Laureate in Search of the Bera Integral, by Anil K. Bera (July 30, 2020)

    8. Cosmopolitan Club, Tagores, and UIUC: A Brief History of 100 years, by Anil K. Bera (May 2006)

Glimpses from the Life and Work of Dr. C.R.Rao: A Living Legend in Statistics

by Anil K. Bera and Priyasmita Ghosh

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

October, 2020

Prologue and Family

As per the Indian mythology, Krishna, the eighth avatar of Lord Vishnu was the eighth child of Devaki and Vasudeva. Coincidentally, our Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, was the eighth offspring of his parents, mother A. Laxmikantamma, and father C.D Naidu (1879-1940). Although Rao was universally addressed as Dr Rao by all his students and colleagues at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), where the “Professor” title was exclusively reserved for Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (PCM), the history of his birthname is quite interesting. Not only that he was named after Lord Krishna, but also his middle name symbolizes the purest form of romance. Rao always claims that though he is a romantic by temperament, yet all his romance is somehow in the wrong place, that is in his head instead of his heart! Below we present photographs providing details about Rao’s lineage and his big family in 1931, respectively.

C.R Rao’s siblings. Like Krishna C.R Rao was the eighth child of his parents

With family 1931, sitting on floor (from 1 to r): Thiappanna, Venkateswara, Radhakrishna and Ramachandra. Sitting on chairs (from 1 to r): Sanjeevamma, Chellamma (father’s sister), father C.D. Naidu (with grandson on his lap), mother Laxmikanthamma (with Neelavati on her lap) and mother’s grandmother. Standing (from 1 to r): Policeman in attendance to C.D. Naidu, Narsamma, orderly in attendance to C.D. Naidu, Sakuntalammma and a poor boy staying with the family

At age 15: Published in the Mrs. A.V.N. College magazine

Continuing with the spirit of Radha and Krishna, let us consider the following excerpt from

the lyrical Sanskrit poem Gita Govinda, by the 12th century poet Jayadeva1:

“And, led by Radha’s spirit,

The feet of Krishna found the road alright; Wherefore, in bliss which all hearts inherit, Together taste they Love’s divine delight.”

The significance of the above lines will indeed constitute the essence of this essay i.e. one can’t really talk about the life and work of Dr. Rao without referring to PCM and ISI. In fact, in a way, PCM, Rao and ISI, form a trinity where PCM can be viewed as the father, Rao the son and statistics (or more specifically ISI), the holy spirit. Let us take some liberty in paraphrasing the above excerpt from Jayadeva in this context as:

So PCM guided, and led by Statistics’ spirit,

The feet of CR Rao found the road alright; Wherefore, in “numbers” which all hearts inherit, Together they uplift ISI’s sight.

In 1989, Rao wrote a book “Statistics and Truth: Putting Chance to Work” [CSIR Ramanujan Memorial Lectures] and nothing is more fitting than his own life as the best empirical evidence of “Putting Chance to Work.” The story of his joining the ISI in 1941 as a “statistics trainee” by a chance encounter is well known. However, such an inspirational story can’t be recounted enough. It was a hot summer day of June 1940. The World War II (WWII) was raging in full swing with its devastation, and at the same time promising jobs to the vast unemployed youths of India amid all that chaos. Rao, not yet 20 then set out on a 500-mile train journey from the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, India to Calcutta, the second largest city of the British Empire, after obtaining a first class first degree in mathematics and with a glimmer of hope of finding a job in the military. Rao was not so “lucky”; he was deemed too young for the job. However, while in Calcutta, through a chance encounter, he visited the ISI founded in 1931 by PCM, a Cambridge-trained physicist. As a last resort, he applied for the one-year training program in Statistics at ISI, with a letter of recommendation from the vice chancellor of Andhra University, Professor V. S. Krishna, who was known to PCM. Very promptly, he received a positive reply from PCM admitting him to the one-year program of the ISI from January 1, 1941. And as we all know the rest is history. In fact, a very long history. Rao did not get the job he came for but found something that would keep him engaged for the next 80 years of his life and the engagement still continues.

Publications: Two Masterpieces by 30

After Rao passed M.A. in. statistics with record marks in 1943, PCM offered him a part-time lectureship at the Calcutta University (CU). In 1944 Rao was giving a course on estimation to the senior students of the master’s class at CU, where he mentioned without proof Fisher’s information inequality for the asymptotic variance of a consistent estimate. There a bright young student Vinayak Mahadev Dandekar (VMD) (1920-1995) who was of the same age as Rao raised the question whether such an inequality exists in finite sample. Rao didn’t know the answer in the class; however, at night in his tiny apartment, with a simple application of the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, Rao solved the problem and discussed the result in the next class!

Vinayak Mahadev Dandekar (VMD) 

 While writing a note on this result for publication, Rao discovered many related results. Since the publication of Sankhyā, a journal started by PCM in 1933, was suspended during the WWII, the paper was published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society (1945)2. Quite interestingly, the same WWII brought Rao from Vishakhapatnam to Calcutta and eventually to ISI! Instead of asking what is in this paper, one should ask what is not? It has, i) Cramér - Rao inequality, (ii) Rao-Blackwell theorem, (iii) Differential Geometry for the first time in Statistical literature, and finally, (iv) Fisher- Rao metric. Any first graduate course in statistical inference will be incomplete without the above two results, (i) and (ii). Here, we think, one should not overlook the origin of Rao’s 1945 paper, i.e., the question raised by the student VMD. He later became the Director of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune and did pioneering work on poverty, unemployment and income inequality in India. Just imagine what would happen, if in classrooms we have students like VMD and also teachers like Rao!

In his second masterpiece, that appeared in the Proceedings of The Cambridge Philosophical Society (1948)3, Rao introduced altogether a new test principle, famously known as Rao’s score (RS) test, as an alternative to Neyman-Pearson likelihood ratio (LR) and Wald (W) tests. Thus, we now have another “holy trinity” in statistics, namely LR, W and RS. The seed of the paper was planted in Calcutta in 1944. That too is an interesting story.

S.J. Poti who joined the ISI as a teaching assistant found himself without a place to stay in Calcutta. Observing Poti’s plight, Rao offered to share his small single room in the fourth floor of a building. The room had no kitchen, and they shared a bathroom and toilet with all the tenants of the fourth floor. They had no cots and would spread their beds on the floor to sleep at night and then roll the beds up in the morning. The two used to go for long walks in the evening, often discussing problems in statistics. One day Poti asked Rao whether the Neyman-Pearson (NP) theory could be used to test a hypothesis about a parameter when the alternative is one-sided. Rao gave an immediate solution that was published as a note in Sankhyā (1946)4, which using the NP lemma showed that a locally most powerful (LMP) test must be based on the score function, i.e. the derivative of the loglikelihood with respect to the parameter, evaluated under the null hypothesis. This little obscure note can be viewed as a precursor to the Rao’s pathbreaking 1948 paper, though the general idea for RS test evolved in natural way while Rao was analyzing some genetic data. The problem was estimation of a linkage parameter using data sets from different experiments designed in such a way that each data set had information on the same linkage parameter. Thus, like most of Rao’s work, the RS test is an example of a statistical method motivated by a practical problem.

The importance of RS test in statistics and econometrics cannot be overstated; it is one of the most useful tools in evaluating and testing statistical and econometric models. Also, there are many well-known tests in the literature that were suggested long before 1948, whose theoretical foundation can now be buttressed by RS test principle. As mentioned above, RS test requires estimation of the score function only under the null thus facilitating a huge simplification of the final form of the test statistic. In most applications, RS statistic has a simple close-form expression which is quite unthinkable, in many cases, for the LR and W tests.

One of us (Bera) has a first-hand experience in using the RS test in devising the following widely used test for normality, popularly known as the Jarque-Bera (JB) statistic first published in 19805:

JB= √𝑛 [(√𝑏1)2 + (𝑏2−3)2], 

where n is the sample size, and √𝑏1 and 𝑏2 are, respectively, the sample skewness and kurtosis. JB was derived using the Pearson system of curves as alternative (to normality)

hypothesis, for which LR and W are almost impossible to apply. Not only the RS principle leads to a neat and beautiful expression, but also it uncovers the optimality implications, namely LMP, of using sample skewness and kurtosis. JB and its various extensions have around 8,000 citations. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Bera’s whole livelihood had been based on RS.

We can pick up each paper of Rao and go through its origin and underlying history; however, that would be a very long exercise, not suitable for this essay. Thus, to cut the long story short, below we present a graph of Rao’s number of publications over the last eight decades (1941-2019).

The publications of Rao from (1941-2019)

Clearly, there is a structural break around the year 1980 when he took the mandatory retirement from ISI at the age of 60 and move to the University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A. Simple counting says, he published 203 papers by that time, and another 271 papers over the last 40 years. Dr. Rao’s research had significance beyond statistics and econometrics, like the Quantum Cramér-Rao bound providing sharper versions of Heisenberg's Principle in Quantum Physics. He has made a major contribution to the combinatorial theory of design by extending the notion of orthogonal Latin squares through the notion of orthogonal arrays6. In the last two decades, he has also touched upon non-linear methods, resampling methods, neural networks, and data mining. It is inspirational to see how a man who is about to cross a century, is determined to stay up-to-date in the main stream of modern statistical learning and data mining.

Rao, The Master Guide

After Raj Chandra Bose and Samarendra Nath Roy left ISI in 1949 and 1950, respectively, and PCM got busy with national planning, Rao became the natural successor to the leadership of research and training of the institute and was the doctoral thesis adviser of many bright students. Over his full academic life, Rao has directed the research work of more than 50 Ph.D. students who in turn produced more than 350 Ph.D.’s.

About our very own Professor Ranga Rao at UIUC7, we note, “Ramaswamy Ranga Rao is a prominent Indian mathematician. He finished his Ph.D. under the supervision of C.R. Rao at ISI, Calcutta. He was one of the "famous four" students of Rao in ISI during 1956-1963. Ranga Rao is now professor emeritus of mathematics at University of Illinois. He made fundamental contributions to statistics, Lie groups, and Lie algebras.” The four, K. R. Parthasarathy (KRP), Veeravalli S. Varadarajan (VSV), S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan (SRSV) and Ramaswamy Ranga Rao (RRR) are known as fabulous (fav) four in ISI legend. VSV joined the institute in 1956 and in a marked departure, instead of Statistics, he decided to work on Probability Theory, and started his research career by learning the necessary mathematics by himself within a year or so. RRR and KRP became partners of VSV, and quite coincidentally like VSV, they also had B. Sc. Honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Madras. VSV completed his Ph.D. in 1959, and in the same year SRSV came to ISI as a Ph.D. student8. SRSV later went on to receive the Abel prize of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (considered as an equivalent to the Nobel prize, there being no Nobel prize for Mathematics) in 2007. Like each of the previous three, he also did a B. Sc. Honours from Madras before coming to Calcutta. Although, at times helped by the brilliant statistician Raj Bahadur, it was Rao who provided the encouragement and guidance to this “fav four.” Rao created a wonderful academic atmosphere for young scholars to carry out their perennial discussion on mathematics, most of the time conducted in Tamil. There is a funny anecdote about a non-mathematician and non-Tamilian6, who claimed to have learnt a Tamil word “ergodicity” from overhearing this intense discourse taking place among the “fav four.”

Dr. Rao had an unorthodox modus operandi while guiding Ph.D. students. His first Ph.D. student was Debabrata Basu whom he recruited in 1950. The celebrated Basu’s theorem arose out of a question Rao put to Basu, about the existence of maximal ancillary statistic. Basu proved the nonexistence of such a statistic, and in addition established the independence of an ancillary statistic and the minimal sufficient statistic. In a recent interview in “Bhāvanā”9, KRP mentioned that on advice of C.R. Rao he read the “Mathematical Foundation of Information Theory” by A.Y. Khinchin10, but was not satisfied with one particular chapter. KRP rewrote that chapter which involved learning some ergodic theory and about the probability measures invariant under transformation. KRP sent it to Joseph L. Doob of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), and who in turn gave it to measure theorist, John C. Oxtoby. Oxtoby wrote and published a paper giving full credit to KRP11. In those days, there were no regular fellowships at ISI and whatever Rao decided was the scholarship amount. When KRP showed Oxtoby’s paper to C.R Rao, his scholarship was doubled. That was the kind of incentive Rao provided to his Ph.D. students.

During the 1962 ISI convocation time, Dr. Rao asked KRP and SRSV to suggest a prominent scientist from USSR who could be invited. The duo suggested the most famous of all, the legendary probability theorist A.N. Kolmogorov (ANK). Rao’s response was simply, “No problem. We will get him.” Rao put a word to PCM who in turn put the right word at the right time to the USSR Academy of Sciences. ANK, possibly the most important visitor that ISI has ever received, came on April 14 1962 and stayed till May 12. ANK’s visit testifies the importance Rao paid to students’ needs and suggestions. The visit was a huge moral booster for not only the fledgling young ISI probabilists but also for the whole of India, all the more as ANK rarely travelled outside USSR.

Rao’s guidance went far beyond Basu and the fav-four. During 1960’s Rao had five or six students working for Ph.D. at any given time, including I.M. Chakraborti in design of experiments; R.G. Laha in characterization problems; J. Roy in multivariate analysis; A.C. Das and Des Raj in survey sampling and A. Matthai on quality control. Very substantially if not wholly, the cluster of these brilliant and creative Ph.D. scholars of C.R. Rao enthroned the ISI to its golden period during 1960s.

Rao’s Foresight on Computer Technology

Long before the era of digital revolution, Rao wrote the book “Computers and Future of Human Society” published in 196912. Being a visionary, he anticipated that the path to economic development and prosperity, is tied to the use of the computers, at a time when less than 1% of the world knew the use of computers. In his words, “We need computers to guard our land frontiers and the long coasts, save us from floods and fury of storms, defend ourselves against external aggression, improve our agriculture to feed the teeming millions, give the best education to our children, help in better medical diagnosis and save the lives of patients, and provide the people with necessary comforts, facilities and opportunities in life.”

Computers and Future of Human Society published in 1969

He traced the history of computers, both hardware and software and analyzed questions like: “Is the human brain superior to the computer? Are we likely to succeed in producing a robot identical with human being in all respects except in origin?” that were much ahead of their time. He laid out that computers can prove to be a great boon for a developing country like India, to close the productivity gap with some of the advanced countries of the world. But he also admitted that there is a dangerous possibility that robots controlled by computers would run factories, and today it is not a secret that many jobs have been lost to automation.

From Rao’s book on calling a computer from a console typewriter. Beginning of the “work at home”!

He pretty much forecasted the future of the world lies in computer programming, and we are now witnessing that every day in our lives. The field of computer programming, especially machine learning is experiencing exponential growth today while in Rao’s time, computers were hunks of machinery, the size of a room. Rao wrote about Anne (shown in the photo above), “She is looking forward to the day when such a console typewriter in installed in her home as telephones are now. She can utilize the computer which may be far away sitting at her home and any time.” Rao anticipated that the day is not far when a computer console will be installed in every home and almost envisioned that one will be able to utilize it at any time to get access to any type of information, like checking email, surfing internet and having all kind of data at fingertips. Rao perceived the world with computers in ways that we never thought was possible.

Rao visited the UIUC, in 1953–1954 as a visiting research Professor of Mathematical Statistics. During his stay at UIUC, he had access to Illiac, the first digital computer in the United States. He took a course on programming using machine language and started using the computer to do his own computations. The UIUC gave him two students to work on developing computer programs for statistical methods. But unfortunately, on returning back to India, Rao didn’t have an opportunity to use computers, and his research involving heavy computations was not possible with hand-driven desk computers. The ISI had acquired a digital computer, but the workers’ union at the ISI protested the use of computers. This obstructed the possibility of creation of computer-intensive statistical techniques in India well before others did. This was such a big disappointment for Rao that he was even ready to resign; however, PCM and other administrators of the ISI persuaded him to withdraw the resignation.

The Women Behind the Man

Rao dedicated his book “Statistics and Truth: Putting Chance to Work,” to his mother A. Laxmikantamma, and credited her “For instilling the quest of knowledge” in him and “who woke him up “every day at four in the morning and lit the oil lamp to study in the quiet hours of morning when the mind is fresh.” Rao remembers his mother as a great disciplinarian, and she controlled the daily activities of her children, prescribing the time for playing, studying, and sleeping. This regiment later helped him in leading a disciplined and successful life. He had very little contact with his father until he retired as he was a police officer that required him to be work at different locations.

Rao was fortunate to have parents who fostered his innate abilities with proper guidance, provided an environment conducive to study, and gave a framework for ethics of life. He himself admits that genetics played an important role in his achievements and goes on to say “I inherited my father’s analytical ability and my mother’s tenacity and industry.”

Rao with his wife Bhargavi during their stay in UIUC, as a visiting professor of Mathematical Statistics in 1954

On returning from Cambridge to India in August 1948, Rao got married on September 9, a day before his 28th birthday. In the initial days of their marriage, Bhargavi, struggled to keep up with the activities of Rao; however, soon she realized the importance of the work that he was doing and adjusted herself to the life of an academician. She supported Rao and provided him with an environment at home to pursue his research peacefully. She had two master’s degrees, one in history from the Benaras Hindu University in India and another in psychology from the UIUC. In Calcutta, she worked for some years as a high school teacher and for a number of years as a lecturer . Rao and his wife were happily married for over 65 years, before she passed away in 2016.

Mrs. Bhargavi Rao narrated a funny anecdote about her husband, in the book, “Putting Chance to Work; A Life in Statistics: A Biography of C.R. Rao” by Nalini Krishnankutty13, published in 1996. Once a visiting scientist came from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to meet with Dr. Rao personally. He knocked on the door to be opened by Mrs. Rao and enquired about Dr. Rao. He was amazed that like the Soviet scientists, Dr Rao did not live in a big guarded house. She told him that her husband was downstairs near the car. He replied that he had only seen a mechanic working on the car, but not C.R Rao. Then Mrs. Rao informed him that it was not just any mechanic, he had actually seen The C.R. Rao. The visitor returned in the evening and saw Rao playing badminton with his colleagues and the next day he went to the ISI office to meet the Director of ISI. To his surprise, Dr. Rao was the Director, sitting in a room resembling a cubicle with only the flap door closed and easily accessible to everyone. Dr. Rao invited him home for dinner and welcome him like a perfect host, with vodka and Russian caviar. The visitor while leaving the house exclaimed, “I have seen the mechanic, the athlete, the scholar and the perfect host, all in one day.” Like Lord Krishna had (108) names and roles- Dr. Rao wore many hats and that too so successfully.

Rao’s daughter Tejaswini is an accomplished Indian classical (Kuchipudi) dancer and runs a dance school. She has a Ph.D. in nutrition and is a Professor at SUNY, Buffalo. In 1970 Rao moved to ISI, Delhi and was surprised to find that there was no dance school to teach Kuchipudi. Because of his interest in Indian classical dance, Rao started a Kuchipudi Dance Academy in Delhi and was its President until he left for the U.S.A in 1979. Rao and his wife admitted Tejaswini in a dance school at the age of eight. When she performed in public, Rao often supervised the performances, the music, the introductions, and the lighting. No matter how busy he was he would always take the time to ensure the performance was well planned. He made her do demonstrations of abhinaya in English translations of her dance music. This is very common now during the Indian dance performances, but it was unheard of in the early 60s. So in this matter too, Rao was well ahead of his time. Rao had an artistic vision and dancers today follow techniques, that were made to Tejaswini more than half a century earlier. Tejaswini now regrets that she didn’t take on some of his suggestions and act on them more seriously. Currently Rao is taken care of by Tejaswini at her Buffalo home.

Tejaswini admits that she and her brother Veerendra didn’t know much about their father during their stay in India, as Rao never talked much about himself. It is only after he moved to the U.S. that they learned about him as a scientist and as a person who is a very sensitive and caring person, with a great but subtle sense of humour. His family wished that he would take some time off to enjoy with them; however, Rao’s greatest pleasure in life comes from being immersed in work and research.

Rao’s daughter Tejaswini, striking a pose

Rao Modesty and Magic

One of us (Bera) was involved in preparing the Econometric Theory (ET) Interview with Dr. Rao14 , at the invitation of the Editor: Professor Peter C.B. Phillips (PCBP). As the interview went along, its size grew longer and larger, and at one stage, it was almost 100 typed pages. Rao became worried and his modesty was expressed as “Are you sure the whole text will be published?”, as in the handwritten note below.

Dr. Rao’s note to Bera on April 6, 2002

With a lot of trepidation, Bera submitted the interview to ET on May 31, 2002, expecting a response in a few weeks, from the Editor, most probably with a lot of suggestions to cut down the size. Quite surprisingly, within a week, apt came the Editor’s letter of acceptance without a single correction (reproduced below)! This is simply Rao magic.

Not only that, the Editor also send the following email to Rao:

Here, quite fittingly, the Editor marvels at the historical insights provided by Rao that will be read and enjoyed by not only econometricians but the wider community of statisticians.

Epilogue and Celebrations

Given that my academic career started with RS Test and still continues, I (Bera) have always been in touch with Dr. Rao for research and on special occasions. None of my emails/letters has gone without a prompt reply from Dr. Rao. I wish I were equally prompt with his letters and emails. On the occasion of his 77th birthday in September 1997, I sent him Birthday wishes with a sketch by eminent Indian artist Charu Khan. Rao appreciated it very much and sent a warm reply back.

Rao’s sketch by painter Charu Khan

Rao is recognized internationally as a pioneer who laid the foundation of modern statistics, with multifaceted distinctions as a mathematician, researcher, scientist, and teacher. His contributions to mathematics and to the theory and application of statistics have become part of graduate and postgraduate courses in statistics, econometrics, electrical engineering, and many other disciplines at most universities throughout the world. Rao is loved and respected all over the world. His birthdays are celebrated by the entire econometrics and statistics community with great enthusiasm, internationally.

Rao’s 80th birthday celebration at the University of Texas, San Antonio, 2000

Rao’s 90th birth anniversary celebrated at the ISI, Kolkata 2010

For his outstanding research contributions, C.R. Rao has been honored with the establishment of an institute named after him: C.R. Rao Advanced Institute for Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science (C.R. Rao AIMSCS), in Hyderabad, India. It is a fitting tribute to Rao, since he hails from this part of India. The institute is engaged in cutting edge research in the areas of Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Wireless Communication and interdisciplinary fields. Fittingly, the C.R. Rao Birth Centenary Celebrations started at the AIMSCS on his 99th birthday, September 10, 2019 with a video message from Rao himself (a screenshot of that is given below) .

In his message, Rao said, “I was fortunate to have made some fundamental contributions to the field of statistics and to see the impact of my work in furthering research. In my lifetime, I have seen statistics grow into a strong independent field of study based on mathematical, and more recently computational, tools. Its importance has spread across numerous areas such as business, economics, health and medicine, banking, management, physical, natural, and social sciences. Statistics is the science of learning from data. Today is the age of data revolution. There is therefore, a heightened need for statistics- both in terms of training in statistics to help analyze and interpret the data, and in terms of research to answer new questions arising from the data.15” This succinctly sums up the long statistical journey of C.R. Rao and also indicates that it is the Data Science what is stored for the future of Statistics.

C.R Rao, as he enters the centenary year, September 10th 2019

The 2019 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference at Mumbai, India on Dec 26th - 30th, 2019 brought together statisticians worldwide from academia, industry, government, and research institutions to explore the latest developments and challenges in the era of Data Science and Statistical Learning. For that occasion Tapan Nayak, a former Ph.D. student of Dr. Rao organized the C. R. Rao Honorary Session with following four presentations:

A new all-purpose generic multivariate transformation with applications in multivariate modelling and missing value imputation, Ravindra Khattree, Oakland University.

Analyzing periodic and nearly periodic data: Statistical perspectives, Debasis Kundu, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Shailaja Suryawanshi, Merck & Co.

The Trinity: Professor Mahalanobis, Dr. Rao, and the ISI, Anil Bera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Incidentally, Shailaja was the last Ph.D. student of Dr. Rao to graduate from the Pennsylvania State University in 1996 with a dissertation titled, Analysis of High-Dimensional Data in Problems of Regression and Discrimination, with Applications to Size and Shape Analysis. The Session was very well attended followed by a very lively discussion.

Of course, there will be many more tributes coming to Rao in coming months and years analyzing his research contributions. However, we should not forget the man, or the “life” behind all the work—the humble and the unassuming person. Here we can only borrow a couple of lines from Rabindranath Tagore to express our feelings for Rao, “You are greater than your achievements. The chariot of your life leaves your achievements behind, time after time.”

ত োমোরকীর্ িরতেয়ে ুর্মতেমহৎ,

পশ্চোয় তের্িেো েোে কীর্ ি য়র ত োমোর

বোরম্বোর । 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Professor Arijit Choudhuri for his kind invitation to contribute an essay on the occasion of C.R. Rao centenary. We are also thankful to Yufan Leiluo for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. All omissions and misreadings are ours. 

Rendezvous with Nobel Laureate Prof. Kenneth J. Arrow

by Dr Anil K Bera

April 16, 2021

Impossible world of Arrow - Pic by Dr. Bera

Prof. Kenneth J. Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was a world-renowned scholar, an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. In 1972, he along with Prof. John Hicks won the  Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.  A stalwart figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory and ever famous for Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

At 51, he was the youngest economist to win the Nobel prize. 

 In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2004, among numerous other awards. 

Professor Arrow passed away on February 21, 2017 at the age of 95.

An Afternoon at Stanford University with the Nobel Laureate

I have had the good fortune to spend an afternoon with this great personality in July of 2009, in his office, in the famous Landau Economics Building of Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

That was one of the most memorable days of my life. It was supposed to be a brief rendezvous (see below, some email exchanges from that time). When I knocked, he opened the door and gave a warm welcome; he made me feel that he was eagerly waiting for me. He went into business right away. For a moment in my life, I just shut my mouth, kept my ears and eyes wide open, and swallowed every word of his.

At one stage, I came back to reality, felt it was all a dream, and I was spellbound. Prof. Arrow noticed that and stopped for a moment. I had to say, “Prof. Arrow, I can’t believe having this conversation with one of my greatest heroes.” He calmly assured me (with a hearty laugh), “Why not, Professor Bera? You seem to be a very nice fellow.”  

I looked around, I was making myself comfortable.  And then I was thinking in my head,  “OMG, how does he find something from the midden of materials that are lying around?”  Felt like he read my mind too.  Referring to an article, he said, “Let me get a copy for you.  And no worries, it's right here.” , as he uttered those words, he bent down and pulled out the  exact article from that huge pile of all that are important stockpile.  I could feel the grin on my face, I said to myself, “Nothing is impossible by the Impossibility  icon, Ken Arrow, it always pointed the right way.”

Connection with University of Illinois, Urban-Champaign

Then added, “By the way, I must also tell you, I have a very soft corner for Urbana  from where my first job offer came.” He went back to the days of 1949 and elaborated his visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Yes, in those days UIUC had one of the best Economics Departments in the country; however, I definitely didn’t have anything to do with that.

I was mesmerized not by his scholarship in Economics, I was sitting across a gentle giant of a genius— of almost everything. Time flew very fast; at one stage I got conscious, the meeting was supposed to be a short one and here I am talking away for quite some time and looked at my watch, to make him aware of it. I was feeling guilty about holding him up for long. It was past 5 pm! He should have been home by now. But he seemed less worried about the time and seemed to enjoy our conversation.  All good things come to an end and while parting he clasped my sweating hands with his warm ones for lingering moments and said, “Goodbye,” in a most gentle voice.

Even after more than a decade, the memories of that afternoon are crisp and clear and I can recall and remember that afternoon like it was yesterday. His conversation is etched in my memory. My first encounter with Professor Arrow was in 1975, at Indian Statistical Institute (ISI, Calcutta), when I was a first-year M.Stat student through the Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) Production Function. I knew less about Arrow, he was just another chapter for my semester exam. In my second year of M.Stat at ISI, Delhi, I was reintroduced to the Arrow’s world. Professor V.K. Chetty taught General Equilibrium Theory from Arrow & Hann: General Competitive Analysis (1971). Professor Satish Jain offered a class on Social Choice Theory that I audited. I remember picking up Arrow’s 1951 Monograph Social Choice and Individual Values and started to it dig deep and dive into this field of social economics. I also read Amartya Sen’s 1970 Collective Choice and Social Welfare and other research paper. This is altogether another interesting world of economics and society.

Experiencing Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem

As a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at ISI I had decided to write a research paper on  Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.  To me, to date, this is the most powerful Economics theorem, I have ever read.  What is Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in simple words?  And why it was so impactful in my mind?  When I had immersed myself in the world of Arrow, India was under the Emergency rule under the regime of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1976-77. 

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is a strong mathematical result for collective choice and welfare economics. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states that it is impossible to reach a community-wide ranked preference by converting individuals’ choices while meeting all the conditions for a fair voting system. Simply put, the conditions for a reasonably fair voting electoral system include non-dictatorship (a single voter and the voter’s preference cannot represent a whole community. The social welfare function needs to consider the wishes of multiple voters), unrestricted domain (all the preferences of every voter to be counted, which conveys a complete ranking of social preferences), independence of irrelevant alternatives (when individuals’ rankings of irrelevant alternatives of a subset change, the social ranking of the subset should not be impacted), social ordering (voters should be able to order their choices from better to worse), and Pareto efficiency (the unanimous preferences of individuals must be respected).

So when the basic conditions of the election process are violated, how can democracy prevail?

Now, after more than four decades,  the world around makes me question the validity of the democratic process and all the hue and cry over collective choice. It baffled me then when the election was held in India under emergency rule and it annoys me more now when I read and learn about the “democratic” electoral processes that are in reign in different countries across the globe. Whether it is the ascent of  Donald Trump to the post of President of the US or those that we are observing in countries like, India, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Germany, France, Austria, Philippines, and more. It is unfortunate that we are indeed the living examples of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Many years from now, I think, researchers will discuss and debate Arrow’s theorem because of its sheer elegance, utmost importance, and far-reaching influence.

To carry out my modest duty as a teacher, I take every opportunity to mention Arrow’s theorem in my class, particularly when we want to define  “a function, with  satisfying certain conditions.” I tell students, don’t be over-ambitious, you will end up with nothing or something that you don’t want.

 Arrow's Nobel Prize                                                         Arrow receiving the Medal of Honor

Handwritten notes of AIT-1

Tagore's Shah Jahan and Essay on Gandhi

by Dr Anil K Bera

March 17, 2021

I have a very pleasant memory about Tagore‘s poem titled ‘Shah Jahan’.

It was the Year 1969. The whole country was celebrating Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the Congress Leader, freedom fighter and the Father of the Nation’s Birth Centennial. I was then in Class (Grade) IX. 

Probir Mitra - Shahjahan - Rabindranath Tagore - Poetry

And the time was just before our Half-Yearly (mid-term) exams. Thus, we were busy with exam preparation rather than participating in Birthday festivities. My elder sister, Rabina who was as eloquent and informative as  Akashbani Kolkata (All India Radio, Calcutta), would spend more time in gathering useful information about exams, rather than studying for it. One day she returned home excited with top-secret information that there was an ‘executive order’ to have Mahatma Gandhi in ‘every’ essay questions of Bengali and English papers in our High School.  Baba (my father) was a local leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Thus, in my own convoluted logic, this ‘forceful indoctrination’ of Mahatma on students, made sense to me. Our revered Headmaster Bijoy Krishna Das was the local congress party leader. Anyway, for us the students it just meant there was no need to memorize 5/10 possible essays, just one would do.

Bankim Bihari Manna taught Bengali in classes IX and XI. Although a science student, I was pretty good in Bengali, which meant I almost perfected the techniques to get good grades. And for some reason, Bankimbabu (Sir) liked me a lot. Just before the exam a senior from class XI approached me with lecture notes of Bankimbabu on Gandhi. Then he showed me some stolen goods on Gandhi, also written by BankimBabu. He couldn’t follow anything and wanted my help with the promise that he would share the stolen goods with me. As it happens with drugs, the stolen notes were much more potent than actual class notes.

I was never an original writer but having read a major part of the popular Bengali Literature (though mostly novels and short stories) I was able to follow most writings. I was completely mesmerized by Bankimbabu’s composition of Gandhi: Around 40% of it was quotes just from this particular poem ‘Shah Jahan’ by Rabindranath Tagore, and that time I had no idea of who wrote it.  I was completely taken by the rhythm and sheer power of the language. And the rest around 60% in prose was equally mind boggling. That part was penned by Bankimbabu but read more like a writing of the famous Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhaya, of ‘Durgeshnandini’ fame.

After a lot of struggle, I was able to decipher Bankimbabu’s Gandhi Essay. It was more like a critique of Gandhi. Bankimbabu compared Gandhi to the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, the builder of Taj Mahal, a showcase. Anyway,  I was able to provide the Class XI student with a watered down version of the notes (Lecture + Stolen) with instructions on how to memorize. He was so happy; he told me to keep all the notes. Thus, I didn’t have to make copies of anything.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just before the exam a senior from class XI approached me with lecture notes of Bankimbabu on Gandhi. Then he showed me some stolen goods on Gandhi, also written by BankimBabu.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the rainy season. I would be listening to the rain cascading down our corrugated tin-roof like numerous narrow streams, swinging on our veranda-hammock (called dolij dolna in our rural dialect) and memorizing the quotations – the whole exercise just mesmerized me! As for the Bengali Exam I just memorized a Gandhi essay from a notable textbook plus a few more as backup – because I was not so sure about the authenticity of my sister Rabina’s top-secret information.

Lo & behold! The Gandhi essay was in our Bengali exam questions*! The 3-hour paper was an easy one. The Gandhi essay part had 20 credits. In less than 2 hours I finished the rest 80 credits. I had more than an hour for Gandhi. And I took a great risk in not using the already-memorized-essay and decided to compose my own masterpiece. This was the first time in my life to compose anything close to original. My exam seat was next to the window and it was raining heavily. Rainwater was cascading down from the outer edges of the window and then flowing into the nearby paddy fields. Prose flowed spontaneously in my head to fill-up the spaces between quotes from Shah Jahan used by Bankimbabu. I was so absorbed in writing that I lost track of the time. Suddenly the final bell rang, and an invigilator came to snatch my paper. However, I vividly remember adding at the end of my essay, addressing Gandhi:

“তোমার কীর্তির চেয়ে তুমি যে মহৎ ,

তাই তব জীবনের রথ

পশ্চাতে ফেলিয়া যায় কীর্তিরে তোমার

বারম্বার।”

“You are greater than your achievements.

The chariot of your life

Leaves your achievements behind, time after time.”

(‘Balaka’, Rabindranath Tagore)

Epilogue 1: After the exam was followed by the Durga Puja holidays. I was passing by our School navigating a huge Puja crowd. Suddenly, I heard Bankimbabu was calling me. His school-boarding-room was just about 5-yards from the road. Such a call could be traumatic for any student.  Bankimbabu had a reputation of being ‘nasty’ to not-so-good-students (according to his definition) and acerbic, particularly to senior girls. I had seen how ‘badly’ he treated one of my own elder brothers, Amal Kumar Bera. Anyway, he took me to his room and asked me to sit down on his bed which was strewn with exam papers from many classes. 

He went straight to the crux of the matter: “How did you get hold of my notes?” I politely responded, “You gave it to Class XI students, and one of….” He stopped me and pulled out my paper…..started checking thoroughly. I think he wanted to find out something from the ‘stolen goods.’ Of course, there was none.  But he won’t give up. “Then what about the quotes? Did you cheat in the Exam hall?”  Then and there, I recited some parts of the poem I’d quoted. At last he was impressed. He told me, “You will get the highest score in the essay-part, all classes combined.”  After the Puja holidays, classes resumed and we got our exam papers back . Bankimbabu awarded me with a 19 out of 20!

Epilogue 2: You won’t believe, after more than a half a century, I concluded a co-authored essay on Dr. C. R. Rao (1920 –  ) for his Centennial Celebration. That essay, “Glimpses from the Life and Work of Dr. C.R. Rao: A Living Legend in Statistics,” is loved by many, and has already appeared (re-printed) in three publications.

*Rabina’s information about the ‘executive’ order to put Gandhi in all Exams was not implemented fully. For instance, Gandhi didn’t feature in our English (test) taught by Panchanan Maity Babu. Nor did he appear in both English & Bengali tests in Class X, of which another elder sister Lakshmi was a student. What bad luck she and her classmates had! Now I very much doubt there was such an ‘executive’ order from our Headmaster Bijoy Krishna Das. He was a perfect gentleman and kept politics aside while at school.

Disclaimer: I narrated the above purely from more than half a century old memory. It is quite possible that I have not recollected everything perfectly. My sincere apologies for that.

Letter from America

by Dr Anil K Bera

February 21, 2021

This writing is a metonymical translation of the article published in my school high school magazine’Choyon’ (চয়ন) in 1989.  On the 40th anniversary of my school Jalchak Nateswari Netaji Vidyayatan (JNNV), I was privileged to share my life’s story with my revered teachers, friends all my young juniors.  Thinking of my schooldays makes me nostalgic‒ those are the memorable days when our inner-world was small than our outer world.The conception of the external world was foggy and fuzzy. Even the textbook contents of Africa, America, Australia seemed like fairy tales of far-away lands. 

For us, those were just textbook materials — written for the sole purpose of memorizing and getting good grades. After the village high school JNNV I got admitted to the Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (RKMRC), Narendrapur located in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal to study B.Sc in Statistics. My small world started to expand. 

Choyon (চয়ন), 40th Anniversary school magazine cover of JNNV School

The college was located near Calcutta. It was the beginning of a very long journey from my village Paschimchak. A journey that was to take me from Paschimchak to Narendrapur, Calcutta, New Delhi, Canberra (Australia), Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Now, I have finally settled down in the twin-city of Urbana-Champaign (UC), Illinois, United States of America. This had been like the thousand-year wandering of poet Jibanananda Das wandering through the paths of the earth. However, at the day’s end, when darkness descends on UC, I routinely return to my school days — soon I always get back to my roots from where I had set forth on this long journey. 

    Jalchak Nateswari Netaji Vidyayatan (JNNV)

The school days always crowd my mind and compels me to return to my roots– even if it is only for a few days. On one such occasion, some of my former teachers dropped by my village home and invited me to write a small article to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the School JNNV (1949-1989). The article will appear in print in the school magazine ‘Choyon’. My livelihood is essentially in teaching and writing based on research. However, those writings (papers) don’t get published easily — the papers have to go through the scrutiny of the referees and editors beforehand. Now how can I decline an offer of writing a piece that will appear in print without much scrutiny? 

Around a few years ago, a charity single became very popular in the United States of America. The song, “We are the World……,” was written in aid of the famine-stricken people in Africa, epitomizes what the United States of America essentially is. It is a melting pot with people coming from all over the world.

The British were the first to arrive. Then came the French, Italians, Polish, Germans, Chinese, and so on. Some came to make money, some to escape the religious persecution in their countries, and yet some just for the sheer joy of adventure. The Statue of Liberty in New York is a symbol of freedom and an open invitation to the downtrodden of the world. Of course, not all arrived here voluntarily. Once upon a time ships full of people from Africa  were brought here in an inhuman way. They were bought and sold in open markets as slaves like any other commodity. Arrivals of newcomers are still continuing. More recently, scores of immigrants are arriving from Vietnam in large numbers

One can notice the whole world’s reflection in almost all spheres of life in the USA, especially, in colleges and universities. The percentage of domestic students in the postgraduate classes I teach won’t be more than 10%. Many of the professors, too, are from abroad. Scientists from all over the world are gradually migrating to the USA permanently for financial benefits and better work opportunities. Of course, some are also coming on a short-term basis. Our very own Rabindranath Tagore had spent some months in our provincial town. He also sent his own son Rathindranath Tagore to study Agricultural Science at UIUC.

Once upon a time in India, too, there were some world-renowned centers of higher learning. Scholars from far and wide used to gather at the educational institutes at Taxila and Nalanda. Alas, at the turn of the wheels of time, everything now has been turned around. 

What impresses me most here are the dignity of labor, the dutifulness of the workers and honesty in all spheres of life. In India, as I myself experienced, the dignity of labor is confined to textbooks only; however, here I observe the dignity of labor in reality. People here do not detest doing any kind of menial job. Many of the Ph. D. students take up part-time jobs in restaurants as waiters/waitresses and dishwashers. These jobs do have decent pay; thus, even a sweeper can afford to buy a TV set, a car, and own a house. Almost every worker is dedicated to his/her duties. It is rare to see people goofing off at work since people here, in general, choose professions according to their own desires and interests. 

At UIUC, we have a very distinguished scientist, John Bardeen, a twice Nobel Prize winner in Physics, once for inventing the transistor in 1956 and then in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity. He is now above 80 and retired for many years. However, he comes to work every day, and many times I had seen him in the library reading intensely as if preparing for an upcoming exam.

Here people do not stick to the same job for a long time‒ when a job becomes boring; they try to find another one that matches their current interests. Taking bribes and adulterating food, which are so common in India, are somewhat unheard of here. Very often, thoughts on India creep into my mind‒ why it is so underdeveloped and why it is so poor. Of course, a huge population size is one culprit.

However, I think, the main culprit is corruption. It has deeply penetrated every core of the society. Thus, very often, the genuine candidates do not get the jobs. In India, for getting a job, the most important thing is connection, not the candidate’s quality. Contrarily, in America, if one possesses certain skills, that will eventually be appreciated.

Many good things that I wrote above about the United States of America does not mean this is a perfect country‒ in fact, far from that. There are indeed many problems present here, for instance, unemployment, poverty, racism, and crime. 

However, there is a difference – if one really tries, he or she can overcome the problems given the opportunities available in this country. Maybe, that is the reason why people from all corners of the world crowd here. It is a joy to see faces of many colors in classes and to hear the sounds of different languages. I learn so much from such a variety of cultures, customs, practices, and rites. As I mingled with the students, gradually, I find my inner world has expanded considerably while the outer world has shrunk a lot.

                                 Remembering Prof. Atindra Mohan Goon                                                               

January 21, 2021

A tribute to the legendary Professor Atindra Mohan Goon (1931-2020), who passed away recently in Kolkata, by the world-renowned Econometrician Dr. Anil K. Bera. Like his predecessor, Dr. Bera is a torchbearer in this field whose name is now ingrained in all the Statistical software, with the famous Jarque-Bera Normality Test. Dr. Bera reminiscences his encounter with Prof Goon and how he looked up to him like thousands of other students and felt the camaraderie of being part of the Goon, Gupta Das Gupta circle.

Professor Atindra Mohan Goon does not need any introduction. Along with Milan Kumar Gupta and Bhagabat Dasgupta, Professor Goon has been an alumnus and teacher at the famous Presidency College of Kolkata. Goon, Gupta, and Dasgupta were not only PC Mahalanobis students; they were also founders of the subject along with him. The world of Indian statistics will always remember the trio as the creator of the first indigenous textbook of statistics – Fundamentals of Statistics. The two volumes of the book, adoringly referred to as “Goon, Gupta, and Das Gupta” by the students, are the foundation stone of India’s Statistics students to date. Those who attended his classes still consider themselves to be the fortunate ones.

Born in Barhatta village in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, he came to Presidency College in 1947 after passing the Matriculation Examination.

This tribute is from an outsider. I was neither a “direct” student of Professor Goon nor knew him personally. He was my teachers’ [Prasanta Kumar Giri and  Nanda Kishore Dey at the Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (RKMRC), Narendrapur] teacher — thus my Grand-teacher. I met him only twice. I will first recount those events and then say a few words on Professor Goon’s impact on generations of students of statistics not only from West Bengal but from all over India and beyond.  

In 1972 Professor Goon came to RKMRC for a seminar under an innovative educational effort by the government of West Bengal, India, called COSSIP. Now I don’t remember what COSSIP stood for. When I type it in Google, it returns, “Gossip Girl”! But I guess it stood for some Science Improvement Program in Colleges. Anyway, this was my very first seminar attendance in life. 

Professor Goon’s seminar topic was Demography, what we called Vital Statistics. His lecture involved lots of data analyses, tables, and graphs but surprisingly, I could follow all of it. He was such a wonderful speaker — soft-spoken & very methodical. After the talk was over Professor Giri invited questions from the audience. I was sitting in the last row. After such a delightful lecture, I thought there would be some questions/comments from the first row. To my disappointment, there was none. Suddenly I noticed my right-hand was up. Perhaps my hand thought such a beautiful talk shouldn’t end with silence. I heard a sweet voice, “Yes.” First I didn’t know what to ask. Then as if someone pushed a question to me, “Sir. You have analyzed so much data. But all with data from other countries. Why not any from India?” Even now I remember his very careful answer. It was all about “quality & reliability of data used in any statistical analysis.” 

Then after half an hour or so, I was called to the Department Office. I was really scared. But I was quickly relieved to know that the reason was Professor Goon wanted to meet the “Boy who asked the Question!”

Professor Goon’s seminar left a lasting impression on me. In our third year (1973) Professor P. K. Giri invited the students to give seminars under COSSIP. I used to suffer from severe stage-fright, still, I was first to take the challenge simply because I had the first-hand experience of the first-class seminar from Professor Goon. Following him, I also selected a topic from Vital Statistics. Now I don’t remember much about it. However, I remember this. Somewhere in my talk spontaneously I injected this English/Bengali (Benglish) sentence, “It is vital for us to remember that – ছোট পরিবার, সুখী পরিবার (a small family is a happy family)“ Mind you, this was Ramakrishna Mission; such dialogues were rarely uttered in public. However, the whole seminar room from the first to the last bench roared in laughter. That taught me, humor can be an integral and useful part of a talk. Even half a century later I am still trying to emulate Professor Goon in delivering a precise, pleasant and effective talk.   

The next meeting was much later before our BSc Part-II Exams. At RKMRC, Narendrapur we had a conspiracy theory– the Presidency College (where Professor Goon taught) Statistics Dept. students surely have some prior ideas about exam questions. Otherwise, it was unlikely that the First Class First in B.Sc Statistics hailed from the Presidency every year, year after year, without fail. We found out the Questions were set by the Calcutta University (CU) Post Graduate Statistics Department at Ballygunge. I was entrusted by my classmates to make a trip to the Science College. The idea was I would go with a set of selective past years’ questions and ask the Head of the Department (that time Professor Hari Kinkar Nandi), for suggestions. The Questions avoided by him were more likely to appear in the test. And the key was to focus on the changes in his facial expression while I showed him the Questions one by one. 

On an auspicious day I started very early in the morning from Narendrapur. Professor Nandi was nice to me but told me he does not “know” much about undergrad stuff; I should rather consult Professor Goon at Presidency. 

Those were my youthful days — when the mantra was to leave no stone unturned to achieve something. I forwent lunch, took a couple of buses and by early afternoon was in the corridors of the majestic building of Presidency College at College St. However, it was not easy to find Professor Goon. When I was wandering in the college corridor looking for him, a clerk pointed to the other end of the corridor, saying, “There He is….coming back from a class.” I could recognize him. Without a prompt, I walked up to him and said, 

— “I am coming from Hari Kinkar Babu.” 

It worked like magic! 

— “From Hari Kinkar Babu! Please do come inside.” 

By the way, Professor Goon was a former student of Professor Nandi.

Of course, I was a visitor from the “enemy” camp [though he didn’t know]. Professor Goon was very gracious and sat down with me in his office, patiently answering all the questions! But Alas! There were no changes in his facial expressions as he went from Question to Question! Thus I returned to Narendrapur empty-handed, to the utter disappointment of my classmates! 

Beyond these two incidents, Professor Goon’s lifelong impact on me was the books he co-authored with his long-time colleagues at Presidency, Professors Milan Kumar Gupta and Bhagabat Dasgupta. I still remember what caught my eyes most when I opened their Fundamental of Statistics, Volume One (FS1), for the first time in 1971 at RKMRC. On the second page almost at the top, it had these names

                     Atindra Mohan Goon, 1931-

                     Milan Kumar Gupta,   1932-

                     Bhagabat Dasgupta,   1933-

Legendaries Goon, Gupta, Das Gupta, The Holy Trio

Atindra Mohan Goon, Milan Kumar Gupta Bhagabat Dasgupta, the Holy Trinity[/caption]

I believed it was not just a random coincidence. To me, these three became essentially a Trinity. We also read An Outline of Statistical Theory, Volume One (OST1); however, at that time I found it difficult to crack. During our second year (1972) in college, we were introduced to the Fundamental of Statistics, Volume Two (FS2) for certain topics. Then finally in 1973, right on time for us came out the An Outline of Statistical Theory, Volume Two (OST2) that covered B.Sc Part II topics Estimation and Testing. During M.Stat at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), I could afford to buy all these four books, and since then they have been my constant companion. They traveled with me from Calcutta to Delhi (ISI) to Canberra, Australia (Australian National University) to Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (Universite Catholique de Louvain), and finally to Champaign-Urbana, U.S.A (the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Even now when I forget some basic things first I consult one of these four volumes. As you see these are now sandwiched between Cramer and Rao (two of the very best classics in Statistics) in my bookshelf.

Goon Gupta Das Gupta Text Books

Thus Goon, Gupta, and Dasgupta (GGD) remain the ‘meat’ of my Statistics training. At Narendrapur we had a buzz expression, “Is your funda clear?” ‘funda’ meaning understanding. After reading the GGD’s two volumes of Fundamentals thoroughly, we were all so very confident about our ‘funda’, sometimes, unnecessarily so.

This reminds me of an amusing story. We had a classmate who always was ahead of us and only wanted to talk about books like Cramer and Rao. When someone reminded him first to read GGD volumes, his response was that he had already done that a while ago. Instantly, our dear friend was given an honorary title, “Goon, Gupta and Dasgupta.”

I also used to see my ‘non-Statistics’ friends carry another GGD’s book, Basic Statistics (BS). They used to tell me that was the best book in Statistics they knew of. One can safely say that this Trilogy FS, OST, and BS by the Trinity GGD has been and will be for some time the essential companion of students of statistics not only in India but in some other countries too. Thus through this Trilogy, the influence of Trinity went a long way beyond the classrooms of the Presidency College and also far-flung into the future.

To conclude let me talk about an unusual book in Bengali, Sambhabnatatwa solely authored by Professor Goon. It is a 111-page gem. As far as I know, this is the only book on Probability Theory ever written in Bengali. The history of writing scientific books in Bengali goes all the way back to 1823 with the publication of 638-page-tome Byabocchedbidya (Anatomy) by Felix Carey, son of the legendary William Carey, from the Srirampur Missionary College. Thus the dearth of scientific books written in Bengali is really unfortunate.

সম্ভাবনাতত্ত্ব (Sambhabanatatwa, written in Bengali Prof. Goon

I should mention that while writing Sambhabanatatwa on such a technical topic, Professor Goon did not sacrifice the rigor at all. I am pretty sure; he himself invented some of the Bengali nomenclatures. After reading this little gem much later in my academic life, I was able to reinforce my own understanding of some very basic concepts. For instance, Professor Goon translated Hypergeometric Distribution as ‘অতিগুনোত্তর বিভাজন’; I would have never thought of translating Hyper to অতি; most possibly, I would have used more prosaic terms like অস্বাভাবিক or অত্যাধিক.

Made in Calcutta University – Memories of an Epic Oral Test

Made in Calcutta University - Memories of an Epic Oral Test

September 9, 2020

It was the middle of 1975. Those were well and truly the worst of times. The whole country was engulfed in Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency. Our undergraduate B.Sc Part-II Exams that was supposed to happen in mid-1974 were postponed to March 1975. I had no complaints though. It was in fact good for me. I didn’t have to worry about money for my postgraduate studies. At the Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (RKMRC) Narendrapur, I had to pay only Rs.20/- per month; even that remained unpaid over the years. But I paid back in kind by tutoring the Economics and Chemistry honours students in their Math pass paper. But pursuing postgraduate studies by paying out of my pocket was almost out of the question.

Welcoming the Chinese New Year with my class

Then I heard about the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) M.Stat program where full fellowship was available. Simply put, they were paying their students for studying! Beat that! But of course there was a catch; you had to pass the admission test, both written and oral.

Luckily, I cleared the written test. The oral test hurdle remained. But I badly needed the money. I had to send some home. That was all I could think of, as if getting into M.Stat was secondary.

I took the 80B bus from Narendrapur to Golpark, and then the luxurious L9 double-decker from Golpark to ISI stop. I was so nervous I couldn’t enjoy the bus journey even though I occupied the prized front-seat.   

The oral test was conducted in a mid-size room with a fan hovering overhead. I entered, my glance fixed to the floor and took my seat almost like a blind person, sweating profusely even though it was nice and cool inside compared to sweltering heat outdoors. I was afraid to look up, but could sense the presence of around half a dozen bodies in front of me.

Questions were hurled at me like rounds of bullet shots

“Are you ready, Mr. Bera?” asked the person in front of me. It was a very young non-Bengali voice; so young, he could be my classmate. Why they chose such a person as an interviewer, I wondered. And now he’s asking for my permission to start the interview? What’s going on? The body with the young voice cleared his young throat loudly sending me a clear signal to respond. I nodded my head violently, which could mean both “No” and “Yes.”

Q. “What is your favourite topic in Statistics?” Piece of cake I thought.

A. “Statistical Hypotheses Testing, Sir.” I wanted to be precise.

Questions were hurled at me like rounds of bullets on Testing to Test me. I’d just written my B.Sc Part-II Exams. We had a paper on Estimation & Testing. The young man didn’t know how hard I had prepared for it, given we had more than six-months before the Exam. I had memorized the material so much so that I could reproduce everything even backwards.

The interviewer then switched to Estimation.

Q. “What is the connection between Cramer-Rao inequality and Rao-Blackwell theorem?” 

I didn’t know the answer – it was not on our syllabus. I was worried. The hundred and fifty rupees ISI fellowship was drifting away from me. But suddenly I remembered a conversation between two professors I’d overheard in the corridors of RKMRC. I put the bits together as an answer

A. “Sir, to start with both the results are in a single paper by C R Rao.”

There was no response from the young shooter. However, a faint but authoritative voice from far side of the room said, “Yes, Mr. Bera: You are quite right.”

Thereafter came questions on probability theory. I did well on those. And then came math – calculus and algebra.

Q. “What is rank of a matrix?”

I had studied Matrix Algebra during the first year in 1971 and in those days all files were stored nicely in the actual ‘memory’ hardware. Thus, another piece of cake!

As soon as the question was uttered, I went on something like this:

A. “A rank of a matrix is said to be r if it’s all minors above r vanish but there is at least one minor of order-r that is not zero.”

“Yes!” agreed the young professor.

However, I could again hear the same thin voice but this time more resolute. I panicked. The voice said,

 “Mr. Bera. You are right. However, I must add within quotes, that this definition is ‘Made in Calcutta University.”

No sooner had he finished, the whole room burst into laughter. I didn’t understand the comment but it sounded like a big joke. It also appeared to me that amongst this laughter they can’t fail me now. I stopped sweating. At last I could feel the cool breeze from the ceiling fan overhead; until now I could only hear its whirling noise.

The burden on my shoulders had lightened. A hundred and fifty rupees were in my pocket; well almost. I made a quick accounting exercise. During the first month I will keep most of the money for myself and the rest only Rupees forty five would go home.

People were in a merry mood. They were still laughing, thus sealing my ISI-Fellowship, I felt. But they had almost forgotten my presence there.

I lift my head high for the first time and try looking at the half dozen faces. Faces of so far invisible gods. The young professor didn’t look intimidating at all. I noticed he had a beautiful smile as he said to me, ”Mr. Bera, you can go now, but please wait outside.” 

Now, it is my turn to hurl questions at all my ISI friends reading this.

1. Who was this young professor? And,

2. Who was the man with the thin voice?

Leave your comments in the box below. Let’s see how many of you remember them.

Nobel Laureate in Search of the Bera Integral

by Dr Anil K Bera

July 30, 2020

Some years back from now, I was in my office, engrossed in my work. Then there was a knock on my office door, and like any regular day, I expected a graduate student and shouted out, “come in,” finishing the sentence that I was in the middle of it. My head was still bent over the book even after the person entered the room – I always want to look busy, don’t I? (Grin)

By then, my guest wanted to make me aware of his presence by clearing an old throat – indeed, I realized it’s not a grad student. I looked up, and to my complete revelation, my eyes in utter surprise, I see Prof. Jim Heckman! Not any other Jim, but the one and only Nobel Laureate, the famous economist Jim Heckman from the University of Chicago.

I almost jumped from my seat, gathering myself, I offered him a chair to sit down. I told him, I was surprised because I was not aware that he was visiting Urbana-Champaign, or else I could have met him myself. Jim then mentioned that the Labor Institute had invited him for a seminar. I realized the information did not reach the Economics Department. Whatever be it, it was indeed a pleasant surprise to have Jim in my office. After a few casual exchanges about our whereabouts, he reached in his pocket, pulled his wallet out, took out an aged piece of paper, almost falling apart, and carefully set it on my table as if he was about to show a magic trick.

Prof Jim Heckman and the history of the Bera connection:

I knew of Jim for a very long time. Although I did not meet him in person, I was well familiar with his work in Econometrics as a student at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Delhi Centre, in the mid-seventies. Our Econometrics Professor V. K. Chetty mentioned quite a few times about Prof. Jim Heckman during our classes. Professor V. K. Chetty used to revel in saying that he and the famous econometrician Jim Heckman were very close as colleagues at Columbia University, New York. He proudly mentioned that he helped Jim Heckman writing a few papers too. We thought, “That’s impressive!” because, by then, Prof Chetty had already moved on from econometrics.

Prof Jim Heckman at present, in Bera’s office:

Fast forward a couple of decades, now, back to reality. Prof Heckman was sitting right there across me, in my office. I started framing some serious econometrics problems to have a decent conversation with this great mind. Previously, as an Econometrics faculty myself, I have attended conferences where he was present, and I have joined his keynote speeches as an audience. I remembered once he had insisted on presenting a hundred and fifty-some slides at “an After Dinner Talk.” I would call Jim a ‘super-serious-research-person.’

Interestingly, I didn’t have to think hard to generate any critical econometric problems that afternoon. Jim was in no mood for econometrics. He was relaxed, in a lighter mood with a casual tone. Like a magician, he pulled out a worn-out thick piece of paper from his wallet and tried to spread it on my table, as if getting ready for a trick. It was frayed, crumbling. He instructed me to pick it up and look at it carefully. Like a subject, following the instructions, I carefully lifted it from the table with my two hands – the piece was almost breaking along the folded ridges. 

“Do you recognize it?” Jim asked. Almost in a trance, I said, “Yes, I do,” I recognized it from the remains of the ISI banyan-tree logo!

In a flash, my memory reverted to my Junior Research Fellow (JRF) days at ISI-D during 1977-79. Those were the days, almost feels like from the dinosaur period when we didn’t have a photocopying machine. The only way to have a copy of a published research paper was by copying it by hand or taking advantage of a marvelous ISI service for the students that allowed them to request reprints from the journals directly via mail service.

We had to send a post-card bearing the ISI logo to the professors directly, with plenty of space for the title(s) of paper(s) and a spot for signature. 

Jim had some path-breaking research on sample selection, which I did request. He always promptly sent me the journal papers via mail. Along with the requested ones, he kept sending his Discussion Papers to me for many years to my ISI address. ISI then graciously forwarded them to my new address at the Australian National University (ANU), where I moved in 1979 for my doctoral study. I was overwhelmed by his generosity, though I never tried to figure out why? I thought of Professor Heckman as a beautiful mind!

My magician asked me, “Look carefully! Do you see anything?” I didn’t see anything remarkable, though I could decipher the worn-out titles of his papers. “Look at the bottom!” Yes, I could see almost half of the integral of my signature that I adopted soon after learning integral calculus in the first-year math class in 1971. I was an undergraduate at the Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (RKMRC), Narendrapur. I think this remains my best application of integral calculus that I learned at RKMRC. 

Jim was delighted. Finally, after all these years, his search for the Bera Integral was over! He found the solution. 

Ever since he had seen this Bera Integral signature, he was enchanted and wanted to find him. Since 1978 he was carrying the reprint-request card in his wallet to find the solution. Whenever he met, any economist from India showed her/him the card and inquired whether she/he knew me. 

Many said yes! So he knew the solution existed, but he needed to arrive at it himself. 

QED. The Nobel Laureate solved The Bera Integral with sheer persistence, after trying for over two decades. 

Message to All: Never underestimate the persistence of a great mind.

It stands for A. K. Bera and the idea is, everything must have its limit, both upper and lower

Cosmo Connections, May 2006

Cosmopolitan Club, Tagores, and UIUC:

A Brief History of 100 years

by Anil K. Bera

This photo was taken at the house of Professor and Mrs. Seymour, 909 W. Nevada St., Urbana, after a Christmas party on December 25, 1916. This was during Rabindranath’s second visit to Urbana-Champaign. Professor Seymour is in the back row (standing), fourth from the right. Mrs. Seymour is in the front row (sitting), fourth from the left, next to Rabindranath. Two children in front are Lawrence and Lois Seymour.

In April 1983, I was invited for a campus job interview at the University of Illinois. That time I was working in Belgium. My flight was from Brussels to Chicago was already two hours late. When I went to the Ozark Airlines counter, I was told to go straight to the gate and get a seat assignment. I had a definite seat preference: a window seat in non-smoking section. When I asked for that, the lady at the departure gate gave me a sharp look and said, “All seats are window seats and all are non-smoking.”

Growing up in a remote village in India, I marveled at North American technological advancement. Assuming that I already missed my scheduled flight, I asked about the next flight to the Champaign. I was told, my plane had been waiting for me down the stairs for the last couple of hours; all I had to do was knock at the door. That was the tiniest passenger plane I had ever seen. It was a stormy April evening. There were only half a dozen passengers, and we had to shuffle a few times to keep the plane balanced.

Anyway, we landed at Willard Airport safe and sound. A future colleague received me and on our way from the airport, he proudly stated that Willard was the University’s own airport and explained the barren fields on the two sides of Neil Street as the most fertile land in the world. He added that my accommodation had been fixed at the tallest building in town, the University Inn on John Street. I was also put at the top floor of the hotel so that I could also get a good view of the town.

After dinner, I went to my hotel room and pulled the curtain to have a view. The narrow John Street was dark and deserted. The only sign of life was a colorful signboard flickering in the dim street light. It read, “Cosmopolitan Club.” Next day I dropped by the club, and met some wonderful students. That was my first introduction to Urbana-Champaign outside the department where I joined in the Fall of 1983. During the 1980s I became more familiar with the Cosmopolitan Club, and over the years my initial impression turned into great admiration for this great institution. Therefore, Cosmopolitan Club has a very special place in my heart.

Let me now get back to the topic and begin at the beginning—100 years ago—Fall semester 1906. A student from India encountered a quad preacher who was popularly known as Billy Sunday. The student was shocked to hear Billy Sunday’s very unkind remarks about other religions. The student did not have enough courage to challenge Billy Sunday on the spot. To fulfill his civic duty, he sent a mild protest letter to the student newspaper, the Daily Illini. It had the effect of throwing a stone at a beehive. The student was assailed from all quarters. Quite frightened, he almost decided to pack up and go back to India. And then there appeared a strong editorial in the Daily Illini, supporting the Indian student’s view and his every right to express it. And that saved the day.

Many of you would know that (assistant) editor of the Daily Illini; he was Carl Van Doren (1885-1950), a senior year student at the University of Illinois. Later, he became one of the most famous literary critics. He was literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922), Century Magazine (1922-1925), The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-1922), The Literary Guild (1926-1934) and Columbia Encyclopedia. And the Indian student was Rathindranath Tagore. I will simply call him, Rathi. He is one of the two Tagores I’ll talk about. The other is Rathi’s famous father, Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet, writer, painter, and educational reformer. I will talk much less about the senior Tagore. He is quite well known at least in this town through the annual Tagore Festival.

These two students—Carl Van Doren and Rathi Tagore—epitomize what the University of Illinois stands for. Carl Van Doren was born in a small town called Hope, near Danville, just a few miles from here. Rathi Tagore came from Calcutta, the then Capital of India, and the second largest city (after London) under the British Empire, 10,000 miles away.

But why did Rathi come all the way to a then-provincial town for higher studies? During the early part of the last century it was not common for Indian students to come to the United States. They would rather go to England to study law or to sit for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) Examination for a lucrative job under the British Raj.

Chance played a big role in his coming to the University of Illinois. An Indian charitable organization planned to send some students to the United States to study science and industry. Rabindranath Tagore asked his son Rathi and Santosh Majumdar, son of a friend of his, to join the students, and study at an American University which provided training in agriculture. Rabindranath was convinced that to uplift the rural India, adoption of technology, and scientific methods in agriculture were essential. Rathi and Santosh secured a letter of introduction to a professor at Berkeley.

All the students had to come through Japan, where they were screened by American doctors. Thousands of young Asians were queuing up to come to the United States. The health checkup was very quick. Rathi was eliminated on reason of an eye disease. He then went to a Japanese eye specialist and explained his problem. The Japanese doctor laughed and said he would give him a prescription not for his eye because there was nothing wrong, but how to pass the health checkup. He said it was purely a “law of large number.” The American doctor was screening so many people everyday, he would not remember anybody. The eye doctor advised Rathi to stand in the queue again and again. Rathi got approved on the third day.

Rathi and Santosh had third-class tickets in a passenger ship—twenty-eight people herded together in a cabin, lined with five tiers of bunks. The ship arrived in San Francisco in the morning of the fateful day of April 18, 1906—the day the great earthquake and fire devastated the city. From the ship dock they saw the charred remains of a few skyscrapers and the thick black clouds of smoke. That was the first glimpse Rathi and Santosh got of the United States.

The solitary letter of introduction for a Berkeley professor was now useless—since that campus was destroyed too. Then somebody told them there was a good agricultural college at the University of Illinois. They knew about the big city Chicago, and thought the University could not be that far from it. Of course, it was not “near” either. They took a train from Chicago to Champaign. Before that, they had a inspired thought: they sent a telegraph to the Secretary of the YMCA, Mr. J.H. Miner, to ask him to receive them at the Champaign station. They congratulated themselves on such an inspiration, but nobody was waiting for them at the station. After a few days Rathi and Santosh met Mr. Miner and discovered that the telegraph had been changed to “Two students from Indiana.” The lady at the Chicago telegraph office made the correction herself, doubting the existence of any place called “India.” Indiana being the neighboring state, Mr. Miner did not bother to receive the two students.

In 1906, there were only a handful of foreign students in the United States, mostly from China, Russia, the Philippines, and Mexico. Many of them did not feel very comfortable—their fellow American students being either too indifferent or too inquisitive. There were less than 100 students from India in the whole of the United States. All the Indian students were called “Hindus,” irrespective of their religion, to differentiate them from Native American Indians.

Let me here mention the role of YMCA. Large numbers of foreign students came from Asia, particularly from China due in no small degree to the missionaries who attended the University of Illinois and belonged to the University YMCA. The very first student from India to the United States, Joguth Chunder Gangooly was sent by the Unitarian Missionary, Reverend Charles Dall from Calcutta. Gangooly arrived Boston on May 24, 1858, almost 150 years back. After a few years of study, Gangooly was ordained as a minister of the New England Unitarian Church.

When Rathi and Santosh arrived in the University of Illinois Campus in April of 1906, there was already another student, possibly the very first student from India to study here. He was Sudhindranath Bose who arrived Urbana-Champaign on May 2, 1904.

Rathi, with the help of Santosh and Sudhin, got a few more foreign students together and started this Cosmopolitan Club. Assistance came from many quarters, especially from Professor Arthur Seymour. He was a professor of Romance Languages and an advisor to foreign students. There was also a lot of help from his wife, Mrs. Mayce Seymour. Sudhindranath Bose was the first Secretary, Rathi Tagore, the President, and Professor Seymour, the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

All the publications I have seen on the Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois mention 1907 as the founding year. Let me humbly say that is not right. I have a precise date: October 28, 1906. That was the day the club was organized. My main reference for this is a 1908 article published in the Bengali magazine Prabasi(meaning foreigner), written by Nagendranath Gangooly, another Indian student who joined the University of Illinois in 1907 and who was also a son-in-law of Rabindranath Tagore. Nagendranath also took an active part in the Club and was elected its Assistant Treasurer in 1908.

The first Cosmopolitan Club on an American University campus was formed in Madison, Wisconsin, March 1903. Then came Cornell in November 1904. The next one was established in Michigan, January 1906. After that came Illinois, October 1906, then Purdue, September 1907, and so on. The year 1907 is often believed to be the originating year because in that year, the Association of the Cosmopolitan Clubs was founded and the Illinois Chapter joined the association. If indeed 1906 is the founding year, that calls for a centennial celebration this year!

One may wonder why Rathi and Santosh undertook the task of establishing the Cosmopolitan Club. There were already quite a few fraternities on campus. A fraternity brings together men with similar ideals, tastes, and social background. The Cosmopolitan Club brings together people of different nationalities, political ideas, and religions. Rathi and Santosh were among the first batch of students from the experimental school that Rabindranath Tagore established in 1901 at Santiniketan, India. Rabindranath gave a different dimension to nationality by arguing for universal humanity. In a poem in Gitanjali, Tagore expresses, in a beautiful way, his generous tribute to the West and the contributions the East can make:

The West has today opened its door 

There are treasures for us to take 

We will take, and we will also give.

I am sure that, imbued with his father’s ideas of national unity, world embracing universality, and international brotherhood, Rathi set out to organize the Cosmopolitan Club with the help of other foreign students and Professor and Mrs. Seymour. When foreign students come here, they are not here merely to get degrees; they come with different languages, cultures, customs, and views. As Rabindranath Tagore said, they are here to receive and as well as to give. The Cosmopolitan Annual (1909) had an article, “American and the Foreigner”—it ended with: “It is incredible to think that Americans see men with such diversities of life, creed and customs in their midst without taking advantage of the opportunity to learn something about them, to form a firsthand opinion, and to broaden their minds and views.” In fact, the situation changed very rapidly. So many domestic students wanted to join the Cosmopolitan Clubs that at many places their quotas were limited to 20% of total membership.

A few other important things happened here in 1906. That same year, a small group of University of Illinois faculty members were engaged in organizing the Unitarian Church on campus. Foremost among them were Professor and Mrs. Stephen Forbes. In fact, Mrs. Seymour met Rathi and Santosh at an informal Unitarian reception that Mrs. Forbes organized. In September 1906 the American Unitarian Association sent a young and gifted graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, the Reverend Albert R. Vail, to become the first minister of the newly formed Unitarian Church of Urbana. Reverend Vail personally invited Rathi and Santosh and a few other foreign students to his religious sessions, which included reading from the Koran, the Buddhist Sutras, and Hindu texts. Rathi also acted as a student-pastor at the Unitarian Church.

Through Rathi and Santosh, Revered Vail, Professor and Mrs. Seymour, and some others in Urbana-Champaign came to know about the great literary works of Rabindranath Tagore. A small group of people from the newly established Cosmopolitan Club and Unitarian Church started meeting every week at the home of Mrs. Mary Kelley to discuss religious matters and Rabindranath Tagore’s work. Thus an informal club, called the Tagore Circle was born. This was long before Rabindranath Tagore himself arrived here on November 1, 1912. To introduce the poet, then quite unknown in the United States, Leslie Carrol Barber, a student at the University of Illinois wrote an article, “Rabindra Nath Tagore” in the December 1912 issue of The Cosmopolitan Student, a publication of the Cosmopolitan Club. And Mayce Seymour published a translation of poet’s three poems along with a photo and a short biography of him in the Illinois Magazine (December 1912), then a monthly publication by undergraduates of the University of Illinois. I think, this is the first publication of Tagore’s poems in any western media, and in which our town and the University can justifiably take pride. During his stay in Urbana, Rabindranath gladly read many of his Gitanjali poems at the Tagore Circle meetings. The audience deeply appreciated the beauty of his poetry and nobility of his character.

The very first week Rabindranath was in Urbana in November 1912, Reverend Vail invited him to speak at his church on Upanishads. At first Rabindranath declined the invitation since he came to this quiet town mainly to take rest after hectic days in London. However, when he found out that a student from India who knew very little about Upanishad was ready to volunteer, to fulfill his sacred duty to the ancient sages of India, Rabindranath agreed to give the talk. On Sunday, November 10, he gave his first public address in the United States at the Unitarian Church of Urbana, at the corner of Oregon and Mathews. The talk was very well received, and at public demand he also spoke at the church on November 17 and 24. The church community befriended the poet throughout his stay in the University Community. Today, many of you know this Chapel as the Channing-Murray Foundation where we celebrate the Tagore Festival each October.

On March 19, 1913, the day before Rabindranath left Urbana, the Cosmopolitan Club organized a farewell party where he read an essay. Reverend Albert Vial missed that and on April 1, 1913 in a letter to the poet he “complained” that “It has been one of my great regrets that no one informed me of your reading at the Cosmopolitan Club just before you left, for I was eagerly hoping I might hear that paper. But they say the meeting was arranged on very short notice.” This says a lot about how much Rabindranath became popular in the Urbana-Champaign community. During his several trips to the United States, the poet traveled widely. But, as Harold Hurwitz (1961) stated, “of all the American cities that Tagore visited during his trips to the United States, in none did he stay longer or make more friends than he did in Urbana, Illinois.”

1906 is indeed a very auspicious year—with the establishment of the Cosmopolitan Club (and, related, the beginning of the Unitarian Church and the formation of the Tagore Circle). These institutions, along with YMCA and YWCA, have welcomed the foreign students at this University, and enriched the culture of Champaign-Urbana.

Few of the Cosmopolitan Clubs survived the 20th century. Other than this one, I know of only two: one at the University of Colorado at Boulder, founded in 1924; and the other at the University of Delaware, started only about 35 years ago. Some have changed names, for example, the Cosmopolitan Club at the Southern Oregon University is now called the International Student Association.

We are so lucky that the Cosmopolitan Club here at the University of Illinois not only survived but also flourished over the century. Over the years the club has made an immense contribution to the spiritual and intellectual culture in Urbana- Champaign, with its already existing superb “agriculture.” Let us all hope, that a hundred years from now, the Club will still be embodying its evergreen motto: “Above all Nations is Humanity.”

References

Cosmopolitan Annual (1909), Published for the Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs by the Wisconsin International Club, Madison.

Rathindranath Tagore (1958), On the Edges of Time, Orient Longmans, Calcutta.

Mayce Seymour (1959), “The Golden Time”, Visva-Bharati Quarterly.

Harold Hurwitz (1961), “Rabindranath Tagore in Urbana”, Indian Literature.

Harold Hannah (1973), One Hundred Years of Action: The University of Illinois YMCA 1873-1973.

Ingrid Kallick (1992), “Tagore and the Urbana Unitarians 1906-1921”, in Rabindranath Tagore for the 21 st Century, Tagore Center, Urbana.

Prasantakumar Pal (1993), Rabijeebani, Volume 6, Ananda Publishers, Calcutta.