Sir C.V. Raman was not very charitable with praise for his fellow travelers in physics. Yet, he used superlative when it came to Homi Jehangir Bhabha: "a great lover of music, a gifted artist, a brilliant engineer and an outstanding scientist... The modern equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci". Curiously enough, Bhabha's Monalisa, if she ever existed, is as mysterious as Vinci's.

Homi Jehangir, a Parsi by birth, was western in his upbringing-he was fed on a diet of Beethoven, Chopin, Shakespeare, a culture entailing the use of knives and forks-but he was a man of the renaissance that ushered independence to India. He always wore a double breasted suit, even when he launched his cosmic ray ballons in the swamps of southern India. And as Raja Ramanna recalls, he once attended a western music concert in Bangalore-he used to play the violin himself-dressed as if he were part of the opera.

I met him once in his alma mater which happened to be my university at that time, Cambridge, Bhabha had come to meet the Indian students. I did not know then that he went through the engineering Tripos because of his father. His passion lay with physics but since his father believed it did not have any great prospects, he continued with his engineering. It was only after he completed it that he went on to do mathematics Tripos, finishing with a first on both occasions.

All along Bhabha nurtured seemingly absurd dreams. When he floated his ideas on atomic energy, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked him, "How can we think of atomic energy in a country which is run by bullock carts?" It is the formidable personality of Bhabha and his close connection with the Tatas that persuaded him to see otherwise.

Originality and inventiveness were the two greatest virtues of Bhabha and he pursued them with ruthless energy and devotion, possessed with an enormous vitality and purpose.

When Bhabha was killed in an air crash in the Alps in 1966, J.R.D. Tata said he must have had a premonition. Only that, he felt, could have "driven him to a superhuman effort to achieve his goal, come what may". Indeed, Bhabha himself had written to a friend way back in 1934 saying, "Life and my emotions are the only things I am conscious of. I love the consciousness of life and I want as much of it as I can get. What comes after death no one knows. Nor do I care. I do have this one purpose: increasing the intensity of my consciousness of life."

And through that consciousness he did wonders. I recall a paper Shankaranarayanan of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) published in 1964 with Bhabha. It was about the Lorentz pancake of a nucleus moving at high energy. Thirty years later that paper remains a benchmark for researchers. Bhabha Bhabha also discovered the now famous hard component of cosmic shower in India while he was at the Indian institute of Science, Bangalore. And long before Lederman Steinberger and Schwartz received the Nobel Prize, he had discovered the "particles of second generation".

Bhabha dreamt of an India which could be as good as any other country in the world. And his keen sense of aesthetics was evident in any task he undertook. When TIFR was set up, Bhabha, having recognized the potential of M.F. Husain, then relatively unknown, asked him to adorn the building with his works.

Bhabha wanted to bring the Palace of Versailles to India by creating the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, now known as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. He believed that ambience played an important role in work place. As did organisation. Anything that was haphazard, casual or shoddy would make him passionately angry. While building Apsara, for instance, he ensured that his men who were working round the clock had a constant supply of food, with cars readily available. Interestingly, when Bhabha's request for these arrangements was initially rejected by the bureaucrats, he approached Nehru and sought his approval.

Bhabha derived his energy from the arts, the music, the paintings, the trees and his beloved roses. Having attended Beethoven's Erotica at the London Symphony Orchestra, he wrote: "The Ninth Symphony is sheer greatness, the sublimest and most colossal achievement of the human mind." To him the arts were whtat made life worth living.

Once when I was visiting Krakow in Poland for a conference, my host asked me if I knew of a gentleman called Homi Bhabha. The distinguished Polish professor recalled Bhabha's detailed knowledge about the museum at Krakow, his sense of history and art in general. Yet another instance to show that wherever Bhabha went, whatever he did, he made a lasting impression.

Bikash Sinha is director, The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta.

Early Genius
S. RAMANUJAN (1887-1920): This mathemagician died young. But in a span of 33 years, he came up with his theory of divergent series, modestly filled in frayed notebooks, considered invaluable by mathematicians even today. It took G.H. Hardy, a professor at Cambridge University, to recognise his genius and provide him with an opportunity to pursue his interests -- Ramanujan spent four years in London honing his skills. His work, based on the number theory and probability theory, among others, has opened up avenues for further research in computer sciences, statistics and physics. And this man failed his matriculation exam, had his scholarship withdrawn and was constantly reprimanded by his father for scribbling on sheets .

SATYENDRA NATH BOSE (1894-1974): When as a 22-year-old physicist he joined the University College of Science, Calcutta, he knew he had to do something different. He did. He worked on statistical, theoretical concepts that could explain radiation, followed up by discovering particles that confirmed them. They are called bosons after him. To this day, scientists refer to Bose-Einstein statistics, which explains the behaviour of small particles that are smaller than atoms. However, the greatest contribution of this man, who worked with Marie Curie and Albert Einstein for a year each, was the amount of time he ungrudgingly spent with students and researchers, and on taking science to the masses.

C.V. RAMAN (1888-1970): Old Calcutta. 210 Bowbazaar Street. The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science was just a signboard to him when he went there first as an Indian Finance Service officer. But in 1930, his work here earned him the Nobel Prize. The Raman Effect as we know it today may basically be a concept of physics but its utility is as one of chemistry's favourite tools: to identify materials by measuring different kinds of light. Raman founded the few-frills, world-class Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, a hub of research in areas like developing liquid crystals, theoretical physics and astrophysics.

Subhadra Menon is a science writer, India Today