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cosmic magnetism whenever we met through the years, we wrote only one paper together on the subject. Perhaps the physical distance between Pune and Mumbai and the independence that students eventually want from their PhD supervisorswas the reason. But this subject was clearly one he enjoyed very much and he would pull out some calculation or the other each time we met for a detaileddiscussion. This also happened when I saw Kumar for the last time, during the celebrations of Professor Govind Swarup's 90th birthday. I sat in Kumar's guest house flat and he was showing me his latest calculations, and I was telling him about my latest work. As I sat there, a streamof people showed up, each wanting to discuss some important practical issues where he could be of help. The atmosphere was like the court of a benign Raja opining on these issues, sometimes making a phone call in its connection and always coming back to the calculations we were discussing! We spent a few pleasant hours like this. This is the picture I have of Kumar, forever interested in science, doing meticulous calculations on what occupied his mind the most at that time and ever eager to share his thoughts anddiscuss science. I shall remain indebted to him for caring somuch aboutme. It is unbelievable to believe the bitter truth that we have lost Professor S. M. Chitre forever; we won't be able to see or meet himany longer! It is even painful to write a tribute to him as reminiscences start trickling in the mind carrying wonderful moments of interaction that I had with him since I met him in the year 1976. While paying my respectful homage to Professor Chitre, I have limited myself to a recollection of some of those fine personal moments I had with him and reflections thereof, which has made an indelible mark on me in shaping my teaching and research career that I enjoyed so far. I joined TIFR, Mumbai on July 1, 1977 as a Teacher Fellow as a part of the UGC's Faculty Improvement Programme on leave of absence from the Government Digvijay College, Rajnandgaon, Sheo Kumar Pandey Madhya Pradesh (now in Chhattisgarh) after completing necessary formalities. Owing to constraints of the teacher fellowship, I chose to work under the supervision of Professor Chitre. He consulted with H M Antia who was working with him on the solar atmosphere, and suggested that I work on penetrative instabilities with its applications to the solar atmosphere. The objectivewas to provide satisfactory exp l ana t i ons f or t he obs e rved oscillatory (the well known 5-minute oscillations), and non-oscillatory (the granulation and the supergranulation) velocity fields detected in the solar atmosphere. Initially, a plane parallel two-layer polytropic compressible mod e l a tmo s ph e r e s ome t h i n g reminiscent of the solar atmosphere, stable layer overlying a convectively unstable layer, were considered for a detailed investigation, which was partly analytical, but mostly computational. What I enjoyed the most were not merely the discussions of the results with Professor Chitre on daily/weekly routinely, but more so his intuitive ideas about the nature of convective velocity fields in the solar atmosphere that he always used to narrate during our meetings with his sparkling eyes. I still remember the joy of discussing the first result based on a realistic solar model with him, and recall how he was overjoyed that day when he saw the effects of the adding effects of turbulent thermal conductivity and viscosity in the numerical calculation of unstable convective modes as per his expectations. Somehow, on my return to the Government College, Rajnandgaon, and after the award of Ph.D. by the Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University (PRSU), Raipur, I could not continuemy research work in the area of solar physics. There was a long exile as far as my research activity was concerned even after joining PRSU in 1985 until IUCAA was born in 1988, and thereafter, I started tuning myself to the observational astronomy. From initial days of IUCAA, Professor Chitre had been a part of IUCAA's Governing Board/Council and Scientific Advisory Committee and somehow, the research programme on surface photometric studies on early-type galaxies in collaborationwith | KHAG L | No. 126 - APRIL 2021 | 03 cosmology to the physics of compact objects. He always kept his finger on the pulse of the current research. Thus, he started his extensive investigations into helioseismology, while working simultaneously on gravitational lensing. I was very fortunate of being partly supervised by him as a graduate student, and together with D. Narasimha was involved in his research on gravitational lensing. The first examples of multiple images had just been discovered, and it was an exciting time for developing their first models. We used to meet in Kumar's office, which usually was in a state of creative disorder, but his desk always had very neatly, meticulously written extensive notes with detailed derivations of what we were discussing! He was always positive in his comments on our work, never getting angry and supervised us seamlessly. Somehow, we never wrote a review on gravitational lensing, which I guess was typical of Kumar, as he was always driven by new, forward-looking ideas, pursuing them with all the energy he had. Kumar was fun to be with in informal settings. I remember us taking a visitor to a typical "masala" Bollywood movie, which all of us thoroughly enjoyed. His conversation was always lively, sometimes critical of science and scientists, but always measured and never crossing a line. He was the master of rescuing any embarrassing situation. Meeting a former colleague after a long period, and when asked how I was, I remember telling her laughingly, we are all getting old! Kumar immediately interjected: Some older than others Kanda (as he called me), some older than others! Kumar always gave excellent and very clear lectures and in fact it was from one of these lectures at the end of my PhD studies that I first heard about astrophysical magnetic fields, which was later to become a mainstay of my own research. Although, we discussed