Peerless trail-blazer: In conversation with B.V. Sreekantan, cosmic ray physicist and astronomer. Part I.

NANJANGUD, a small town near Mysore in Karnataka, is more famous for its pink-coloured tooth powder than for producing the great cosmic ray physicist and astronomer Badanaval Venkatasubba Sreekantan, who was a student of Homi J. Bhabha. Sreekantan was born into a scholarly family of Nanjangud and his father, B.V. Pandit, who was an Ayurvedic doctor, was the originator of the famous herbal tooth powder. Sreekantan completed high school in Nanjangud and obtained a two-year intermediate degree from Mysore. He then moved to Central College, Bangalore, where he obtained his BSc Physics (Hons.) degree in 1946 and MSc (Physics) in 1947, with a specialisation in wireless. He then joined the Communication Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, as a research scholar. In 1948, Bhabha, who had carried out theoretical studies on cosmic rays in Cambridge and had decided on cosmic rays as one of the areas of research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, selected Sreekantan as one of his first students to carry out research in experimental cosmic ray physics. As the cosmic ray scientist P.C. Agrawal points out in a recent article in Current Science, Sreekantan is that rare scientist whose work ranges from experiments a few kilometres deep underground in a mine—the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF)—on cosmic ray particles and proton decay to altitudes up to several hundred kilometres with balloon and rocket-borne detectors to study X-ray emissions from neutron stars and black holes