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MEETING NUCLEAR SCIENTIST DR RAJA RAMANNA OVER LUNCH AT BARC

By P.T. Bopanna

When I was a post-graduate student of journalism in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the late 1970s, my cousin Satish Ganapathy, working with Tata Electric, invited me to join him on a tour of the world famous Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Satish, well known for his public relations skills, was a friend of Dr Raja Ramanna (in picture), who was then the head of the BARC.

It was a rare privilege to visit BARC, as entry was barred to the top secret nuclear reactor where India’s nuclear programme was being executed.

It was a pleasant surprise when Satish told me that Dr Ramanna had asked us to join him for lunch.

During those years, Dr Ramanna was a national hero as he was instrumental in carrying out India’s first nuclear explosion in 1974 at Pokhran, much before the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government carried out the second nuclear test.

The world came to know about India’s first nuclear test on a May morning when pictures of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi inspecting the test site with Dr Ramanna were flashed on front pages around the world.

Now coming back to the lunch part, I was delighted to be seated near Dr Ramanna at the dining table. He narrated several anecdotes involving world leaders visiting BARC.

He recalled that when Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, visited Bombay, he was asked whether he wanted to visit BARC, or actor Raj Kapoor’s studio. The Indonesian strongman, known for his flamboyance, preferred to visit the studio!

Dr Ramanna was the one who was mainly responsible for putting India on the nuclear map of the world. India failed to celebrate the birth anniversary of this great nuclear scientist on January 28 in a befitting manner.  

Source: Round and About with P.T. Bopanna, Rolling Stone Publications, 2022.

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