The extinction of uncommon men

Aveek Jayant

Chandigarh is not the quaint city that one can be nostalgic about. In Mysore, where my parents live, is a house in a corner of a leafy suburb; it fights the vagaries of time and weather but it is there R K Narayan lived and wrote from. In concert with his brother, the no less illustrious R K Laxman, the duo made consistent passes at our sense of security but altogether in a manner that was never offensive. The man who made cartoons was clearly the more daring; always irreverent, yet rooted as a common personage who would watch the world standstill or go around in quite the wrong direction from what seemed reasonable or right, hapless but not exactly helpless in the acerbic power of declamation.

Although cartoons and literature are clearly closer to a political or a public life post- Independence India apparently had no surfeit of extraordinary people from diverse backgrounds who could speak up and work tirelessly for the plebeians in the Republic. If there was to be a historical retrospective in Indian medicine my guess would be that Prof Vulimiri Ramalingaswami (1921-2001) would convincingly win that place, hands down. Prof Ramalingaswami worked on the pathology of malnutrition, unique patterns of Indian liver disease, the scientific basis of iodine supplementation in our salt and was still among the first to rise to meet the medical needs of the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy.  He established the Indian Council of Medical Research; his stewardship of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences is remembered as a halcyon era. VRS was also a Shakespearean scholar and a musician of ability. ISRO was established by another charismatic giant: Vikram Sarabhai.  However, it is Satish Dhawan who evokes the Ramalingaswami genre in Indian space science. Dhawan (1920-2002) graduated from Panjab University with degrees in English literature and mechanical engineering! In common with Ramalingaswami, Dhawan was in love with Shakespeare. In his leadership of one of the world's cheapest space programmes, trees and the horror of having to cut them down, the grace and science of bird flight and the plight of cows who he refused to be fenced out of Sriharikota appear with equal poignancy.

 In our not so distant past, science was an eminently public activity. In combination with the number of intellectuals standing apart in being apolitical and,  yet, vociferous common men there is of course, the far more dangerous trend of being public for the sake of oneself. The race for awards in public life to membership of academies or an oration Indian science can seriously destroy the legacy of the likes of Dhawan and Ramalingaswami, a point that Ramachandra Guha (The Staggering Vanity of India's powerful, Feb 2015) makes, albeit in somewhat polemic terms. As the current leaders of the Indian science pursue rather more limited roles in promoting themselves or their science, we might do well to remember these gentle giants. More generally, this tradition of being narrow experts and yet speaking or acting in the common space for greater allied and disparate causes is dying all over the world ("Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline", Richard Posner, 2003). For countries like India where higher education is both thinly spread and tightly enmeshed with political discourse this decline could mean an unmitigated tragedy!