Schizophrenia can have such grave repercussions, you can’t even imagine. This is the story of an Indian genius named Vashishtha Narayan Singh who was born in 1942 in Basantpur village of Bhojpur district in Bihar, India.
This man was such a great mathematician that he was compared with another great Indian mathematical genius, Ramanujan. Not only this, he was the one who had the mathematical acumen to challenge Einstein’s theory of relativity: E = mc2.
His qualifications are a claim to this fame. After topping Bihar Board in 1961, he joined The university of California, Berkeley in 1963 to study mathematics, where he excelled. His craving for mathematics egged him off to receive a Ph.D. in 1969 in ‘Reproducing kernels and operators with a cyclic vector’ from University of California under the mentorship of John L. Kelly. Such was his capability that he was invited by NASA to join their organization as associate scientist professor.
Despite such achievements and a fantastic job, India beckoned him. So, in 1972, he called it quits in the US and headed to India where he joined IIT, Kanpur as a lecturer. He was the most sought after teacher. In his five-year stint, he taught in TIFR, Mumbai and ISI, Kolkata, in addition to IIT, Kanpur.
Things couldn’t have been better for Vashishta, but destiny had something else in store for him… something really horrid. It was in 1977 that the first symptoms of Schizophrenia, the deadly mental illness, began to appear.
As the symptoms turned into the disease, his treatment began in Kanke. However, the kind of treatment he received there did nothing for him. One day in 1988, he left the place without telling a soul. Nobody knew where he went.
Then in 1992 came the news that he was living in atrocious conditions in Siwan, Bihar and was finding it difficult to make ends meet. The news soon reached his students, who held this genius with great respect.
It was their love for the professor, that made the students shift him to Patna. They lodged him in a comfortable accommodation befitting a professor and provided him with a study table, books, and other things.