Ou phrontis. It is a phrase that Raja Ramanna is fond of. It is Greek for "who cares" and implies a certain insouciance. It may seem irresponsible. But it is also a refusal to follow convention.

Ramanna has always had an air of ou phrontis about him. A streak of daring. There would be far greater physicists than him in India. Even managers of science. But Ramanna could lay claim to being the father of India's atomic bomb. It is a moniker that is a cause of much fission among the scientific community. And Ramanna himself shrugs off the debate saying, "The genetics of the bomb is not relevant." But like Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan project that built the world's first atomic bombs, for India the mantle of leadership fell on Ramanna. And he was not found wanting.

When Ramanna put the bomb team together in the late '60s he had the legacy of Homi Bhabha -- by then a giant nuclear estate sprawled across the country -- to assist him. Before Bhabha died in 1966, he had chosen Ramanna to head a team to explore peaceful nuclear explosions. Bhabha had always been impressed by the witty young man who played music with the same passion with which he spoke on physics. Even as his reputation grew as a physicist, Ramanna never gave up playing the piano. Science, he believed, would cease to be exciting the moment all the fundamental laws of nature were discovered. Whereas music for him is essentially an exploration of human consciousness which, "has no limits. It is totally free".

Appropriately, a musical phrase best describes Ramanna's contribution to the making of the Indian bomb. He orchestrated the effort superbly and conducted it with such a degree of secrecy that when the explosion happened in 1974 it caught the world by surprise.

The task was made more difficult because India had remained politically ambivalent over possessing the bomb. Many Indian leaders including Mahatma Gandhi thought it blasphemous for India to even think of designing such weapons. Unperturbed and at times even defiant Ramanna secretly told his small team to go ahead with the programme. He had sensed the nation's need to have an atomic halo as an insurance against India ever being militarily colonised again.

Ramanna's abrasive personality saw him come into conflict with many of his colleagues. Just before he retired, he had a stormy relationship with prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who, unlike his mother, disliked his style. He would be charged with being "a scientist politician" and the "splitter" of organisations he headed. He remains better known, however, for splitting atoms and as India's bombmeister.

Raj Chengappa is deputy editor, India Today.