Khagol # 124 - Oct 2020

| KHAG L | No. 124 - OCTOBER 2020 | 03 Finally if I take the liberty of a wish, I would have much liked to locate him in a university or an IIT/IISER where he could have fired and excited a large number of young minds. That would have done due and adequate justice to his unbounded imagination, innovation, creativity and enthusiasm. This is how I would always remember him with great fondness andwarmest reverence. Ajit Kembhavi: Like everyone else, I have known Professor Govind Swarup as a great astrophysicist, radio telescope builder and a towering figure in Indian and world astronomy. But after his passing away, my thoughts about Govind have been focused mainly onmy personal interactionswith himover the years. I used to visit TIFR, Mumbai as an undergraduate for four years before I joined the institute as a graduate student in the early seventies. Over that early period, I had never heard about Govind, possibly because in those days my friends and I were so enamoured with nuclear physics. When I joined the graduate school, Govind asked me to work with him, but by then I was enamoured with theoretical astrophysics and wanted toworkwith Jayant Narlikar, which I did. Once again, some years later, I had the chance to work with Govind when he askedme to shift fromTIFR to the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru to head the Joint Astronomy Programme there, which I did not do. If I had accepted either of the offers, my phase space trajectory would have been quite different, except that in configuration space it would have ended in Pune anyway, as it has nowdone. But I am sure that working with Govind Swarup would have been quite a different experience from working with Jayant Narlikar. Their ethos, aspirations and achievements have been very similar, but the outwards manifestation of these great qualities in the two gentlemen could not have been more different. My regular interactions with Govind, in person or on the phone, were limited to his talking and my listening and trying to get in a word or two occasionally. What surprised me very much was that the few words I managed to utter were recorded, processed and remembered, without any interruption in his own streams of words and ideas, and were brought up in future conversations. In this manner Govind took me from his early ideas for a great new radio telescope to the GMRT. I learned a lot from these conversations, about astronomy, about large projects, about science and about life. An important set of conversations I had with Govind was about the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Govind was not comfortable with India joining the project, he wanted us to build an optical telescope in India. But this would necessarily have been a significantly smaller telescope, leaving us a factor 10 behind in aperture for the foreseeable future. My friends and I tried very hard to convince him that we should join the project. He finally relented to say that we could join at the 5 per cent level. That would have deprived us of a seat on the TMTBoard, which needed our joining at the 10 per cent level at least. After many discussions and arguments Govind finally agreed to the 10 per cent. Perhaps he always had that in mind, andwas simply getting us to sharpen our arguments and focus our attention on the important issues which we were missing in our enthusiasm. I last met Govind at a dinner party just before the pandemic. He had gone frail, but his spirits were undiminished and he did speak tome as in the old times. I am sure he continues to be the same wherever he is now, though he can speak to us only in our imagination. Photo credits: IUCAA Library, Prof. Jasjeet Singh Bagla (IISER-Mohali), Dr. J.K. Solanki (NCRA) and Prof. Somak Raychaudhury.