Samir Ranjan Das and the Visual Mind

Acronyms used: PhD means Doctor of Philosophy, the highest research degree in most academic systems. US means United States. OPNET was a network simulation and modeling tool. AI means Artificial Intelligence. SUNY means State University of New York. WINGS means Wireless Networking and Systems Lab. RFC means Request for Comments, the publication series used for Internet standards and related technical documents. NSF means National Science Foundation. ACM means Association for Computing Machinery. IEEE means Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The memory arrived with the dry smell of an old diagram.

Not with ceremony. Memory rarely respects protocol. It comes through a line on a screen, a box connected to another box, a graph that suddenly brings back a room, a decade, and a younger version of oneself trying to look less lost than he was.

Yesterday, for no grand reason I can defend, I remembered Dr. Samir Ranjan Das.

Samirda was my PhD advisor. At one time he was my go-to person, not in the thin modern sense in which people say “mentor” after two messages and one webinar, but in the older, weightier sense: a serious mind nearby. A mind one could turn toward when one’s own thoughts were still trying to arrange themselves in a foreign country.

I still respect him deeply.

That is not casual. After fifty, respect becomes difficult to give. Too many public announcements have revealed the cardboard behind the painted backdrop. Too many clever men have turned out to be only fast talkers with good stationery. Respect becomes like good fish left in the market late in the evening: rare, inspected carefully under a tired bulb, and bought only if the hand and eye still trust each other.

Samirda lives in the US.

I am glad he does.

A Bengali saying this may sound like treason, because we have trained ourselves to perform longing for return. Come back, we say. Come back and serve Bengal, serve India, serve the old soil, the old language, the sentimental geography. Come back, eat muri, discuss culture, and then spend productive years being delayed by a clerk, flattened by committee politics, and rained upon by a ceiling that nobody with authority will repair.

Bengal has always produced brilliance. It has also perfected the art of making brilliance feel useful only after it is safely framed, garlanded, and unable to ask for laboratory funding.

There should be a public register somewhere near Howrah Station, perhaps beside the tea stalls where people still argue as if civilization depends on yesterday’s newspaper. It should list the departures. This many toppers left. This many researchers left. This many teachers left. This many returned and were worn down by family duty, office politics, municipal decay, and the splendid Indian creature who discovers procedure and mistakes obstruction for importance.

No such register exists.

So the bleeding continues without accounting.

I went to Samirda in 1998 as a PhD candidate. His field was mobile wireless communication. I will confess, respectfully, that the subject did not set fire to my inner lamp. Signals traveled through air. Protocols negotiated. Packets wandered through the invisible world like relatives at a large reception searching for the correct table. I tried to appear scholarly. I tried to look as if the invisible was exactly where I belonged.

Then he introduced me to OPNET.

That changed something.

Not everything. Life is not so obliging. But something.

I had always loved graphics, diagrams, visual structures, the relief of seeing an idea take shape in front of me. A page of code by itself can look like a sealed wall. I know there may be life, design, intention, even elegance inside it, but my first response is not music. It is suspicion.

Draw it, though, and the thing begins to breathe.

Put boxes around its parts. Connect them. Show movement. Show state. Show flow. A system that was previously a slab of instruction becomes a small city with roads, crossings, delays, accidents, and neighborhoods.

Then I can think.

This has followed me for most of my life as a persistent private question. Why do some minds feel at home inside symbols while others need shape before the idea becomes trustworthy? Why can some people build whole cathedrals out of code while another mind needs to see the scaffolding? Why does abstraction enter some brains smoothly, while another brain insists on cutting open the sweet, checking the texture, and asking which shop made it?

I do not know the full answer.

But I know what Samirda did for me, perhaps without intending to. He made my way of seeing feel legitimate. He did not force me to live inside his exact intellectual house. He showed me a door, and beyond it was a room where graphics, systems, simulation, networks, and thought could belong together.

That is no small gift.

Some teachers hand out conclusions. Better teachers hand out tools. The best teachers alter appetite itself. After them, an answer is not enough. You want the mechanism. The hidden hinge. The back of the clock. The failed gear. The reason the trick works, the reason it breaks, and the reason the audience applauds before understanding what happened.

This is why visual tools still hold me. InfraNodus, for example, fascinates me because it makes text visible as a network of ideas. A paragraph stops being flat and becomes a neighborhood. Some words sit like crowded markets. Some remain like lonely tea stalls at the edge of a para. Some act as bridges. Some pretend to be bridges but are only decorative lampposts with good posture.

You can see density, repetition, absence, obsession. You can see where a thought is working and where it is only making noise.

That matters even more now because AI has arrived with excellent manners and a frighteningly smooth voice.

It gives answers. Some are useful. Some are wrong. Some are rubbish in a silk kurta. The danger is not merely that AI may answer badly. Human beings have always been able to do that after two cups of tea and one newspaper editorial. The deeper problem is that the answer often arrives without an obvious shape.

What did it connect? What did it ignore? Which words became central? Which ideas were pushed to the margin like poor people during a beautification drive? Where is the structure of the thought?

A black box does not become transparent because it speaks politely.

This is where my memory of Samirda returns with force. The coming decades will need serious minds with technical depth, impatience toward nonsense, and enough moral steadiness to identify fraud before it becomes a platform, a policy, a grant proposal, a national mission, or a corporate brochure.

Unfortunately, academia often takes such minds and ties their shoelaces together. A professor should be a live wire. Too often the system turns him into a form-filling functionary: grants, committees, administrative rituals, performance measures, ranking exercises, meeting after meeting where everyone says “stakeholder” and nobody risks an honest thought.

A mind that could help shape a country is asked to spend its best hours satisfying the paperwork appetite of institutions.

Meanwhile the world is being run more and more by money with muscles. Noise has learned to fly. Mediocrity has discovered branding. Into this already unequal room walks AI, not as a neutral angel, but as a machine that will likely strengthen the hands already gripping the table.

AI may increase inequality not because it has evil intentions, but because powerful tools usually favor those who already possess power. The person with data, capital, English, bandwidth, institutional access, and legal cover receives a telescope. The person without these things receives a fogged window. Then everyone is told the future has arrived.

Wonderful.

For whom?

The Gini index measures inequality with the cold manners of a clerk. But behind that number are actual days: a graduate applying for jobs that demand five years of experience in a technology invented last Tuesday, a person teaching tuition in a damp room, a freelancer waiting for payment, a middle-aged fellow in the southern fringe of Calcutta drinking overboiled tea and wondering whether his life has become a footnote while the world upgrades its software.

That is not self-pity.

It is inventory.

And yet gratitude remains, stubborn and slightly embarrassing.

I remember Dr. Samir Ranjan Das not because he solved my life. Nobody does that. Lives are not equations, and anyone offering a final solution to yours is usually selling a course, a retreat, or a subscription. I remember him because he strengthened a form of curiosity that stayed with me through failure, return, scattered consulting work, and the long unglamorous labor of keeping the mind from rusting.

That matters.

A teacher may not give you a destination. Sometimes he gives you a way of holding a lantern. Years later, when the road is broken, the city is feverish, the bank balance is sulking, and the future behaves without discipline, you notice that the lantern still gives off a little light.

So yes, I am glad Samirda stayed in the US.

Let him remain among people and institutions that know somewhat better how to use a mind like his. Bengal will keep producing brilliance; that has never been the problem. The problem is what Bengal does afterward. Unless it learns to hold serious minds without choking them, the best will keep leaving, and the rest of us will keep standing under the leaking roof, arguing about heritage while the water rises around our ankles.

The machine will think.

The city will argue.

And somewhere, if luck has not completely abandoned us, one good teacher will still open a small door inside one confused student’s head.

P.S. References: Dr. Samir R. Das’s public Stony Brook University profile; RFC 3561.