How Mahalanobis tried to ruin Swamy

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How Mahalanobis tried to ruin Swamy

by MulaiAzhagi Sat Feb 11, 2012 8:35 pm

It has been my lot throughout my life to be confronted and to confront the corrupt and powerful. As a student for my Masters degree in the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Calcutta, the then Chairman, P.C.Mahalanobis took a dislike to me because he and my father were rivals in the government statistical organisation. Mahalanobis was a corrupt leftist. I had come to the ISI as an innocent student with a brilliant first class B.A. Honours degree in mathematics. But Mahalanobis' dislike of me filtered down to the professors. For no reason except to please him, they began failing me in every subject. A ruined career stared me in the face. So I decided to retaliate ( a foolish resolve on first thought, since I was then a 19 year old student facing the darling of the Left, USSR and Nehru: P.C.Mahalanobis). But I dropped everything, parked myself in the library, and read whatever Mahalanobis had written as a scholar. I found that his celebrated Second Five Year Plan model, the so-called Mahalanobis model, was actually stolen from M.A.Feldman, an obscure Soviet economist of the 1930s. This discovery I could not use against Mahalanobis however, because neither the USSR nor the then docile Indian press would take notice. But I discovered that Mahalanobis’s magnum opus something called 'Fractile Analysis', had recently been published in a scholarly international journal. That research was, I found worthless when scrutinized under the microscope of modern mathematics. It was, literally, well-known earlier research re-hashed. Mathematics laid bare the plagiarism. Mahalanobis was too big to be challenged by other Indian scholars. But I had nothing to lose.

Naturally when I wrote out my critique and set it to the journal, it was hot stuff. The journal published it, and asked Mahalanobis for a rejoinder. He had none. His reputation abroad was therefore in tatters. He never recovered from it. A 19 year old writing out complex mathematical equations was a novelty for Harvard's Economics Department to whose notice the journal article came. They offered me a scholarship for a Ph.D Course. My ruined career prospects did a 180 turn! I never looked back thereafter. Had I not been cornered like a cat, I would never have ventured to demolish Mahalanobis.

MulaiAzhagi: Posts : 1254
Join date : 2011-12-20