O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!

Last evening (7 Feb., 2008), I was intimated of the demise of a gentleman, a Mr. Koteshwara Rao in Hyderabad. He is survived by his wife, and had no issues.

However, no words can express the loss experienced by 'his children', myself being one among those. And most certainly, the article to describe the man ought to be 'The'.

I was one among the many fortunate ones to have had him as a teacher. In our student lives during classes 11 and 12, anyone and everyone considering the prospects of an IIT education was invariably attracted to the buzzword -"Ramaih". When I first joined 'the institute', the buzz word amongst the students before the first day of classes was Koteshwara Rao - Koti for short.

The word 'Koti' refers to 'one crore' - 10 million. But men like Koti are fewer than that; he is one in hundreds of millions.
To us, Koti was not just a man; nay, he represented to us a certain way of thinking, expressing, and feeling. Above all, he breathed math like we wanted to. The passion for math that he exuded was what drove us to the institute at odd hours, or made even 2 hour lectures seem a short time while he was in flow. His meticulous approach to drilling certain notions into our heads (which might also involve a little thrashing if need be!) has had an everlasting effect. My parents and sisters were in awe of the man simply because I couldn't stop talking about him once I got back home from the institute. How wonderfully, one man could influence a young kid! I was forever waiting for his next class, the next lesson, his sermon...

And the man did teaching like no one else I have seen in all these years. To date, he has been the best teacher I have ever had, and I doubt if that is ever going to change. His teaching was sublime, the material profound, and yet, he was talking to mere teenagers and holding their rapt attention for hours on end!

Koti had a wonderful sense of humor, and was wonderfully well versed in English and Telugu. His sarcasm laden taunts kept us in splits during class, and yet, the moment he got serious, we would be terrified. Not because his words stung; it was because a scolding from him isolated us from him, mentally. And no student of Koti, who wore that badge proudly ever wanted that. The thought of alienating him was petrifying.

While the man was extremely simple, and humble, his act in class made it super cool to be a math person. Quoting something he said on many an occasion, " A mathematician has the right to be arrogant!" And there was that definite swagger in his attitude to problem solving, something only he could pull off so beautifully. To us, there was no problem beyond the man. There had been several occasions when he would stop a very involved discussion mid-sentence saying, "But this is for mathematicians, not mere IIT scholars!!", and that had led me to the strong belief that a math degree is what I had to do; I wanted to pursue math even while I was in high school, but Koti's influence on me clinched the deal.

While my own fortunes with the IIT were not satisfactory, I did join the ISI, and that has led me to where I am today, culminating in what I always wanted to do. Koti's influence on me has had no mean share in all of this.

I personally believe my teaching is modeled heavily on his own style. Why, I guess even the twirls in my cursive handwriting are most likely influenced by his beautiful, artistic strokes on the board. And I am not the only such; there are hundred of us.

Alas, there are only hundreds of us, and only hundreds will it remain. One of my deepest regrets is that I couldn't make a visit to see him one last time. He might have been very happy to meet me. As he would have been on meeting with any of his students.

No amount of my writing here can describe his achievements, even describe his influence on me fully. When I got the news of his demise yesterday, I secretly hoped this was a rumor (there had been one a little while ago just before he underwent a major bypass surgery). I was even hoping all this would be debunked and that we could all get back to our mundane lives. But that was not to be; the news report in Eenadu with a few pictures confirmed the worst.

The lump in my throat is probably accentuated by the fact that I can never see him again and thank him for all that he has done in shaping my personality. My salutations to the great man. You Sir, are the only one of your kind.