Sarjana: We feel privileged to get
this opportunity to have an interview with you. First of all, we would like to
know about your background and how had you been during your childhood days?
Prof. Roddam Narasimha: I am a native of Bangalore. I grew
up in Basavangudi which is in south Bangalore, sort of the old Kannada
cultural centre of Bangalore life. I went to what at that time was a very
modest school right there. It was built up by a very remarkable educational entrepreneur, and as I grew the school also grew.
I think that the greatest thing about that school, looking back in retrospect,
were some of the teachers. You must remember that this was all in the 1940s,
just around the time of the end of British rule. Actually, we were very
fortunate to have a couple of teachers who were very good, very committed. They
were basically nationalist in outlook. I think they all wanted to do their
best, even in education. They took interest in good students beyond the call of
duty. They shaped my early views as a young boy about the nation and about
independence. I went to college also in Bangalore and ended up doing mechanical
engineering. At the
time it was called Government Engineering College, now known as University
Visvesvaraya College of Engineering. That college had some remarkable engineers
as well as some very good teachers.
S: How did you come to know
about aeronautical engineering and what tempted you to opt for it?
RN: During those
days, there was an exhibition at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),
what we call today an Open Day. I
went there and the first thing that I saw was the aeronautics department on our
left, and the first thing that I saw there was an old Spitfire, a British aircraft which actually
won for them the battle of Britain during Second World War. It was a very
famous aircraft at that time and Indian Air Force also had some. I saw one of
those parked under a tree. So that was the first time I got close enough to an
aircraft to touch it and see what was inside and so on. So I decided that if I
had a chance, I would do aeronautics after my B.E. The Institute was the only
place where you could get a degree in aeronautics at that time. So when I got
my B.E. degree at the end of four years, I wanted to do aeronautics from the
Institute and so went to ask my father. He said before you make up your mind,
why don’t you go and talk to a friend of mine
at the Institute. When I met him; he was actually very discouraging (RN
smiling). He said, “Don’t be a fool, don’t study aeronautics.” It was because aeronautics was not a very popular subject at
that time. People didn’t see many opportunities there. In
fact the batch before mine had zero students. I went back and told my father
expecting that he would agree with his friend. But he said, “You have heard him, so what do you
want to do?” I replied, “I still want to do aeronautics.” Then he said, “OK, You go ahead.” That’s
how I joined aeronautics. In retrospect that was a good decision; I thoroughly
enjoyed aeronautics, aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and so on.
S: How was your life at
Indian Institute of Science?
RN: At that time, I’m talking about 1953, 6 years after
independence, industries were picking up. The good jobs were in the Indian
Railways (IRS), if you wanted a government appointment. It was equivalent to
IAS for the engineers. Also there were jobs in the new petroleum refineries
being set up in the country. Many did well in the IRS examination and joined
the Railways. Some went to the TATAs. Very few joined the Institute. So, I was
from a small group of 12 that joined the aeronautics department that year. I
spent two years there and that was my first opening to what I may call research
(we had very little research at the engineering college). The one man who had a
big impact on me was Prof. Satish Dhawan. He was a young man then. He
had come back from Caltech, United States in 1951. So, when I went there in
1953, he had been there just for two years. He was remarkable, very different
from the other faculty. Other faculty dressed in tie and suit but he came
dressed in just a shirt and his pants. He was cheerful, very open and frank. At
that time the head of the department was a distinguished but serious German
scientist. I hardly saw him smiling. But Dhawan had a ready smile. He
used to come in a small sports car, jump out and run up the stairs. On the
whole, he was somebody whom you couldn’t miss on the campus. I spent two
years there getting my diploma. Towards the end of those two years, Dhawan
said, “I’m trying to do some research, would you want to help me?” I said, “I would be delighted.” So I actually worked with him on
supersonic flows and shockwaves. At that time, these were still mysterious
things, and Dhawan had made a small (5 mm x 5 mm) wind tunnel in which
he could generate shockwaves and a small optical set up show you the
shockwaves. He was an extraordinary experimentalist. He was very good with his
hands, good with his designs and good in telling people what should be done. At
that time, we had to do many things ourselves, we didn’t
import much and the practice of getting money from outside sponsors was
unknown. So we scrounged around for money all the time., but Dhawan
taught us how to do most with least money.
At the end of my two years in the
diploma course, I had 2-3 options before me. I could have easily got a job at
HAL. The very first thing that I wanted to do was some research and the German
professor was the first one to encourage me. He usually didn’t
speak to students but one day he called me, just before he left for home, and
asked me what my plans were. I said, “I would probably go to HAL or apply
to the Meterological department.” He said, “I think you should get into research. I would advise you to
go to Goettingen or Caltech; if you need
any help from me, let me know.” I was quite surprised, but I saw
going abroad was one option. Going abroad was not such a common thing then as
it is now. One thing was that I had already made up my mind to do research with
Dhawan, if possible. Dhawan met me and asked the same question.
He said why don’t you do research here. So I stayed
on to do research with him and spent two more years at IISc.
S: So, Was it Satish Dhawan
who was the role model for you while growing up? Can you also highlight a little about the
research you did with Prof. Dhawan?
RN: In a way yes, because he had an extraordinary
influence on me, but in another sense no, because he could do things which I
would not (e.g. making beautiful little ‘gizmos’, as he called them).
But I learnt from him that if you can
think through and analyze problems,
there are very interesting things one can do without spending too much money.
Thus, I needed an electronic amplifier for hot-wire anemometry, but I knew nothing about electronics. So
Dhawan hired a technical assistant who could help me, and we put together a
very “crazy” amplifier. It was running on a
battery, using cheap radio components. It worked!
So, my first lesson from Dhawan
was “We can do
it! You can do it! If you have a clear enough goal, you can do it!”. We had a 5ftx5ft wind tunnel
in which flow conditions were transitional, i.e. neither laminar nor turbulent.
He said, “We don’t know much about transition, so let
us do some research on transition.” As we read the mails that carried news
about transition research in the US I found that some beautiful measurements
had been made there confirmed a physical picture but could not be connected to the theory. So, we made our own
measurements and could repeat what they had done and they didn’t
agree either. The question was about where what are called ‘turbulent spots’ are from on (say) a flat surface or
wing. The theory assumed that they were born all over the surface. We found
that theory and experiment agreed if we said that spots were born along a line
across the surface. So I wrote it up my work and submitted my thesis.
S: That was your first paper?
And how did it influence your career ?
RN: Actually there were two papers: the first was a short
note by me, and the second a larger paper by Dhawan and me. Dhawan then persuaded me to go to
Caltech for a PhD: there was nothing
much more I could learn in Bangalore, he said. I think the papers and Dhawan
helped me to get admission to Caltech.
S: So, you met Hans Liepmann
at Caltech. What were the most striking features about his personality?
RN: Liepmann was an excellent teacher. He taught
without notes but I found later that he would make little cards containing
tricky steps and carried them in his pocket, in case he got stuck. But during the
classes I took from him, he never got stuck. He could make connections among
many different subjects. He wanted students to do as much as possible by
themselves. He was very liberal: country, language didn’t
matter to him. He was from Germany and was among those last few people who just
escaped the war. So he went on to settle down in California and I learnt a
great deal from him about research, how research problems are selected and so
on. He had a great sense of humour. He led a very lively group, who went on to
become some very well known people in fluid dynamics. This includes the names
of Anatol Roshko, Donald Coles etc. who contributed a great deal to fluid
dynamical research. So, It was fortunate that I could work with people like Dhawan
and Liepmann.
S: So, you came back to India
in 1962 after your PhD. What was the reason for your return when you had a more
promising future in the United States?
RN: That depends how you define promising. The month I
reached United States in 1957, a week before registration, a big event
happened: the Russians launched Sputnik. This report was treated with
scepticism. I still remember one occasion, very vivid in my memory, is that
firstly The Russians then said, “If you don’t believe it, tune your radio to this frequency; you will hear the
beep-beep from our Sputnik.” People said, “Yeah! That we can do but how can we
know that that is from Sputnik?” Then there was a list of times at the big US cities where, if
you went out and watched the western sky, you
could see a bright little object crossing the sky. Everybody at Caltech
went to the terrace or the top of the building, wondering whether the Sputnik
would show up. It did on time. So, the debate was settled, everybody knew that
they had done it. Sputnik changed everything. Suddenly the national
interest shifted to space and they cut down programs in aeronautics. So, I was
there at what many people would say, looking in retrospect, a golden age. If
you had done anything remotely connected with space, you were in great demand.
I had many job offers. I was actually hired as a consultant by a US company
before I actually got my PhD. Although I liked the United States and Caltech
was very dear to me, I wanted to come back to India; and there was Dhawan’s example. When
I left Caltech, my American friends took bets that I will be back in the United
States within six months because I won’t be able to do any research (in
India), but I knew that was not right. So anyway, I came back and I continued
at the Institute for the rest of my career till I retired in 1993.
S: You have been associated
with a lot of prominent institutes like Caltech, IISc, then University of
Brussels, Adelaide University, Cambridge University. What basic difference you
personally felt between the pedagogy of Indian Institutes and Foreign
Institutes?
RN: I think that there is one big difference between the
usual undergraduate education in India and those in the better foreign
universities. I think the weakest link in the Indian education system is those
four undergraduate years. I think that the IITs, the NITs, and your
institute or some of the
better universities may be different, but in general our undergraduate system
doesn’t match up with the great universities of the rest of the world. Caltech
and Cambridge are very different in their institutional personalities but both
of them have great spirit. All great universities of the world, I found out,
have one thing in common. Some are small, some are huge. Caltech has only 2000
students, Cambridge has 20,000. Caltech has many science and engineering
departments, but also a humanities and social sciences department. But in Cambridge, you can
study almost anything under the sun:
science, engineering, Greek literature or Hindu philosophy. Cambridge has been there for 800
years and Caltech has been there for just 100 years. Caltech is not very much
older than the engineering colleges here. But, they have one thing in common.
Their programs are very strong on both undergraduate education and research.
Research is done at the same place where those young people are taught. That is
really what makes it a great institution. Many people in India think that if
you copy the syllabus of Cambridge and Caltech, you can replicate the
institution; they are totally mistaken. The syllabus is the product; it is not
the driver. What drives it are the people teaching at those places. They know
where the frontiers are because they are at the frontier themselves, they are
pushing it. So, their view of knowledge is very different. In most of the Indian
colleges the teachers are not doing research. So for them, knowledge is in the
text book, often the prescribed text book! Usually, even if there is an error
in the text book, it’s the answer in the text book that
will get you marks; no wonder therefore the students mug up the text book. What
the great universities do, whether in the United States or Russia or Britain, is that knowledge is being created
at the same place where it is being taught. Students grow up knowing that something which is in the book today may
be proved wrong the next day. Some new techniques which we never thought of can
be invented and change everything. They grow up in this atmosphere. So by the
time they graduate, their view of science is far more mature and realistic in
terms of how knowledge is generated than that of an average Indian
undergraduate student. I found out that at Caltech, the man who joined first
year was generally a very bright student, but did not know as much as the
Indian counterpart does. You see the same men four years later, there is no
comparison between the two. The attitude of the American student is far more mature.
S: You have also been at the
helm of prestigious institutes like NAL, NIAS etc. Did you face any kind of
difficulties there?
RN: Actually when I went to NAL, I was very doubtful: NAL
is a huge place: 1500 or more employees at that time. I said, “Good God.” I had known NAL personally, many of
the scientists were graduates from the Institute. Despite my reluctance I
yielded to the persuasion of Dhawan,
Dr. Valluri (then Director of NAL) and others. The institute was
generous and allowed me to remain on its faculty, and that helped a great deal.
NAL had many bright engineers,
carefully recruited by Dr. Valluri; they had some very good facilities.
They could make things on a larger scale than at the Institute. However they
were not very clear whether they should be like professors at the Institute or
engineers at ISRO. So I focused on what NAL could do that nobody else in the
country was doing: what would make NAL special?
So we adopted the principle that if somebody
else could do it, we would not do it at NAL. So, let’s do things like that might be
important 5-10 years later. There was also some time left for individual
research. I was pleased with the response of staff at NAL. Carbon fibre
composite technology, parallel computing, flight control systems, wind tunnel
techniques, CFD etc. became NAL’s special strengths.
From experience at NAL and elsewhere,
I concluded that we have a lot of talent in India but do not know how to use
it!
S: We have heard that you
have a deep interest in history of science as well. You edited a book on
Classic Indian Sciences. How do you see the contribution of ancient Indian
Science viz-a-viz Modern Science?
RN: The general western view about science is that “It all started in Greece”. Archemedes was the first physicist, Euclid
was the first mathematician, and everything else then followed. Now, that view
of History of Science is in my opinion wrong.
If you look at the history of science in the world before 300-400 BC,
Babylonia, China and India had already some achievements in science and
technology. For example in linguistics, grammar, till the 19th century there was nobody in the
world who could even match Panini in terms of the science he brought to
the grammar of languages. There were other areas like medical science (Susruta
for example), metallurgy and mathematics (the Salva sutras). There are
controversies about the so-called Pythagoras theorem; there is no
evidence that Pythagoras stated or proved the theorem (as widely
believed), whereas there is credible evidence that Baudhayana (500 to
800 BCE) stated the general result explicitly before Pythagoras (who
doesn’t seem to have
done it in any case).
I believe different kinds of science
started at different times in different places. We can say with confidence that
between 200 AD and 1500 AD, there was little new science in Europe. India
and China were well ahead in many ways: economically, scientifically,
technologically and perhaps culturally too. All the great names of Indian
mathematics, Aryabhata, Bhaskara, Brahmagupta were from that period.
Algebra was developed in India and travelled to Europe through creative Islamic
scholars and it changed the concept of what mathematics was. For nearly 1400
years, as the distinguished British
scientist Joseph Needham pointed out, there was no new science in Europe
whereas Indian and Chinese science were prospering. But the “modern science” we know and pursue today largely
arose from a profound scientific revolution in Europe, triggered in part by
earlier developments in the East, especially in mathematics and technology.
S: How do you think
scientific researches that contain a lot of technicalities can be made
accessible to general public especially in rural India?
RN: If you want to reach rural audiences, you should
relate science to their life. It is true
that their life is not surrounded by modern gadgets, though it’s
changing. So one should communicate to them what is changing and what the
potential of that change is. When they know it is going to help them, they take to it. It is
not that the people are not interested: I have talked to villagers about
weather and found that their local knowledge and their keenness is very
impressive. But you must use language they understand, don’t
expect that they will understand or make
an effort to understand the esoteric technical language that we learn to speak
at school and college.
S: You have been awarded with
the second highest civilian award “Padma Vibhusan” in 2013. How did you feel when you first heard this news? How do you
take this achievement?
RN: I actually felt greatly honoured. To know that the
nation appreciates that one has done something for it is a privilege. Well, I
have tried to combine what I like to do with what the country needs, and
enjoyed doing it.
S: Where do you see India in
decades to come in the field of science and research?
RN: In my view, there is now
no limit to what India can do if we have the will to do it. Why do I say that? I say that because India has a huge
population and has a lot of dormant talent; we have
about the youngest large population in the world. At a time when the more
developed countries in the world are struggling to get enough people for
science, we have enough or more here in our country. If we learn to make use of
this talent, give them a good education and offer them opportunities after
their education, India’s human
potential is huge. India has many young people, people like you, and you hold
the future in your hand, and I really mean it. The future depends on the
choices you make in your life. If somehow somebody can inspire Indians that
there is a great opportunity here and we can all help to make that happen, I
think Indians will do it. The ability is there, I have no doubt, but ‘will’ may or may not be there, I am not sure about it. After
all, you must remember, India and China were among the leaders of science in
the world from 200 A.D. to 1600 A.D. Can’t we be
there again?
Did
you know India and China contributed to some 60% of the world’s GDP till almost a few centuries
ago?
The
last 250 years have been a bad time for India but it is only ten generations in
our long history. It is true that in the last 250 years, the West has made tremendous progress and left its mark on
the whole world (otherwise we would not be speaking in English to each other!).
If we want to plot our future, we must have a critical view of our past. That’s why I consider history important, not because you
want to find out when somebody became a king, when he was killed in battle and
so on. There is a history of ideas and a history of civilisations that is more
fascinating and more important.
S:
Recently there had been many space missions of India with France and U.S., I
think India appears to lag in the field of technical advancements as compared
to those of U.S. and France. What are the prime reasons of this lag in the
technologies?
RN: In the first place there is no comparison between the
money India is spending and the other countries you mention. If you take Chandrayaan
or Mangalyaan, what surprises the West is how little money we have spent
on a project like that, while a certain kind of ‘intellectual’ in
India criticizes the
program as a waste of money. Mangalyaan’s cost was Rs. 450 crores over 3 years or so. That comes out
to be a little more than Rs. 3 for each person; that is less than a cup of tea
once in 3 years for every Indian. You
tell me, how many Govt. projects are there
where you put 450 crores into each and get the equivalent of Mangalyaan? Whenever and
wherever the country has shown the will, we have done that here with our own
resources. We often think that it has to do with the ability of the people. I
think it is more a matter of national will.
S: You must have some spare
time from your engagement and commitment. So, what kind of hobbies do you
possess?
RN: Well, when I was your age, I spent time learning to play the veena but
it was hard to keep it up later on. I
used to read a lot of literature in English: novels, poetry. Then I came under the influence of the
Kannada scholar-poet-philosopher-wise man, the late Sri D. V. Gundappa. He
was my guru. Every Sunday morning he used to take classes, where we studied one
English book and one Indian book. The Indian book could be either in Kannada or
in Sanskrit. Subjects varied from
political science, philosophy, economics, science, literature etc. It was very
broad. Now that was something which I liked very much. I used to watch movies
at one time but these days I do very little of it. Presently my hobbies are
history and philosophy, which I pursue as much for enjoyment as for
understanding; I am fascinated by them. India is a big country, with diverse people, all
kinds of language, still most of us feel that there is something that unites
all of us. India seems unique, and I love to try and find out why.
S: What message would you
like to give to the young generation?
RN: We are at a stage where if we make up our minds, we
can be a major influence in the world for peace. Here is a vision statement I
drafted some years ago when a diverse group of distinguished people were
debating the future of India ( they agreed with the statement):
“We visualize here an India that, by the year 2025, will be
and will be seen to be a proud, confident, democratic, multi-cultural nation;
strong militarily, economically and culturally; among the front rank of the
powers of the world in science and technology; pragmatic and hard-headed in its
international relations; and, without being dominationist, a force to reckon
with on the side of peace and multipolar order in an uncertain world.”
Whether this vision survives or is
replaced by something else, I think your generation has a unique opportunity.
It can make India ‘strong’ in our sense of the word. It is entirely possible if we believe
in it. Believe in it, and in yourself!
S: Thank you very much
for your time and for this interview. It
was a privilege.
RN: I enjoyed talking to
you. Thank you!
