Atanu’s response: Yes, it is worth pondering. I take to heart Rabindranath Tagore’s prayer which includes the lines about living in a world which “has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls . . . ” Yes, they — Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, etc — lived in a different part of the world and at a different time. They and everyone else who lived before us are part of our collective heritage. My admiration for Shakespeare’s genius does not diminish my admiration for Kalidas’s work. When the need arises, I will take Kalidas’s words as readily as I will Shakespeare’s. That European children don’t have access to Kalidas is their loss and I hope that someday they will be so fortunate.

Why is it not so unbelievable that all these brilliant men might have done miserably at school? simply because they were brilliant at something! not at everything!

Atanu’s response: It is unbelievable because it is not true. Brilliant people are brilliant all throughout their lives. Every now and then, however, they are not recognised by mere mortals as being brilliant. That others are slow to recognise their genius does not mean that they were not brilliant all along.

After Einstein developed his special relativity, he needed to learn differential geometry for developing his ideas on gravity in the general theory. He was at Gottingen at that time and he says even the school kids there knew more about differential geometry than him.

Atanu’s response: I consider Einstein to be an intuitive genius. He figured out the reality of the world first and only then learnt later in some instances how to express his insights in mathematical language. For that he had to learn the mathematics. The important point is that mathematics comes later; the insights precede the expression in a compact form.

Atanu’s response: Yes, it appears that Edison when he was in school was considered a bit slow.