The talk will be on growing academic cooperation, competition and the superb research atmosphere created by Professors CR Rao, D. Basu, VS Varadarajan, KR Parthasarathy, and SRS Varadhan. In early sixties we struggled with adjusting to different food habits, and had to cope up with intense lectures , visits of renowned combinatorists like C. Berge, number theorist Paul Erdos and so on. The talk will also describe our initial struggles with convexity , Liapunov's theorem on vector measures, Bonsall's theorem etc. It was the period when Prof CR Rao was writing his book on Linear statistical inference with applications and we had to learn the theorems of Dvoretzky, Wald and Wolfowitz etc. as part of his query. I am quite doubtful whether one can create such an atmosphere anymore?
