Reflections

                                    The lion in winter: Grothendieck in old age  Mathematicians and theoretical physicists fascinate me. This is because, I can imagine myself, if I work hard enough, sometime solving a biological conundrum, or evaluating a chemical compound. But the idea of sitting with a piece of paper and pencil and calculating away for days or months or years and then coming up with a proof of an esoteric mathematical problem, or a theory to explain an observation made in deep space seems to me to be more like magic. Anybody who can do this, in my opinion is made of stuff that I cannot even imagine, let alone ever to hope to emulate. There are several such mathematicians. One of them passed away last November. I refer to Alexander Grothendieck who passed away on the 13 th of last month. Grothendieck was the mathematician par excellence. He embodied all that is mysterious and unknowable about these “beautiful minds” as somebody picturesquely described anoth

Artist's impression of Susrutha doing an operation Stones in the urinary tract have been a part of life for humans for all of recorded history. The earliest treatments for the condition originated in India when Susrutha, the undisputed father of Plastic Surgery described a method of lithotomy of cutting for stone. There is some dispute about when exactly Susrutha lived. There are some over patriotic Indian authors who believe that he lived around 3000 B C. Colonial historians who were reluctant to believe that everything did not originate in the West or near about placed him at the end of the first millennium in the Common Era. However most sober scholars place him at about 600 BC which makes him roughly contemporaneous (give or take a century of two), with the Buddha and Mahavira. Susrutha described perineal lithotomy. This method was described in Ashmari Chikitsa (roughly translated as Management of vesical stones). The method has been described as follows: “First, the