My visit to NCBS

I spent a most amazing day yesterday at the nearby National Centre for Biological Sciences which is in the GKVK campus. It was the first time that I had really entered the institution for any length of time, although I had once been there on a social occasion over 2 years ago, and met other delegates at the conference whose social event I had been invited for, and once about 20 years ago, from the outside. It was established by the famous Obadi Siddiqi, about whom I had written in the context of his famous advisor Guido Pontecorvo, brother of the equally famous physicist Bruno, known for his mixing matrix of neutrinos and one who had defected to the Soviet Union after learning physics from Fermi, and the brother of the movie maker Gillo, the maker of the Battle of Algiers. I had also been to the conference centre in Pisa which earlier used to belong to their wealthy family as a factory for garments, if I am not mistaken. Among other highlights of my visit, was a 20 minute visit to the archives that store the papers of Siddiqi and many other important archival material, something so unusual that it merits an award for its own sake. I was invited by the Manager, Academic Collaborations and Events, a young person Vaishnavi Sridhar who make impeccable arrangements, and my host was Varadharajan Sundararaman, an expert on various diseases that he is trying to unravel at the level of cell-biology, and is himself an IISc alumnus. As someone who knows almost no biology it was a sobering experience listening to the expertise of the persons there. At lunch I was joined by my old friend Madan Rao who has been there for decades, indeed as I have been in IISc for decades and Shashi Thutupalli, a physicist who now does biology, and he was telling me about his astonishing interest in how life may have started on earth and his experiments and also his recollections on prior experiments in India and in the world. It was an astonishing set of interactions, and also crowned by a visit to the lab or Ranabir Das, who had been a student in my particle physics class in 2000, who did his Ph. D. in NMR and then learned biology during his post-doc years at the NIH and has just been promoted to professor. NCBS is a piece of heaven, and all this was before my own 70 minute talk on the Joy of Discovery as usual. Thanks to Varadha, I also now realize that Discovery of Joy is equally important. Thank you everyone. Thank you world. Thank you Universe for this.