On Professor Roop Mahajan's 80th Birthday

Roop Mahajan was born on March 5, 1944, in Jassar, a small town near Sialkot (now in Pakistan).His family was reportedly affluent, owning vast tracts of agricultural land and small businesses that his father had inherited.However, the partition of India in 1947 upended this cozy living, forcing his family to relocate to Gurdaspur, a district town in post-partition India, near the border.Like many families affected by partition, the family was forced to rebuild their lives amidst the turmoil of partition.Recognizing that education was the key to future opportunities, his parents impressed upon their children the importance of academic excellence.Guided by this ethos, Roop dedicated himself wholeheartedly to academics, to the exclusion of extracurricular activities, and that single-minded devotion allowed him to achieve notable academic milestones, such as skipping grades in primary school and ranking fourth among hundreds of thousands of students in a state-wide high school examination at the age of fourteen.His siblings also excelled in academics; his elder brother would go on to become a professor at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.Driven by a natural aptitude for mathematics, Roop pursued an intermediate degree in preengineering, laying the foundation for his future engineering profession.He established a record of academic performance in the district and earned a top four state-wide ranking, he attended the Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, a premier legacy college renowned for its strong engineering programs since its establishment in Lahore, Pakistan in 1921.