Raja Ramanna's passing away rather suddenly on September 24 removes a colossus from Indian science whose career spanned half a century of active service to the nation, long after his last assignment as chairman, AEC, formally ended. His prime role in making Pokharan ’74 possible — marking India’s entry into the Global Nuclear Club — was only a small manifestation of his vast involvement in India’s nuclear infrastructure known today as BARC and its numerous satellites. His untimely demise marks the end of an era dominated by the pioneers of nuclear science in post-Independent India. Ramanna’s dynamic energy was not only confined to nuclear science but extended to several other fields ranging from music to theoretical physics, on the one hand, and from interactions at academic levels to science policy formulations at the national level, on the other. I once had the privilege of accepting his invitation to spend a year at his NIAS, his Bangalore institute, to make a detailed analysis,in terms of conventional quantum field theory, of his seminal idea that the product of the mass and lifetime of all elementary particles is a universal function of an integer, a surprisingly simple yet startling result that he had derived from Number Theory some 12 years ago. He published several papers on the subject in international journals. It was perhaps the first example of an Indian celebrity, indulging afresh in highly professional physics at 70! Despite top positions — he had been president of the two main National Academies — and numerous honours from scientific and academic quarters, Raja Ramanna was a most charming personality, easily accessible to all and sundry — students and faculty alike — who sought his advice on their problems. His untimely death has created a big void that will not be easy to fill. — A.N. Mitra Formerly, INSA-Einstein Professor of Physics, Delhi University Statistics and polemics • You have pseudo-secularists and you have pseudo-scientists. This article, ‘A woman is a woman is a woman’ (IE, Sept 22), falls in the latter category, a typical diatribe of interesting observations mixed with unsustainable conclusions, a feminist polemic no less. You cannot draw any conclusions based on a survey of 100,000 people in India. It is statistically unsound. You may get interesting pointers, which will have to be tested with statistically sound sampling. I suggest the authors’ project the difference between 2.8 children per couple and 3.5 children per couple over 50 years. It comes to a population difference of almost 300 billion people. And they say, there’s “not too much difference!” — Arul Bhaskar On e-mail Different strokes • With reference to the report, ‘For these economists, World Bank is Evil but Ford money is just right’ (IE, Sept 22), collaboration with a private institution is quite different from that of governmental ones. In this case the span of impact is far more extensive. We need a planning structure which can address these imbalances and take up even an adverserial position as and when necessary. It is absolutely essential that decision-makers on formal recommendations are Indian. There is a strong case for collaboration and rapid expansion of FDI but not here. — N.J. Ramesh On e-mail
