Reflections

Around 4 years ago, I had written a blog post suggesting some solutions for the public transport situation in Siliguri. Recently, Nipon, he of the Nipowave and Bong Buzz fame, sent me a write up on his suggestions on the same topic which i have appropriated for this blog post. I have his permission. I also append a comment that Dr John Sinha, Nipon’s friend made on his post. Siliguri is a small but very important city considering its strategic location - being an important tourist transit point as well as the heart of North Bengal. But it will rank nowhere in the top list of small cities of India. In fact, it is a town at best, far from a city. I am sure that mere population doesn't make a city. A city needs some amenities which I am afraid are lacking here. Public transport being the worst! Even friends staying in Siliguri since birth find travelling from Hakimpara to Pradhannagar tiresome and "the distance too much". Without a decent transport system, Siliguri can

Satyen Bose in his seventies. ( Image: Google Images) Satyen Bose served in Dhaka for about 25 years. Here, he initiated a X ray Crystallography unit, even fabricating and designing his own equipment and did some excellent work on the structure of crystals. He also researched radio waves. As one biographer states” “In 1938 Bose investigated the problem of total reflection of radio waves in the ionosphere. It is said that it was M. N. Saha who induced Bose to look into this problem. To quote one of Bose’s colleagues Dr. Satish Ranjan Khastgir: “Prof. Saha had once come to Dacca from Allahabad. He gave a lecture in the Physics Department. He addressed a huge gathering at the Curzon Hall. Saha spoke these problems relating to reflection of radio waves from the ionosphere on which he was working. He asked his friend Bose to work out a solution for an intricate problem like this. Appleton had given three conditions for the reflection of radio waves; Saha introduced a fourth one based

Bose and Einstein In Berlin: Image courtesy: Google Images. The Dhaka University was founded in 1921 and he was invited to join the Physics Department there as a Reader. It was a wrench for him to leave his beloved Kolkata as his grandson has recorded, but he did decide to take up the post and he wrote to his friend Meghnad Saha from there ( Saha hailed from that part of Bengal) “ it has been well over a month since I moved to your part of the country. Work has not yet started. Your Dacca College had quite a few things but due to utter neglect they are in a bad way. Perhaps I need not elaborate. On the table of the sahibs are scattered lots of Nicol prisms, lens and eye-pieces. It would require a lot of research to determine which one belongs to which apparatus. We do suffer from lack of journals here, but the authorities of the new university have promised to place order for some of them along with their back numbers. Talk is going on about having a separate science library.” Ho

Satyen Bose as a young researcher. ( Image courtesy: Wikepedia) This is part of a fairly long article on Satyendranath Bose, one of the long list of men and women who made Kolkata what it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have broken it up into three parts. The other parts will be posted in subsequent weeks. I had a friend who used to claim that when walking towards his North Calcutta home on his way back from school, he often used to notice a senior citizen with a thatch of white hair sitting on the verandah of one of the houses of the locality. He never realized that this man was none other than Satyendra Nath Bose, whose name has been immortalized in science by the particle boson and who together with Einstein developed the Bose Einstein statistics which revolutionized the study of small particles. Bose was born in Kolkata on New Year’s Day in 1894. Their ancestral home was in the Nadia district. His father, Surendranath Bose worked for the East Indian Railw