Khagol_126_April_2021

student was rendered much more pleasant because of Kumar. I recall those Tripos result announcements from the inside balcony of the Senate House. One felt increasingly doubtful if the name would come in the right list. When it did, at that time Kumar was the first to congratulateme. Indeed, my Cambridge life was certainly enriched by interaction with Kumar Chitre. Yes, he provided the cricket kit and Churchill College pitch for our summer matches usually billed as India Pakistan Matches. Long walks, punting on the river Cam and other relaxing experiences were that much more pleasant because of Kumar's participation. We also went on British Council Vacation Courses as this was an inexpensiveway of seeing the country. After my Cambridge stint, I joined TIFR, Mumbai and thus, we had another interaction. Now, we were married householderswith children to look after. Yes, and we were also part of the Teaching and Research programme of TIFR. My field of research was gravitation and cosmology. Kumar's was solar physics. Later hemoved to the topic of gravitational lensing. It was a characteristic of him that he would not be satisfied till the last detail of his problemhad beenworked out. The Theoretical Astrophysics group wherein we all worked at TIFR included the seniors Vardya, Chitre and myself followed by Tarafdar and Krishna Swamy, and then youngsters like Ajit Kembhavi, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, Narayan Rana, Thanu Padmanabhan, and Kandaswamy Subramanian, all of these former graduate students at TIFR and Pankaj Joshi and Alak Ray who had joined from outside. I beg to be excused if I have left out some others. My main purposewas to showhow the group had grown from those early days when Kumar Chitre joined in 1966. Indeed, one of the pleasant recollections I have of TIFR astrophysics schools and workshops is that it attracted bright students to astronomy and astrophysics. When the opportunity of setting up IUCAAcame up, I had requested him to joinme in Pune. My persuasions did not work! He resisted the offers saying that he felt strongly bonded to Mumbai and did not wish to cross the Western Ghats. In fact, he was anxious to bring a Centre of Excellence at IIT level on the Mumbai University campus with the help of the Department of Atomic Energy. After many years, all the bureaucratic and political hurdles were crossed, and Kumar was able to welcome outside lecturers to the campus. I enjoyed my visits under this programme. But as an interacting visitor, he kept link with IUCAAalive. Hewill be greatlymissed! Professor Kumar Chitre, I remember was a warm, kind, suave and sophisticated person, completely into the pursuit of science even till the very end. He had a great influence on a wide spectrum of people including me. My first memory of him was in my PhD admission interview in the late 1970's. He askedme a simple question: what are the points in the complex plane where mod(z) is unity, but this was asked in such a characteristically languid and profound manner and with a dramatic pause that I was completely dumbstruck for quite a time. Fortunately, I managed to give a partial answer! Kuma r wa s a b r oad - spe c t r um theoretical astrophysicist, with interest ranging right from solar physics to Kandaswamy Subramanian | KHAG L | No. 126 - APRIL 2021 | 02 India-Pakistan (Informal) cricketers from left Jamal, Khalid Ikram, Rajendram, Jahid, Amit Bhaduri, Kumar Chitre, Anand Sarabhai and Anant Narlikar. Professor Kumar Chitre was a man of impeccable taste and humour, and deeply committed to Science and Science policy, and to the teaching and dissemination of science among the public. I was very fortunate to have him as a mentor and friend at different phases of my academic life. I met him in Churchill College, Cambridge, soon after I arrived there as a PhD student. He was on a sabbatical that year at Churchill along with his family, and lived at a block of flats right across from where I lived in the graduate students' quarters at the back of the College. Soon I found myself spending a lot of time with them having meals, discussing cricket, walking to the Institute ofAstronomy or the Cavendish Laboratory, not so far away, or to the CollegeHalls. Chitre was at that time deeply interested in gravitational lensing, and he came up with amazingly resourceful material models that mimicked these lensing effects. I remember howawestruck I was when, after dinner in Hall one day, he ripped off the base of a wine glass and showed me how the caustics of a gravitational lens could be produced. Somak Raychaudhury remembers: It was hard not to be charmed byChitre’s childlike interest in understanding p h y s i c s a n d i n s c i e n t i f i c communication. He was also a deeply cultured and intellectual person, and as a prominent member of Bombay’s community of thinkers, he seemed to know almost everybody who mattered, across of worlds of science, arts and policymatters. Hismain interest was in theoretical solar physics, and at that time Chitre was workingwithDouglas Gough’s group at the IoA in Cambridge or with Ian Roxburgh at Queen Mary College in London on various topics to do with solar modelling, including current topics like helioseismology. During subsequent annual visits to QueenMary and to Cambridge, I got to meet him and his wife Suvarna every time, and this continued during my time at the University of Birmingham, when I would make it a point to spend some time with them during his summer visits to theUK. He was deeply committed to helping younger colleagues in every way possible, and I sought his counsel and wise. advice on many occasions. His interest in teaching and education was obvious when, after he retired from TIFR two decades ago, he started a second career in establishing the Centre of Excellence in Basic Sciences at BombayUniversity. Wewill trulymiss him.