… See, he has written a tremendous number of books and continuously through his life, right up to the, right up to last year. I think I know how that sequence started.
Because as someone else mentioned, there were these 10-day intensive courses, the number of participants in each course was actually 75. So if you multiply 75 by about 25 or so courses that totally ran in that decade, then you can guess how many people's lives he touched, how many people in the country he introduced to computers. Initially, the first course may have been run by the visiting Americans, but the notes for that course, there used to be 10 lectures each on numerical methods, on FORTRAN and on computer organizations.
And the notes were all by Raja Raman. He would have them cyclostrate that – the technology of those days– and distributed to these students. Prentice Hall, India was reprinting books by American, from their American principals and selling them much cheaper in India.
But they came scouting for original Indian content. And these three books, numerical methods, computer organization and FORTRAN, the notes were so good after a few runs of that course. Because in every course, those notes would be distributed and I am sure Raja Raman was looking at the response and cleaning them up whenever, wherever they were unclear or whatever.
By about half a dozen courses, the notes were beautiful, as good as a book. Prentice Hall, India–Ashok Ghosh, in those days– said he wanted to print those. But Raja Raman would not hear of getting a typeset and then proofreading and all that stuff.
He said, “No, just photocopy these notes. They may not look beautiful, but it will come out quickly and we need these books yesterday.” So that's how his book started.
Those people who have seen his early books would remember that they are all in typewriter font, equal spacing font. That's because of the technological limitations. He would not have, it was before DTP.
So that gave us speed and that gave us error freeness. If other people who have seen books of those days will remember that every book came with an erratum, a list of errors in the print and the correct version. That was either the second page in the book or if it was added after the binding, then it was pasted at the beginning of the book.
And about 10-20 errors in normal book size book were very common. But because of this technological leap that Raja Raman initiated, these books were error free, no erratum, very readily available to the students and he was extremely conscious about the cost of the book. There were several occasions when Ashok said “this book is becoming very popular. Let's jack up the price.” He said “no, because I want my books to be affordable. That's rule number one.”
So what Prentice Hall, of course, later on the technology improved and my book with him programming in COBOL is half and half. The programming examples were reproduced from computer printouts, but the rest of the text was nicely formatted.
I'll tell you a story to end my memories.I'll tell you a story which sort of encapsulates his open and simple personality. We were attending a party in Dr. Narsinghdev's house and his own book on computational graph theory had just come. So that book was going around among the guests in that party.
It came to Raja Raman's hands. He looked at the book and he complimented Narsinghdev, “Narsinghdev, this book looks very nice.”
It looks like a real book, he said, sort of making fun of his own early books. Now, how many people will do that? I hope that his memories continue. I hope that we all continue to learn from him even after he has left the body.
And I pray to God that his legacy continues to guide us further. Thank you very much.
