"The Institute"

My first week of joining the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) a.k.a The Tata Institute or just The Institute also happens to be the 125th birthday of Sir C. V. Raman, its first Director of Indian origin. Sir Raman is also one of the handful of Nobel laureates from India, winning the prize for Physics in 1930 for discovering the Raman Effect on light scattering. Google has a doodle today recognizing his birthday.

 

 

Interestingly, the only other scientist from India to win the Nobel prize for Physics was Sir Raman's nephew, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in 1983, with NASA's Chandra Telescope named after him. Maybe physics aptitude runs in their DNA (the working of which to synthesize proteins was partly explained by Har Gobind Khorana and led to his 1986 Nobel prize in Medicine). Along with "Venki" Ramakrishnan who won our most recent Nobel laurel for Chemistry in 2009, Khorana rounds out the science winners. Khorana is however a geospatial outlier from Punjab, in that the other laureates are either from the states of Tamilnadu (the "scientists") or West Bengal (the "humanists"). Hmmm... maybe this explains the intense peer pressure on kids from the south to enroll in science and engineering majors?

 

My personal favorite though is the socio-economic work (and the fascinating book, The Argumentative Indian) by Amartya Sen, the former of which was recognized for Economics by the Nobel committee in 1998. Rabindranath Tagore, a doyen of our freedom movement and the author of our national anthem (as well as Bangladesh's), was of course our first Nobel laureate, and apparently the "first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature" in 1913. Its the 100th anniversary, by the way. Rounding out the list is the benevolent Mother Theresa whose service to humanity won her the Peace prize in 1979. Interestingly, she's the only Nobel laureate to immigrate to India, rather than the other way round :-)

 

Ok, by my recount of these fun facts from Wikipedia, "handful" comes to 7 so far and we have managed to get one prize in each of the five possible categories. But in a country of a billion people, I'm sure there are other hidden gems awaiting. Any takers?

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P.S. From my recollection, I've met and spoken to just one Nobel laureate, by happenstance. While at MSR in San Francisco and collaborating with researchers at Berkeley Labs, my manager and I made an exploratory visited to a leading astrophysicist at UC Berkeley in 2009 to see if we could expand on our ongoing research on the Pan-STARRS Sky Survey. As we headed out from a genial 30 mins meeting in his office, which was chock full of papers and books, my manager remarked (with her trademark mischievous grin) that she wouldn't be surprised if he won the Nobel prize. Saul Perlmutter did indeed win soon after, in 2011! My only other brush with Nobel glory was also at Lawrence Berkeley National labs when, on my way to the cafeteria for lunch, I ran across a photo shoot of the IPCC members from Berkeley who won the Peace Prize in 2007. Maybe it was this photo?