The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : ‘Bose was part of renaissance in Bengal’

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‘Bose was part of renaissance in Bengal’

Staff Reporter

He was driven purely by inner compulsion and worked when there were no grants, says C.N.R. Rao

— Photo: K. Gopinathan

A MASTER REMEMBERED: Eminent scientists C.N.R. Rao (left), P. Balaram, M.K. Mathew and Virginia Shepherd at a symposium on Sir J.C.Bose in Bangalore on Friday.

Bangalore: A symposium on “Remembering Sir J.C. Bose” at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) was conducted with good reason on Friday.

Celebrating noted scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s sesquicentennial year, due on November 30, the 100th year of the transistor, to which Mr. Bose made tremendous contribution and the centenary year of the IISc itself, this symposium came at an appropriate time.

As the symposium opened, IISc director P. Balram described it as being one that looked back at Indian Science itself. “J.C. Bose was part of the renaissance in Bengal with scientists such as P.C. Ray and Ashutosh Mukherjee,” he said and spoke about those who set the stage for modern science developments in India.C.N.R. Rao, honorary president of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Scientific Research, was taught by J.C. Bose’s student J.C. Ghosh, also the first principal of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

“J.C. Bose was driven purely by inner compulsion and worked at a time when there were no research grants and it was not yet fashionable to have a Ph. D.,” he said as he inaugurated this seminar in memory of the scientist.

Prof. Rao added that it was Mr. Bose who experimentally proved radio-transmission and it was somehow ignored.

“Two years later in 1897, Guglielmo Marconi did the same, for which he went on to win the Nobel Prize,” said Mr. Rao.

Members of the J.C. Bose Institute, India, said that it was a place where they tried to achieve seamlessness of interdisciplinary science.

The other speakers of the symposium were D.P. Sen Gupta from IISc, M.H. Engineer from the J.C. Bose Institute and V.A. Shepherd from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

While Mr. Sen Gupta is responsible for crafting a new sky theatre show for the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium based around J.C. Bose and his life, Ms. Shepherd, who has done work in the field of plant biology, fluorescent microscopy and cell-to-cell communication among many other areas, had used Mr. Bose’s work in various papers.

As Mr. Sen Gupta spoke about his life in a chronological order, Ms. Shepherd attributed many new developments in the field of plant biology to Mr. Bose’s work. It was a unanimous opinion among the speakers that Mr. Bose should have won the Nobel Prize in science for being 60 years ahead of his time and he was an example of how great men got ignored in India.

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