 Good afternoon and welcome everybody to HBCSE, especially Professor Arvind Kumar, our guest of honor today and Professor Jaram Chengaloo, Director of GIFR, Dr. Anil Kakodkar, former AEC Chairman, President of Bhattacharya Director HBCSE and all our friends. It's lovely to see so many of our friends and colleagues and ex-colleagues. Of course Arvind Kumar's name always brings in people. So no wonder. So we will begin this special session of the Symposium on Physics Education which is dedicated to the celebration of Professor Arvind Kumar's life and career on the occasion of his turning 80, which he did about a month ago and to start the proceedings I would invite our Center Director Professor Arnab Bhattacharya to come on stage and welcome the audience. Good afternoon. Wake up, wake up. It's a privilege to stand here and it's an absolute delight and honor to welcome you all to this wonderful event that we're going to have. It's a real, you know, pleasure that we can honor the legacy of Professor Arvind Kumar to building this institution to his role in the development of HBCSE over the last 50 years in setting up what it is right now. It's also great. I'm delighted to see that there are so many colleagues old and new who have come together just in the lunch break when people were coming in. It's nice to see that, you know, an event like this provides the opportunity for people who otherwise have probably not met each other after the pandemic to really come here, get together. It feels really nice that we are catalyzing. This event is catalyzing bringing together people. It's very difficult to describe the achievements and the legacy of Professor Arvind Kumar in a sentence, in brief. Anvesh will be doing the honors in a bit. But, you know, person whose knowledge of physics is absolutely impeccable. A passionate teacher whose classes, you know, the old study circles for physics, etc., legendary. A person who led, whose visionary leadership of the center, the architect of the Olympiad program for the country in the sciences, to have the foresight to set up NIOS, the Initiative for Undergraduate Science, which we realize today is so much more important than what we may have realized over all these years as the new education policy talks about universities having undergraduate education, you know, integrated into them. So to have the foresight for that, I think it's amazing. And the combination of all of this, someone who managed very deftly, all the difficulties of, you know, leading an institution with diplomacy, with tact, with whatever and got things done, is Professor Arvind Kumar A.K., and I really refuse to believe that number 80. Let me tell you why. I know his birthday was sometime, unwaisted, about a month back, but on the 9th of November, A.K. turned 25 years younger. And this I saw for myself. This is the day the NCRT called many of us to say that, okay, now, you know, the next generation of textbooks, etc., have to be written, we are gonna have a meeting. And I never saw anybody so excited about this and so energetic as A.K. You know, he decided, no, of course, we have to do this. This is such a great opportunity. I'm going to be there. Somebody who's 80? No, not at all. A.K. You have many, many, many years of great productivity and success ahead of you. And today, let's join in celebrating that. It's a celebration, folks. You know, thot as a joj di kao. Smile, be happy, and all the best. Over to you. Thank you, Arnab. I will now request Prasad Jairam Chingalur and Prasad Savita Ladge, Dean HBCSE to please come on stage and Prasad Arvind Kumar, if you can come on stage for a few minutes, to greet Prasad Arvind Kumar on this special occasion. With deep gratitude and appreciation for your pioneering and sustained contributions to science education and visionary leadership of the Centre. Okay. So, of course, it's A.K.'s birthday, not today, but a month ago. So, there has to be some small gift, a very small token of our appreciation on behalf of HBCSE. And to give that to A.K., I will invite some of our colleagues who are presently working at HBCSE and also with whom A.K. shared a long time at HBCSE. So, please come on stage. Sumana, Ghazanan, Sandhya, Rasam, please, do we have a bit, just a minute. Sorry, I'm just getting the list out. Yes. Mahesh Bhavne, Andy Deshmukh, Suresh Pathare, Anupama, Meena, okay, is a pednecker here. No. Shenoy, yeah, Shweta, and Manoj, you have to come out of there. Lale, yeah. So, of course, I mean, A.K., as you all know, that lives a very frugal life. He doesn't have many needs, et cetera, but he loves to read books. So, we thought it would be a good idea to give him a couple of books. So, please gather together, please. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Yes. Now, you can go back. We'll call you again. We'll call you again. Okay. So, we'll start with a few things now, and we will take a break at around 4 o'clock because I expect this session to be long because there are many people who have expressed a desire to speak on this occasion. So, we will take a short tea break for about 20 minutes at around 4 o'clock. But before that, Pritesh, if you can come on stage. Second one, sir. Yeah. So, I must mention that we have some friends and colleagues, ex-colleges of A.K. who are joining online. So, we are on Zoom as well. So, it might take a few minutes time every time to adjust these things. Yeah. Can you hide it, please? Or it's okay. Yeah. Thank you. So, as, oops, as Arnab said, that it is very difficult to describe A.K.'s contribution to this center, to TIFR, the larger institute, and to the country in general in a brief manner. Nevertheless, I will give it a try and I will just take you through some of the most important aspects of his life and career. I don't know. I'm sure I will not be able to do justice because I, I mean, there are many others in the audience who have known him for much, much longer. But still, let's give it a try. So, yeah. So, I title this, Arvind Kumar, a celebration of life and a life to celebrate because I think looking at his life, you can see how he really gets or takes the best of life. And that's his motto. He's always, I mean, alive and doing something and that's, that's the celebration of life. Okay. Yeah. I'm trying this. Yeah. Okay. So, Arvind Kumar was born on 15 October 1943 in Delhi and he did his initial school education in a vernacular school in Hindi medium in Old Delhi. He won the then prestigious All India Entrance Scholarship in 1960 for college education and went on to do his B.S.C. Honours in Physics in 1963 from Hans Raj College in Delhi University. And he joined the Atomic Energy Establishment, as it was called at that time, time training school 1963 to 1964 as a physics trainee. And later, one year later joined the theory group at TIFR. This picture is kindly provided by Kravinozani and even he doesn't know exactly when it was taken. I asked AK even he doesn't remember but it must be somewhere in the 1960s when he was just a young student. I still haven't. Yeah, you still haven't. Yeah. Maybe we can have the lights off here please. So, he completed his PhD in TIFR from TIFR in 1969 in theoretical particle physics. His guide was Professor Vinendra Singh, who later became the director of TIFR and he acknowledges that his overall mentor was Professor B.M. Udgaonkar, who was then the head of the theory group and who later played a pivotal role in the founding of HBCSE. And then after his PhD, he went on to do his postdoctoral work at CERN Geneva from 1969 to 1970 and then the University of London, Westfield College for two years more 1970 to 71. So, this picture, it's taken in 1967, must be during his PhD years. I'll just enlarge the picture and I don't know whether you can spot AK here but he is here. Third, this is AK. This picture has been kindly provided by Oindrila Rai Choudhury from TIFR archives. There's one more person in this room who is in this picture. I don't know whether he remembers. This is Professor Abbas Rangwala. These I know because these are in the caption of the picture. And this is Yotiri Nambu and this is B.M. Udgaonkar among many other people. Okay, let's go ahead. So, during his postdoc period at Westfield College, he gave a short lecture course on a topic in particle theory, the Iconal Approximation and this he says was a turning point because this is the first time that he had an experience of teaching and he decided on a career involving teaching theoretical physics. So, this was one turning point in his life and this picture is taken in Europe as you can easily imagine. You don't imagine AK like this leaning against a car and all that. So, this is a very interesting picture. And this is of course his wife and he was newly married at that time. And then he came back to India and from 1971 to 1983 he was at the Mumbai University. At that time I think it was called University of Mumbai and University Department of Physics or UDP as they call it. And there he taught nearly every core course in theoretical physics or MSc physics and several domains beyond his specialization of particle physics. And as you shall see that this has been the hallmark of AK's career, the breadth of things that he has done. And during this time he also supervised two students in PhD in two unrelated areas. One is quantum black hole physics. We are all familiar with the name Professor Bala Ayer who has also joined online and I am sure he is listening to this. And another one on atomic and optical physics and the student was Dr. Marina de Souza who is presently in the US. And during this time he wrote many teaching materials at the BSc level. And if you look at his publication record you realize that he wrote numerous expository science articles in IAPT bulletin and science today. Including the Einstein Centenary year in 1979, a commemorative article on that occasion. He also devised a 30 minute radio program for all India radio called The Grain of Sand in 1981. And he regards this period, the UDP period as foundational to his later academic career. And many things started from here as we shall see. And he came to HBCSE in 1984 that was the HBCSE old campus. And he started this homibaba study circle in physics which ran for a staggering, here you can see 14 years and later again he did it for two years. So for 16 years without break. Every Saturday, right? Every Sunday. Thursday and Sundays. So many of you have attended that and without fail this ran for so many years. And he taught everything in the undergraduate and postgraduate level. And these were weekly sessions for BSc students and in this he was assisted by Professor H.C. Pradhan who is also there and Professor Sris Bharve. He was also due to come, I don't know whether he has, oh yes, okay. So they were assisting him. And this time he started PhD supervision in a new area. This was perhaps his first foray into educational research on mathematical modeling of educational processes by Manjusha Deshpande. She is also perhaps in the audience. She was due to come. And now one very important thing that happened during this time is the NCRT class 11 and 12 physics textbooks were written. And Professor Arvind Kumar was a key member of the team that wrote. There are others also, Professor Rajaram Nithyananda is here. And especially for the teachers who use these NCRT textbooks. So these are of course the older edition but in the later editions much of it has remained the same with some reorientation and some editing. But the core part has remained the same. And the biggest contribution to this perhaps apart from writing was that he devised about 1000 new exercises. All the exercises in the NCRT class 11 and 12 textbooks were written by, were devised, almost all of them were devised by Professor Arvind Kumar. And we are still using them. And this is perhaps very little known. And I asked you people a few days ago, some people that you know who, we were discussing about the NCRT problems. And we asked that you know who devised them. And I told you that I will tell you two days later. So this is a novel feature which has survived all the later editions. Even in today's editions these problems are there. He devised another 30-minute radio program for AIR called Compliments to Complimentarity on Neil's board during this time. And he says that all this in a sense was based on his earlier teaching experience at the university. And then from that point onwards from 1984 onwards when he came here, he was totally immersed in HBCSE's work of which equity was a primary pillar. And he engaged deeply in the field visits to rural areas along with V.G. Kulkarni who was at that time the director of HBCSE. Prasar Pradhan, Prasar Agarkar, Prasar Gambhir and many other colleagues. So again all these pictures we really don't have the exact dates or the exact context always. So it looks like from that period. And he had many field visits in the program led by Prasar SC Agarkar. And he says that this removed his misconception that he had the school science education is just a dilute version of higher science education. And he realized that it is a whole new ball game and it has to be treated differently. And during this time he also got involved in the remedial secondary mathematics part. So one to four with Agarkar and R.M. Bhagwat and H.C. Pradhan. And he also wrote materials in Marathi based on his intuition and experience at that time. And he was a resource person in numerous nurture and orientation programs throughout. So I mean throughout his career he has been doing teaching and writing all the time and in multiple languages. In research and development activities during his HBCSE years from 1992 to 2008 just started a little before coming to HBCSE. So he turned to the professional field of physics education research which he is still involved in. And one of the earlier works was his PR work on student conceptions in Galilean relativity with Jayashree Ramdas and Shri Shri Barve. And he also wrote co-curricular materials in physics at the beginning college level with Shri Shri Barve. Many of you are familiar with the books How and Why in Physics. The three volumes. Wonderful books if you have not seen them. And he extended his intellectual interest at this time. And coming from a core physics background. He went on to give courses for PhD students and others at HBCSE on learning theories. Great education is cognitive development and later philosophy of science. So he shifted gears very quickly. And then he became center director in 1994. And he retired as center director in 2008 a 14 year tenure during which many things happened at HBCSE. I will not have time to go through the details of all. I will just mention some of the major initiatives that he took upon himself and in which he was assisted by his numerous colleagues who took leading roles at HBCSE. Among them the foundation curriculum along with Professor Chitra Natarajan and Sugra Chunawala. The homibaba curriculum in primary science with Jayashree Ramdas and Jyotsana Vijapurkar. The homibaba curriculum in primary mathematics led by K. Subramaniam. The collaborative program with Atomic Energy Education Society. Then the tribal education project led by S. C. Agarkar. And who is here in this picture for those of you and this is Professor Gambhir. Here we have, I hope you recognize Samang Vaia who is here in the audience. Looks very different now. And this is P. R. Satnavisa our previous administrative officer. And also the portable science and mathematics laboratory along with V. G. Gambhir, K. Subramaniam and Shweta Naik. He also was one of the main persons behind this history of science exhibition which is a wonderful exhibition on history of science. Temporarily it's undergoing renovation and it will be reinstalled. It is edited by G. Nagarjun and Professor Vin Kumar. And this is how the exhibition looked at this time. This is Professor Arun Grover, Sudha Mutti having a look at it. And the other important exhibition which was created at that time was the Gender and Science exhibition by Sugra Chunawala which was in one of the adjoining rooms here. So this is the Professor Shobha Bhattachari Nagar writing that here. And also the biennial international conference on STEM research called Epistemi was started during his time. I don't know if this is a picture from Epistemi but this is many of his colleagues, all of whom are almost present here in the audience today. So one of the major things during his tenure at HBCSC which changed to a great deal the nature of work done at HBCSC and also put HBCSC very much in the public eye was the Olympiad program which is a very big program and which as you know still continues today with great success. And Professor Vijay Singh talked about the origins of the Olympiad program in his talk earlier today. And so this started from 1997 the Science Olympiad program with the international participation in the physics Olympiad in 1998. And quickly from 1999 we started participating in the Chemistry Olympiad from 2000 in the Biology Olympiad. The Astronomy Olympiad also started in we participating in 1999 and later the Junior Science Olympiad also we participated from 2007. And HBCSC was made the nodal center of the country in Mathematics and Sciences. So this put HBCSC on a very important national role. And we also hosted the International Olympiads in Chemistry, Astronomy and Biology during his tenure. So these are some pictures from ICH of the Chemistry Olympiad. This is from IBO I think the previous year where he is receiving the IBO whatever it is which is to be carried. This is the IBO team the previous year this is the IEO 2006. The other major program that he initiated at HBCSC is the National Initiative on Undergraduate Science, NIUS from 2004. And this I think it would be fair to say that it was almost completely a case-brained child. He conceived of it, he wrote the entire proposal and got it through DIE approval and all that. Of course he was helped by other colleagues but this originated from him. And this extended HBCSC's domain of work from school education or high school education into undergraduate education. And this was again a game-changing affair because it also gave us two new buildings which we are still using including a very big hostel where many of you are staying. And without these many of HBCSC's programs that are being held today would have been impossible. And so that was again a very big contribution. Yeah, here also there are I think Dr. Sathya Murti who has joined online I think he is here and some others are also here. So what happened was that these major programs elevated institutional status of HBCSC within TIFR and outside. And from a constituent unit of TIFR HBCSC became a national center of TIFR at par with other national centers of TIFR in terms of the institutional structure. And when TIFR became a deemed university at that time a separate subject board on science education was formed. And so all this was led by what happened under Professor Arvind Kumar's leadership and he had a key role to play in this. Of course most of you know but for the others this is Professor S.S. Jha the then director of TIFR. And also during this time the substantial upgradation of HBCSC infrastructure and four new buildings were added. The two hostels what we today call the old hostel at that time it was called the Olympiad hostel and then the NIUS hostel. And the two office buildings the Olympiad and the NIUS. So this allowed HBCSC to grow in many directions in with new labs and other facilities. So this was a huge contribution. And on the national scale HBCSC came to be regarded as a premier place in the country for R&D and orientation activity in science education at school and colleges. And he also in recognition of his contributions to all to all these efforts. He was also the author of the co-author of several national reports very important national reports related to science education. He was a member of the National Steering Committee for the National Curriculum Framework 2005. And he chaired the focus group on on teaching science. Yeah so this is I think then education minister Muli Monajoshi visiting HBCSC. This is Dr. Chidambaram the EC chairman Professor Jha here. And this is J.J. Bhaba who was the chair of the TIFR council that time. So now AK retired as HBCSC director in 2008. But his retirement if anything just increased his activities mainly into because he is now free from administration. So he plunged absolutely I mean with full force into academics again. And he which was all the time alive as you saw he did a lot of academic work even as director but now he had even more time. And he played a key academic role in the initial phase of UMDAE CBS. Mumbai in the setting up of that Amya and Sangeetar here they know all this history and Nizer Bhuvaneshwar. So the first entrance test the nest and then the curriculum development AK had a very very significant contribution in those. And he started teaching regularly at CBS of course for many years from 2008 to 2020 he taught several courses at CBS. And of course he remained involved and engaged with the research activities in physics education at HBCSC which continues to date. And among the major works after retirement here he had a student who completed a very nice PhD on cognitive studies in relativity. And this was perhaps the first detailed study in the world on student pitfalls in the basic themes of general relativity. This was done in 2011 along with Professor Savita Lardge he wrote a book on chemical thermodynamics which is available on our website. A very nice book especially for teachers who are present here you can consult this book. And currently he is also involved in PR in content specific epistemology of physics and his disciplinary practices along with Mashud and myself. So if you look at his career and his range of work the first thing you notice is that the wide range of research from physics to PR. So in his initial papers during his student and postdoc days were in quantum field theory and black holes and things like that during these of the 1970s and the 80s and the 90s. And you can see after coming to HBCSC and so he is writing in Galilean relativity for frames of references and alternative conceptions. This is with Joshi Namdas and at the same time parallely doing core physics also this is with Vikram Atle. And then more and more into physics education research. So he covered a wide range of research in his entire career. This is also evident in his writings from the school to the UG level in every level he has written books and in multiple languages is written in English is written in Hindi is written in Marathi. So that's again a very wide range and various kinds of books on various topics from basic textbooks to how and why to fractals and what not. He has received many awards and recognitions among them. The Indian Nuclear Society Science Communication Award in 2003. The Godavari Gaurav Award in the category of GAN from Kusumagraj Pratishthan Maharashtra in 2006. The Tuas Regional Prize in School Curriculum and Materials Development. The National Award for Science Popularization among Children by the National Council for Science and Technology Communication of the Government of India. This was an award for HBCC which happened under his directorship in 1999. He's a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and he also received the INSAR Teacher Award in 2014. And the Government of India felicitated him with the Padmasri Award in 2010 for his contributions to science education. So I'll just finish with some pictures. So this is a picture I think where I mean so from the left I mean many of our past HBCC colleagues are here and even I think yeah. So I'll not name all of them but this is I think Mr. Raul, this is Prasad Jha, this is Prasad Chitre, Prasad Narlikar and this person I'm sorry I can't really recognize. This is VG Kulkarni and this is Kadam I think our previous driver and others I no sorry this is Joshi and this is Kadam anyway. And this is of course Avin Kumar if you don't recognize him he looked a bit different at that time. And this is Mr. Kurgaoka, this is Mr. Mastaka and this is again again some of the people in the audience. Prasad Radharam Nithyananda is here, Swapan Ghosh is here, Abbas Rangwala and Mukunda they are all here in this refresher course on quantum mechanics in 2014. Some more pictures. This is Prasad Vilendra Singh who was the director of TFR and also AK's PhD guide. This is J.J. Bhava the then chair of the TFR council, AK and this is Prasad VG Kulkarni. This is Yashpal, of course we say Yashpal, Shobha Bhattacharya and Musan Sir Barma who were the directors of TFR. Yeah, this slide I wanted to show you because this is of course J.V. Narlikar and here you can't read it but there are two letters. This first one coming from, so Narlikar was that time the director of AYUKA and he is writing to AK under official letters one directed to writing to another. Usually this is about some official matters or some administrative matters but he is asking a question. He is looking for the answer to the question, why is the color of the tire black? That's the question that is put in this letter and here AK is replying again to Narlikar with his explanation which he acknowledges Prasad Chitranatharajan who has given this and AK of course in his usual style says, I will read it out he says that I am aware that the answer does not go into the basic organic or structural chemistry of why or how the carbon black does of what it is known to do empirically. I have meanwhile consulted some organic chemistry friends of mine for this kind of explanation and would pass it on to you if I get one. So very unusual exchange between two directors but those are the ages I don't know whether today's directors also exchange such things on official letters. So anyway, so this is again I mean this is of course B.M.Udgaoka who was one of the key persons behind HBCSE. Dr. Kakotkar is here, here of course Prasad Rangwala and here some of his colleagues I think Prasad Sudhir Panse is here and others who are there in some conference I believe. Yeah, some more pictures of teaching or giving lectures. This is of in with HBCSE colleagues. I am sure I don't have to identify these people for HBCSE friends. So these are various friends. Again very unusual picture of AK. This is I think in some conference in some party, epistemic goa. So goa brings out different personalities right? So you can see also AK dancing or at least supporting the dance. This I think is the transition of the directorship from AK to HCP in the director's office surrounded by many colleagues from HBCSE. And yeah, so here again Manoj who is behind here, Shenoy and then here is Gajanan, here is Meena, Sumana, Smita and Sandhya. Yeah, some more pictures. Yeah, so if we look at AK's whole career I think what strikes me most is the depth and the breadth of his work in research. He has gone from core physics to physics education research in various and within core physics also a breadth of ideas. He has been teaching continuously nearly 50 years of teaching experience at the university, at CBS and at various countless programs at HBCSE. The Homi Baba study circle which has benefited countless students in Bombay and around and it ran it for 17 years. And he has taught in diverse settings. He has not just in institutional settings. He has gone to rural areas, he has gone to semi urban areas and given many lectures. And he has been writing prolifically. He has written so many research papers, he has written pedagogic articles and books, popular science books, etc. And of course perhaps the most, one of the most important thing is the institution building and the national impact that he has left in the whole scene. So he has a transformative leadership of HBCSE for 14 years which brought in so many new things to HBCSE and made HBCSE what it is today. He had a big contribution to that. And he helped set up the graduate school in science education. Then the Olympians in the United States have already talked about the authorship of the NCRT Physics textbook which has a very big national impact. So many students have benefited from these textbooks. And of course the contributions to KVPIC, CBS and NISR since inception. So that's what I just tried to summarize his work in a few slides. So one can go on and on. But I will stop here and let others do the talking. Before that thanks for the pictures which came from these people. And so again, I mean I would end with this thing that he is a celebration of life and it's indeed a life to celebrate. So before I call on the others I will just, yeah. So I will just, so the others have four minutes. I will not take four minutes, but I will take a few minutes because I am perhaps one of the people in this room who has the least overlap with A.K. or working experience. But because I was actually what I found out recently was that I was the last permanent member that was recruited under his directorship. So I officially have the least amount of overlap officially with you. But I have been working with him since then after his retirement. And right now we work very closely together for several years. And I'm sure the others will paint a much better picture than I can. But I will just say one or two things that strikes me whenever we talk, I have my interactions with A.K. The first thing that comes across is the extreme dedication to anything that he does. And that can be, I mean writing a paper that can be just writing some two few lines or something. He doesn't like procrastination and that's one of the things where we have great differences. But A.K. is something, so he will send, okay, I will send you. And by the time I reach from here to my home at TIFR, it has come. He has already finished it. And this kind of dedication and when he starts, so you can see that the wide range of things he has done. So obviously he is, I mean doing a lot of things. But one thing that I noticed, he is that he doesn't do too many things at the same time. He just starts one thing and he finishes it and he works tirelessly behind it all the time till it is finished. And once that is done, he immediately jumps to the next one and finishes that. And that's his working style. And he says that also, now I will completely, I will not look at anything else. I will just do that. I think this means, so his usual, sorry, this is a little personal, but if I may share. So he will send you a WhatsApp message at 1.45 in the night because he's still working. So his working hours are, I think, typically from 11 o'clock in the morning till 2 o'clock in the night. And I've tried to advise him time and again that perhaps this is not so good at your age. But he says, no, no, I have busted that myth that early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy and wise. And one can see it, of course, in practice. So he's a tireless worker. That's the first thing that comes across. I mean, any work, he will just work tirelessly till it's finished and he doesn't wait for the others to contribute or anything. The other thing is the self-effacing nature. Although he does so much work, he never puts himself in front. During the physics Olympiad that we hosted here, we requested him to be in the academic committee if possible to chair it and he declined. But he said, but whatever physics feedback you want, I will give you. You just bring the questions to me and I will give you feedback. But on one condition only, you cannot put my name anywhere. Nobody must know and I don't want my name anywhere. But I will give you the feedback and that's exactly what he did. He gave very detailed feedback on all the questions that we showed him. So that's the kind of work that he does. And the other thing that I will like to say is he's extremely persuasive. So if you have an argument with AK about anything, you're sure from the beginning that you will finally lose it. Because you say something and he says something and you get the feeling that you are winning this argument. And at some point, AK out of the hat will say something so incontrovertible that the argument cannot go any further. And this we have seen him in his capacity as director also and even now in various arguments on politics, on sports and anything. He will somehow find some argument that will win the argument. He's very persuasive and of course in all that I said it must have been clear that he knows how to take people along and to work with so many different people. I mean from many esteemed colleagues who are sitting here to down to much younger people like me and who have very different working styles than him. Sorry for that. But he manages to work with everybody. That's what I have found out. There's nobody who cannot work with AK. He has that capacity to take people along. So thank you AK for everything and for the guidance and the mentorship that you have given all of us and especially to me personally. And wish you a very happy, healthy and productive life. Thank you. So now what we'll do is that there are many people here who would like to say things about Professor Avinkumar. So I have a list and there are many people already on the list. And then I have a second list of people who have said that if possible I also want to say something. So we'll see. So one request that I have is that because there are at least 30 people to speak. So I request every speaker to limit your contribution to less than four minutes and hours not counting the transition and the breaks. So first I would like to invite on stage Dr. Anil Kakodkar who has been of course AK's batch mate from the training school if I am not wrong. And a long-term colleague. Yes. Well first of all Dr. Arvind Kumar compliments and let's say that although it is not your official birthday today but many happy returns of the day. There are many things we share together. But one thing which I had not recognized or realized so far is that we also share the initials which are so common because I am used to imagining if somebody writes AK it is me. So today is another reality dawned on me. But you are right. We are batch mates. But if I had to recount the list of things we share he of course as the bio data said he studied in Delhi. I studied in Madhya Pradesh but both studied outside Maharashtra. So Dr. Arvind Kumar we worked particularly when he was the center director here. There are plenty of occasions to talk this program which he initiated call it NIUS later even the CEBS and more importantly when it came to devising the national entrance test for admissions both at NYSER as well as CEBS were all very singularly dependent on Dr. Arvind Kumar and the Homi Habas Center. Dr. Pradhan also is here. So there are many things I can go on but I would save a few minutes out of the four minutes limit that you have put but I come here only to express my gratitude, express respects to a dear friend and wish him all the well in years to come. Thank you very much. Thank you Dr. Kokodkar. Sorry about the time limit but you have finished much less than four minutes. So we have several people online are those people already there or we will come back to that. So maybe Prof. Rajanam Nithyananda. So Prof. Arvind Kumar entered my frame of reference through the black hole work that you had about through my colleague Bala here. You will hear from Bala separately. So I just want to say it's a little vicarious excitement for us. It's a bit like seeing Rohit Sharma hit a six. You didn't hit it but you feel somehow the Aapnaad Meenakya hai. Anyway then of course the next thing I heard is that he had moved into science education. Of course you have seen the whole trajectory. So I had a theory about it. Of course he was obviously doing very well in this area but from what I know maybe the kind of things that we do did not satisfy his philosophical explanations and also urged to be useful practically. And I think he's found a calling in which both these have been amplified. So our real overlap was in this NCRP textbook that you heard about, the early work in the late 80s, early 90s. So I'll let you behind the scenes here. I think Prof. Vijay Bide, if I'm not mistaken, decided to assemble a team. I think of the team as having N minus one very eminent physicists. Some of them were from Bangalore so they wrote Meen also. So that became N. And then to keep them all in check to ground them or ground this high voltage group, Prof. Rajan Kumar was there. So we debated everything but he became our critic, our conscience in spite of which of course such a group will head in many directions. Anyway the book was put together. We had a lot of feedback from teachers. I have to say it had mixed reviews. I did go to the house of one of my TIFR colleagues and he very proudly introduced me to his daughter saying he wrote the wave optics chapter and she didn't talk to me after that. But the one thing which has got fantastic reviews and we heard about that is the problem set. And the reason is each of us thought we will devise problems for our own chapter and somewhere at some point we realized that it had all been done. So that's as far as the textbook was concerned. And of course we again were together in the later edition. In the first edition I think we were the babies of the team and then in the later edition we were the sort of grey senior people in the team but never mind. Lots of further overlap. As my t-shirt tells you I joined TIFR, the nuclear family if you like. And then you know NCRA being just around the corner. I found, someone said he's very persuasive, found myself being sucked into things like the Olympiad program. So let me just cut it short here and say Arvind, thanks so much for everything that I've learned from you. I mean the rigor with which you've approached teaching and anything, setting a question paper and so on. And thanks also for sort of sucking me into this very vibrant community and I've learned a lot from all of them. Thank you President Nithyananda. And now we'll have someone who has joined online, President Bala Ayer who is a PhD student. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Yes, dear Arvind, I thank the organizers for the kind invitation to be part of this celebration of a wonderful and long career. I wish I could be there in person to recall these memories and convey warm regards to you from me and Suman on your 80th birthday. Thank you for your insights in physics, molding our values towards it and for being a role model of academic integrity. So, objectively simple, yet so challenging to emulate. I did my MSA in UDP during 74-76. I still recall the pleasure and end-the-life treatment experience from your lectures on beta decay or Sunday lectures on mathematical physics from Daneri or nuclear physics from Desalete and Freshback. I worked with Arvind Kumar from a PhD during 76-79 on issues of Dirac field theory in current regular space time. How did it all begin? My personal interaction with A.K. began during MSC Part 2 when A.K. fellow student Roy and I jointly read through Derrick Laudan's book on tensor calculus and general relativity. Sometime later A.K. mentioned he would be willing to take me as a PhD student if I was interested. A.K.'s research career was earlier in particle physics and I was his first PhD student at UDP interested in general relativity. He then took me to the library and we browsed through physics reports. He took two of them, one on Solitons by Raja Raman and another on quantum field theory in current space time by Bryce Divid. We went over both of them and were reading through the literature cited in the latter on the paper in Physiology by Larry Ford on the continuation of the scalar field in the curve background. Arvind then turned to me and posed what would happen if you had a Dirac equation in such a background and investigating this became my baby step into research. In its treatment I found we used almost every technique that A.K. had taught us in his different courses. When we did a participative treatment the film problem could not be solved since it required the separability of Dirac equation in the curve background. We were not up to it. However there was a question detail after completion of this work Arvind was invited to TOFR to talk about this and at the end of the talk L.K. Pandit told us that in the proceedings of Royal Society on Display Chandrashrikar had separated the Dirac equation in the curve background. We were excited but realized that the separation was done using the Newman-Pendross formalism that we were not familiar with. To bridge the gap we worked through Weinberg's book on general relativity and it took us almost a year to translate the Newman-Pendross treatment to the standard Dirac form and use it in my thesis. This simple quantum mechanical problem led to issues related to super radiance and hocking radiation for curve black holes. In Chandrash book on mathematical theory of black holes it came out during my PhD and it was memorable to find a minor reference to the paper by me and Arvind in that magnum opus. It was so versatile that I have been mentioned that after me he guided Marina on a very different area related to two photon states and later on moved to research in physics pedagogy. Arvind used to have his celebrated weekend physics study circle for undergrad and it was the role model for my involvement in the reap activity in the Bangalore planetarium over the weekends. From watching Arvind in action whether in teaching as editor of the concept bulletin introducing atomic structure of matter by a series of queries, discussing Herman Hess's glass bead game, devising problems for the NCIT textbook or laying the road map for participation in science olympiacs. I am proud that if anything is worth doing it is worth doing well and importantly in time and it always require giving up some other thing that you are involved in. Thanks again Arvind with fond memories and warm regards and best wishes for good health and active intellectual life in the coming years. Thank you very much. Thank you Professor Bala here. We will move on to the next speaker. Professor H.C. Pradhan who was a centre director after Professor Arvind Kumar. Mr. Professor Arvind Kumar and members of this August audience who have assembled here out of love, admiration and respect for him. First of all my apologies that I had to read my speech thanks to my not being so well enough. I consider myself extremely privileged and fortunate that in my life I met and been a friend, Kale you are associated with many stalwarts of science in India. One foremost such person is Professor Arvind Kumar. I met Professor Arvind Kumar aka as we normally used to refer to him for the first time in 1975 at the university department of physics where he was a member of the staff and I was a visiting teacher. A.K. Vash known to be the best physics teacher in the university with thorough mastery over core physics subjects and our acquaintance soon developed into friendship. I had returned from abroad with a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics, had three years of post-doctoral research experience and joined RIA in RIA college in Mumbai because of a strong desire to teach undergraduate physics back at home. In 1980 I moved to Western Regional Instrumentation Centre at the University of Mumbai WRISC. However neither RIA college nor WRISC provided the environment that I was looking for and in October 1988 I switched over to Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education which was the place I was in search of. From there I never moved anywhere else until my retirement in June 2011. A.K. also had meanwhile left UDP, joined HBCSE in 1984 and started the famous Homi Bhabha study circle for physics undergraduate students. A novel and unique experiment in student island nurture. I found a study circle attractive and therefore used to participate and help in some of its sessions. Since I joined HBCSE in 1988, A.K. and I became colleagues. The then and also the founder-director of Homi Bhabha Centre for Swiji Kulkarni whose name has been given to this auditorium already knew me for many years and he had been after me for joining HBCSE. The clinching reason however for me to do so was undoubtedly the presence of Professor Arvind Kumar at the centre at that time. Professor Arvind Kumar's teaching prowess always amazed me. His subject knowledge was deep and thorough. His explanations were always clear, perspicacious and yet lucid. He never uses, in fact, never needs gimmicks to be in good books of students. His arguments are always strong, non-trivial and at times serious. Yet students always gravitate toward him. The value is teaching. They attained his classes not so much to enjoy the classes, but to learn the subject. After his retirement from HBCSE, A.K. taught almost for a decade various core and advanced physics courses at the integrated level. The integrated MSC program of the U.M., University of Mumbai and EIA Collaboration Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. At this institution too, he was the most sought after teacher. Professor A.K. is a first-rate intellectual. That is why he could easily and effectively make transitions from physics to physics education and from there to cognitive science. Because of his immense teaching experience, his work on students' understanding and their alternative conceptions covered a wide array of physics topics. With the help of one bright student, he impressively handled even students' misconceptions in learning general relativity. Unfortunately, this important work was not appreciated even at HBCSE. His analytical reasoning went beyond teaching and research and extended to decision and policymaking. In my opinion, it was A.K. who established in India science education as a serious discipline. Until he took up the position of centre director of HBCSE, the general impression even at TFR was that science education was more of education than science and was not a strong academic discipline. With the emphasis on the subject, content knowledge that Professor Arvind Kumar introduced, things gradually changed, culminating in the recognition of science education as a faculty in the TFR deemed university. Otherwise, HBCSE, I would fear, however, remained a good science education NGO, but not grown qualitatively. Excellence was now added to equity as HBCSE's goal. In a sense, HBCSE became a model science education institute for the country. A model affiliated of an outstanding research institution like TFR, excellence-oriented programs like olympia training and NIUS naturally evolved from this transition. This model should have been repeated at several other places in the country. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. This could be worth considering for the national education policy 2020 when it is being implemented. I was a witness to the HBCSE transition and I am happy that I could contribute to it whatever way I could. I was a member of the HBCSE Management Committee first and then board later since 1992 and attending the board meetings during the transition period used to be a wonderful, memorable educating experience. I must record here that this desirable change in HBCSE would not have become possible if HBCSE did not have unreserved support from its parent organization, TFR. TFR, which is truly a liberal, intellectually strong and honest organization. A guest teaching promise is reflected also in his books and textbook writing. His book series, How and Why in Physics, which he wrote in collaboration with Dr. Sreej Parve is outstanding and every physics undergraduate student should study it. He excels in preparing questions and exercises. He single-handedly developed the totality of chapter end exercises of higher secondary standard 11 standard 12 physics textbooks for the NCRT published in the late 90s. The quality of these exercises is hardly matched by other higher secondary level physics textbooks in India and perhaps elsewhere in the world too. He contributed significantly to the national education framework 2005 brought out by NCRT. Especially to its part on science education. His thoughts on what science is and how it should be taught are so readable and are a guide to all science teachers. They come from his deep study and understanding of history and philosophy of science. Another striking feature of Ake's personality is that he attracts and what attracts me in particular is that he is a scientist to the core. You will never be able to find a non-scientific or a pseudo-scientific argument in his discourse. Neither does he tolerate any such arguments. He enjoys to work in a workshop mode, group working in a cyclic pattern, planning, writing, checking, discussing, reviewing and rewriting. I immensely enjoyed working with him in this mode for a series of four books on remedial mathematics at the secondary school level. Much of the work on the considerably acclaimed science exhibition, history of science and gender of science that HBCC had developed was also carried out in this manner. To sum up, what HBCC is today is because of Ake. I repeat that I consider myself fortunate that I happen to be Ake's colleague. To me, he has been a friend, philosopher, guide and a guru. I am also lucky that despite serious health issues, I could be here to greet him on the day of his felicitation on completing 80 years and to express my gratitude to him. He has many more years of life, happy, healthy and as fulfilling as ever. Thank you all. Thank you, Mr. Padhan. I would like to invite Mr. Vinod Sani next. Well, Arvind, before I say anything, very many happy returns of the day. Are you able to hear me or? I can speak in this. So many, many happy returns of the day, though belatedly because today is your official birthday. Arvind's real birthday is 15th of October. I happen to be talking to my son and when I mentioned to him that I am going to attend this event, he said convey best wishes even on my behalf. And I'll tell you why. That is because Sobal used to study in the junior college and some of the enrichment programs you supported. Thanks to Dr. Kakotkar and I, we were on the governing council of education society. And of course, Arvind doesn't need any excuse. Physics education epitomizes Arvind's life. So to tell you the truth, this little booklet which has been compiled, I thought does justice to that because it says, Symposium, we forget about physics education at AK80. My mind goes back. Actually, the first time I met Arvind was back in July of 1961. I doubt whether there is anybody who has an older association than mine. And it so happened, Anvesh mentioned this, that Arvind was one of the recipients of all India entrance scholarship. Which used to be offered by Delhi University in those days. It used to be 100 rupees scholarship per month. Our tuition fee was 15 rupees. The room rent used to be 20 rupees and the mess bill used to be about 45 rupees. So you're still left with about 20 rupees at the end of the month and the one was, that was a princely sum. Now Arvind joined the physics honors in Delhi University. Hansraj College happened to be just the conduit because the classes were held in the university campus. And I followed Arvind a year later. I was also lucky to have won that entrance scholarship. So I ended up in Hansraj College hostel and that's how I came to know Arvind. My admiration has simply been going up exponentially ever since. I saw a glimpse of it because when Sapna Sharma was sharing a session and Sahana Murthy was talking about Arvind, her last slide summed it up very well. She wanted to pay tributes to you. And it just crossed my mind, there is a person who for generations has been stimulating people. And from Anvesh's talk, one thing became pretty obvious. You've been doing it passionately. So the only example which comes to my mind, I'll give you one or two incidents which stand out in my memory. We ran a quantum mechanics refresher course at St Xavier's College in South Mumbai. And typical of Arvind, he starts that course, he says, well, this is going to be a course. I'm Arvind Kumar, blah, blah, blah, and then he starts his lecture. No irregular function, nothing of the sort. Arvind was only one thing. Physics should be communicated without any dilution, no extraneous thoughts. So the thought which comes to my mind is apparently Beems and Joshi, the famous singer, went to a meeting or something like that and people were asking him to give a speech. Beems and Joshi said, look, I know of only one thing, that is to sing. So if you ever asked Arvind Kumar, he will also tell you, give you only a lecture on physics because everything else is extraneous according to him. What is so unusual about this sort of an attitude? We have an environment in which retaining that purity, I think is a laudable achievement. And perhaps you have imbibed all those qualities from your mentor and guru, Professor Uddhankar. Several things run through my mind because in the days when I passed out of the training school and joined Atomic Energy Establishment, we used to still go to TIFR often and typically meet Arvind at least once or twice or twice a week. And that is the time I met people like Pradhan, people like Rangavala. And I realized that that purity is actually permeating the entire institution. I think this was the point which Professor Pradhan made. So to retain that purity and communicate that purity is something which is indeed very laudatory. I don't know whether I can cite many examples, but I remember that there was a committee which was constituted by DA Secretary at Anupam Das Gupta used to be one of the members of that. And you know when people make very provocative statements and obviously he was joint secretary R and D, he has to find something is not going right and so on. Arvind had a very patient way of handling all those. He would rebut everything by sheer logic. By the third meeting, Anupam Das Gupta had been converted. He had shed all those criticisms. In fact, in those conversations at times somebody would say, Professor Yashpal would say, you know, you should be teaching how a cycle is the dynamics of a cycle or something. Arvind says very privately, he would say, no, that's a very complex problem. So in fact, you have to develop the concepts through simpler ideas. Here is a person who is immersed in teaching physics. So he knows inside out he would even go looking at the Mufassal areas of Maharashtra, trying to understand the learning impediments and so on. Arvind, I can go on, but I think all I can say is salutations to you. Continue your extraordinary work, which is going to stimulate many more generations of people who would be beneficiaries of your enormous capacity and dedication. God bless you and my best wishes. Thank you, Prasasani. We'll next hear from Professor N. Satyamurthy, who is joining online. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. It is a pleasure and privilege to say a few words about Dr. Arvind Kumar. I got to know him, but not exactly by accident. For some reason, I was made a member of some committee of the HBCSE. Then I started interacting with him and I didn't know why I was there, but every meeting was enjoyable and I had nothing much to say. Until one day he surprised me by asking me to be the chairman of the International Chemistry Olympiad, hosted by India. And I didn't know what that meant, although I had given some lectures for the Olympiad students. Then he put me at ease, saying, you be the scientific chairman, I will be the overall chairman. Then I could breathe easily, then I could agree to do the job, we put together a committee and we started making question paper. First we have to make model questions, then of course we make the real question paper. And many of us came from IAATs and some from IASC and so on. And we used to make question paper for GE, for GATE. So when we started making, we thought one or two meetings will be done. Then we started interacting with Dr. Arvind Kumar. He would say, oh, that's a GE question. Oh, that is a descriptive question. Very quickly he would demolish most of our questions. We had to learn how to frame questions for the chemistry Olympiad. Remember, everybody has been talking about the great physicist, Arvind Kumar, great in research, great in teaching, great in physics education. And here he was sitting through the team which was making the question paper for the chemistry Olympiad. After several iterations, we lost track of how many iterations we did. Enough has been said about AK's character to be perfect and to arrive at a complete solution. If one wanted an illustration of it, you don't look for physics. Look at the question paper that was made for the International Chemistry Olympiad, posted by HBCSE in India. It was a remarkable success. I would give most of the credit to AK. Of course, we were there as a team to make the question paper. There were only two changes made in the question paper. And both those changes were English changes made by somebody from Cambridge. That was such a perfect solution. I can go on, but since my time is limited, I would like to say, even that was a limited experience interacting with Dr. Arvind Kumar. I had an opportunity, most of the time I end up as chairman of a committee because the chairman drops off in the last minute. This happened when we had to review HBCSE and the professor D. Balasubramaniam was to be the chair and he couldn't come. So I was asked to be the chair and I did. I think for three days or four days, Dr. Jayashree Ramdas was the center director. We went through the entire activities of HBCSE as part of the review. There were international members also. Then I could fathom the contribution of Dr. Arvind Kumar to the center. Anvesh kept using the word institution building. Clearly, Arvind Kumar was an institution builder. If I say that you cannot find anybody after him, some people may not be happy because always there are successors. I have seen some of the successors. It doesn't reflect on them but the fact remains HBCSE is what it is today with all its expansion, with all its activities largely due to the directorship of Dr. Arvind Kumar. Before closing, I must also add he was instrumental in forming the association of chemistry teachers. It would be Indian association of chemistry teachers along the lines of Indian association of physics teachers but there was a nomenclature problem. Finally, it became association of chemistry teacher registered under HBCSE and it continues to be active under the umbrella of HBCSE. One last thing I would like to say is that when we were trying to find out the decide the INSA Best Teacher Award when it came to Arvind Kumar, there was no discussion. It was a unanimous choice. It was very clear the man has contributed immensely from whatever we have heard from everybody else so far and I join all of you in saluting Dr. Arvind Kumar and I wish him all the best. Thank you, Professor Satyamuti. I would like to call Professor Kailash Rustagi. Good afternoon and congratulations Arvind. I am delighted to be here because other than Vinod I think I know you the longest. And we had a big interaction. I met him first time actually in Pramjas College hostel where he had come to meet Sodesh Mahajan who was his experimental partner I presume. And then of course we met when we were in training school. We got some insights into training school and the life after. And then when I joined TIPR we shared the office and a lot of other things. So I am going to tell you about the research part of it which is from the TIPR days. Even at that time there are two constants of Arvind Kumar's character. One is behind a very quiet demeanor. Once he has decided something is extremely determined and gets to a decision very very fast and sticks to it till completion. One anecdote I will recount. Professor Rajshikran suggested some problem which Arvind liked to do. It involved calculation of lots of traces of matrices of polyspin matrices, combinations and so on. Some cross sections ratios were to be calculated. He made a very quick calculation and decided that this is going to take this much time and this much work and so on and so forth. Went to the store, issued a gross of paper, took it to his home in Daisar and came back after one week with all the calculations done. Rajshikran has not actually calculated how long it will take and I do not know what finally happened to those two calculations. He had done the job completely and thought. He enjoyed research, had a collaboration with Professor Patti and then went on to sign. We continued our discussions. He also showed the second trait that I want to talk about is complete objectivity. There were issues about our things that were happening in TIFR. He was asked to actually leave TIFR when he was post-doc or leave from TIFR. And I was annoyed. So I wrote to him and he replied, I have that letter still with me. His analysis was completely, completely objective and he completely supported TIFR decision, whatever that was, no matter how it affected us. It did not actually affect me because I knew from the beginning that the TIFR position is still PhD in spite of being from training school etc. In his case he did not even know that. But that letter is a great reading even now. It is a long letter. I do not want to quote anything from that but to just say that it is an example of objectivity which he showed then and continues to show now, forever and forever. I think that he is a great teacher I knew from so to say childhood because we learned lots of things when we shared a common room where all the students used to sit. Deepan, Arvind, Radhakant and me and we enjoyed. We also used to discuss what is original physics, what is not so original physics, what is exciting, what is not so exciting etc. etc. We found many things, we differed on many things but the dialogue has never stopped. Whenever we meet we take it off as if we had met only the day before. So great to have learned many things from you above all determination and objectivity. It is very important to remain objective even when personal things are involved. And to take action once you have decided that this is the right course to do. I think it is very very important learnings. You learn and it is an important thing for all the science teaching fraternity. Students learn not only from teachers, they learn a lot from each other. It is important therefore to have a collection of students who are bright because they pull along many other people who are perhaps not that bright. So combination, students learning from each other, it is a very important part for example in IIT hostels. People even who have parents staying in IIT still prefer to stay in the hostel because students learn a lot from each other. It is an important thing in all the science education or in any education in fact. So we learnt a lot from Arvind and thank you so much. And I wish you lots of lots of time of very very active life as has always been. Thank you very much. Thank you Mr. Sucki. May I call Mr. Sudhir Panse. It was sometime in 1973-74. I had been to university department of physics under faculty improvement program from Sathe College. And Dr. Arvind Kumar was in the UDP at that time. So we started interacting. I used to ask him some questions. And that is how we started our discussion on physics. But it is my great privilege that not only I call him as my friend but he calls me as his friend. We developed friendship and apart from physics on various other matters also there used to be discussions. I used to interact with his study circles. Since the time it was being held at Nana Chowk and then when it was being held here also in the beginning. He used to stay at Vile Parli that time and I stayed at Goregaon. So we used to travel back together and discuss many things. We had a nice group occasionally meeting on some of the evenings to discuss on various matters. Dr. Pradhan was a part of this group. My friend Rajwade was subsequently added to it. Now his entire career was very deeply and in detail described but there is one gap there and that is an important incidence which I want to tell you. He was in UDP until something like 1981 and he joined Homi Baba Centre somewhere around 1983. After leaving university department of physics for some small period he was a science officer in British council. And when we used to meet at that time once he very seriously told me I was in Sathe College that time that was Parli College then. So he was once seriously asking me whether there is any job possibility of physics teacher in your college. I said no right now there is no vacancy. He said even if it is in a junior college of any college in Mumbai please let me know. I said this is ridiculous is there any problem with the job at British council. Then he said no it's a very nice job. There is hardly any work that I have to do. I have to travel in aeroplanes to different cities in India and see the projects which are being presented. I don't have to go into details of those projects. But my problem is that there is no work that I have to do there and more importantly I miss teaching. I want to do teaching and even if it is junior college I will be happy to be a teacher there. That those were his words at that time. Fortunately Viji Kulkarni had the foresight two of them met and Viji Kulkarni took him for Homi Bhabha centre. Subsequently Pradhan also joined here and the centre became very big one. And it is the fortunate thing for the students in India, students in Mumbai and around that he joined Homi Bhabha centre. Otherwise it could have been his passion for teaching that's what I want to convey. Passion for teaching was so intense it's so intense that he would have been a teacher in a junior college also for doing that. That's what he sincerely was saying at that time. But fortunately he joined here and then he helped and developed physics teaching in many different ways in our country. Including the Olympiad program about which everyone is talking. So this was the episode which I wanted to share with you and I wish Dr. Arvind Kumar a very long, healthy and active life in future also. Thank you. Thank you Prasapant Se. Prasabh Abbas Rangwala. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I will fill in ten years which have not been detailed here in Arvind's career. That is the time that we were together in university department of physics. I met Arvind somewhere in I thought mid 60s but here I got the exact date 64 in TIFR. But we didn't interact that very intensely. But in 1971 both of us joined almost simultaneously department of physics of the University of Mumbai. Which had been established in May 1971 and its head was Prasapant Se again from TIFR. There is one more Kali who joined with us S.C. Paddy who was also from TIFR. So there was three of us and it was a wonderful time in the sense that it was a new department. A lot of things to be done and 1973 or something of that sort. The new syllabus B.S.C. new syllabus had come into the picture. And we had to kind of we were involved in framing it. So this is where Arvind starts with his career in teaching and very seriously. I want to highlight a few things which later on reflects in his. People say this devotion to teaching. Initially I mean he taught somebody did mention mathematical methods that. Lennari and Krzysztof Skic's book. But he was also teaching nuclear physics as a special thing. A special course. And what would you do? He would get to some 60 lectures or 40 lectures have to be given. Part of it is angular momentum. First you start with it. He would pick up Edmonds book from cover to cover cover entire angular momentum. The kind of thing. Rather than take a book in nuclear physics or quantum mechanics and then take that part of it. Secondly he also and I'm saying this thing because it reflects in his later career in H.B.C.C. Right I got it because there are lots of. For instance he had to teach nuclear physics. One year he would take up a book and I still remember and most of you wouldn't even know the name. Eisenberg and Greiner. And you would cover from that thing. Next year it's Egal Talmi's book. Third I do not know whether he touched Boren Mottelsen's book or not. But that's what he would do. Take a pick a book and go through it. So that is his hallmark. And we used to have lots of discussion concerning what to teach how to teach. And I think we had really wonderful time under benign headship of M.C. Joshi who would allow us to do anything. Now you must realize that what would happen when you want to teach something which is much more than what is given in the syllabus which says 40 lectures. So you call extra classes right. Each lecture would be instead of one hour it will be two hours extra classes. And then you call the students on Sundays five hours and stuff like that. So that's the kind of thing which started early in when he was in the university. The point that I want to also make is the following is that you must realize the university structure. We have this syllabus which is made by some sort of people. You may be involved you may not be involved in it. Then there is the teaching. Now Mumbai university has a very peculiar thing at that point of time. Namely there would be something like 150 students enrolled for physics in M.S.C. But most of them would be with the colleges. But they would have lectures centralized lecture in the university department of physics. The students so you and there we used to teach and then there is this examination. The paper setter paper setter would look at the syllabus and he is not involved in the teaching. So you would set the question. The point that I'm trying to make is the following students, students nevertheless attended everything. The reason for that is the kind of they were even implicitly they realized they were benefiting from the whatever was being told to them. We had used to have lots of discussion. People have said that he is very I mean he is very incisive, very logical and stuff like that. Let me emphasize one part of his personality. I hope you will not mind it which no one has mentioned it. He is a romantic at heart. Believe me, believe me he is a romantic at heart. He was a great admirer of Dilip Kumar. Okay. For example at that time there was this movie called Saraswati Chandra and he was sold on that thing. And what is the story of Saraswati Chandra? A boy falls in love with a girl and stuff like that. The girl gets married to somebody else and he would be moved by that thing. So please correct your impression of Arvind Kumar. He is not a bland physics, logician kind of thing. This is Arvind Kumar and we used to have lots of lovely discussions. And of course I was the first sufferer of his incisive logic kind of thing. And we had wonderful time together. I really learned a lot from him. Unfortunately I have not been able to implement whatever he has been trying to communicate. It has been mentioned. One thing I want to say about D'Souza and Bala Ayur. D'Souza, this is her PhD. It was mentioned. So I am just repeating it. I thought it was self-induced transparency. It is a topic in quantum optics. Then the next person does in general relativity, Bala Ayur. So he could move with ease from one to the other. And so these traits that one finds in a more kind of pronounced manner, coming up later in his career, were already there when he was in the university. And we had wonderful time together. Going to canteen, have cups of teas, snacks. And it was a university has a very different atmosphere. There are many departments, not necessarily science departments. And so you interact with people of other disciplines. And Irwin has left a huge impression on me personally and on many others. I think he has acknowledged that his basic things formulated when he was in the university. Now one thing which is, I have not understood it, why he decided to leave. Maybe Irwin can explain it. Department and join British Council at that point of time. What was the attraction? I don't know. Anyway, but that's where he lost him. Unfortunately, simultaneously, MC Yoshi passed away. Anyway, so Irwin, thank you very much for the lovely time that we had in the university. And all that you gave to us. Wish you all the very best for many, many years to come and a very productive life. Thank you very much. Mark my word. He is a romantic at heart. Thank you President Angwala. Although it's not my turn and I've already spoken, but since you have spoken about this romantic thing. So with AK's permission, let me also share something. So AK I think is a fan of Shah Rukh Khan. But according to him, Shah Rukh Khan's Devdas is an absolute blasphemy of the original Devdas. And the other thing is that if you think that he's only fond of old movies and all that. Now, he gives a very detailed commentary on the railway station scene of, guess the movie. Dilwale Dulhania le jange. So he has these facets also. Okay. May I call on Professor AP Deshpande. And after this probably we will take a break, but we have something to do before the break. But first Professor Deshpande. Professor Irwin Kumar is multilingual person. So let me speak in Marathi. Let me speak in Marathi. This is a very well-organized film. So before that, I would like to introduce him to the director of our industry, Devdhar. He is more serious than I would like to introduce him. And Arvind Kumar has told me about it. He has told me about it. At the beginning of the film, there was a scene where Arvind Kumar said that he wanted to make you reform. So he made Arvind Kumar reform in the night. So he said that he would send a message in the evening at 1.45 pm. He would send a message in the evening. And all of that was sent. In 2008, when we came to Karekram in Udgavkara in 1995, we came here to Homi Baba Centre. It was two days. And he was the main director of MGK. So for that Karekram, Arvind Kumar had made his planning. And because of that, Professor Udgavkara told me that you are the best event manager. So I came here today. In 1991, National Council for Science and Technology Communication, DST, was the director. At the same time, for the Faculty of Science and Technology, Homi Baba was the director of the Faculty of Science and Technology. At that time, I was also the director of the Faculty of Science and Technology. So we were in the same room. We were in the same room. In the other room, we were in the same room. So it was a good experience for me. In Goa, there was a STEM conference. I showed a picture of the conference. But on that occasion, I had to tell you another thing. The people who had come to the conference were giving a speech. They were sitting in Arvind Kumar for the speech. So the villagers had taken that speech. And the people who had worked in the administration, they knew that there was no more space to give speech. So Arvind Kumar was sitting there. I think Arvind Kumar had written many more speech here, at the Homi Baba Faculty of Science and Technology. At that time, he had started his career as an Olympian. So he had started a new career in his profession. Because of that, in the area of education in India, whatever the field is, that is what people see. So it took a lot of time. And for ten years, we were getting medals. We were getting medals. But at that time, there were a lot of special conferences. The Homi Baba Faculty of Science and Technology has come to the Homi Baba Faculty of Science and Technology. So Arvind Kumar has given a leadership to the Homi Baba Faculty of Science and Technology. Arvind Kumar, you will have a long life. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Deshpande. We'll soon take a break. But before the break, we have something to do. Because it's after all in celebration of Professor Arvind Kumar's birthday. So we will have a cake cut by him. So I will request, take it to common stage. And the others to just quickly arrange for the cake. And then we'll have a tea break after that and come back in about 20 minutes. Lights on the stage please. A.K., if you can please come on stage. And I invite other people also, whoever wants, especially HBCSE people, please come on stage. Meena, please come. Anybody else can come. I am told that nowadays candles have gone out of fashion. Yeah, please come. Yeah, please come, come, come. Please come. Whoever wants to come, please come. It's a birthday celebration, so please come. Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay, so we'll have a break now. Please, there's tea outside and we go out and we'll have some of the cake also, of course. And then we come back in about 20 minutes if possible. Sorry, we also have a big card to give you. We'll continue with the reminiscences and tributes. There are many people still waiting to speak. But before we do that, because after those, Prasar Vin Kumar would like to say a few words at the end. So we thought that this break would be a good opportunity for, I would invite our senate director Prasar Anup Bhattacharya to propose a vote of thanks for this symposium before we go on with the reminiscences. Yeah, we thought we would just end with A.K.'s words and not have to do formal things after that. So it's again in order to be here back and thank many people without whom this event wouldn't have happened. The first is the major conspirators of the event called the Symposium Organizing Committee or whatever. This is people like Anvesh, Mashud, Deepa, Siresh, Praveen. Thank you all. I think you all agree this was a great idea. We should have done this. We should have absolutely done this. Thank you all for taking the trouble and getting everything together, writing all the letters, inviting the people, doing the needful. But then to actually pull it off requires the efforts, skills, the competencies, the hard work of a lot of people at the center and beyond. And I'd like to thank Manoj for taking care of the website, designing the registration materials, including this beautiful pad that I think is really nice. Sumana, Sandhya, Shweta, Suchita, thank you for arranging, ensuring that we've not just been fed but fed very well. Vagmare, Bhame, Shanoy, thank you for taking care of accommodation, transport, all the logistics to ensure that people have been hosted and brought here well. Suchita, Sonal, Rahul, Gajanan, all the registration materials and innumerable small, little, large administrative tasks whenever called upon, always ready to help. This has also been part of the symposium on physics education, not just today but we've been having lectures here and again Rani and Sachin, if you're hiding there. Mamta Pradesh, Manoj, Rish, thank you for ensuring that the sessions ran well, all the talks were loaded and everything, all that happened. Back end of course, the entire, you know, the purchase and accounts teams who've been taking care of the TADA and all the materials that we need to get for this. Prakati, Krishna, your teams, Rasam, all of you. And then of course, you know, the participants of the physics camp. I hope you had a great experience here and you will go back carrying behind you a small bit of HBCSE and a lot of memories of not just physics but all the interactions you've had and all the wonderful stuff you've done here. Thank you all the other physics teachers from across the country who've come here, especially today, all the senior colleagues and friends of AK, all our ex, the members of the center, our previous, Mike, Mike, Mike is off, off, off. It's not me, me, me, it's something happening there. And you know, all of the HBCSE members right now, the present HBCSE members, all our staff, students, thank you all. Thank you all for helping us ensure that this event went off so well. And with this, I think let's get back to hearing the reminiscences. We'll have a few more people who've expressed their desire to speak and then of course we'll hear AK at the end of it all. So thank you. Thank you, Arnab. I'd now like to call Professor Dipan Ghosh, another person who has known AK for very long. I have known Arvind since 1966 when I joined TFR as a graduate student. And after so many people have spoken about him, I have very little things to add, accepting one thing. When Anves asked me to talk here and he said that it is in commemoration of Arvind's eightieth birthday, that was one good reason for me not to agree. And the reason was Arvind is so meticulous about what he hears, every physics sentence. I mean I have to be extra careful. So when I came in the morning and Anves told me that Arvind is unable to come in the morning but he will join later, I was actually relieved. So Arvind, it has been great knowing you. I have interacted with him over all these years since 1966 in very many ways. And as all of you have pointed out, learned a lot from him and his contributions, I don't have to recount again and again. Wish you a very long career after that. Thank you so much. I would now like to call upon Professor Arvih Hussur who has joined online. And may I request the others who are online to please keep your microphones muted. Professor Arvih Hussur, may be. Can you hear me? Yeah, just a minute. Yeah, we can hear you. Just wait for a minute. We will get your video. Yeah. Yes, you may start. This is my first invitation in the first place for asking me to speak here on this special occasion of celebrating the 80th birthday of Professor Arvind Kumar. I have known Arvind Kumar for so many years on many different occasions and many different capacities. Firstly, from TIFR, as a member of their committee on the Homeover Center for Science Education. I have seen his commitment to education then so deep-rooted, committed for school education, improving quality of education at the school level, quality of physics education, chemistry education and all aspects. Hussur, you have muted accidentally I think so please unmute. Yeah, okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay. So it is a great occasion and I don't know how to express my words about Professor Arvind Kumar. He is such a fantastic leader and a teacher and I learnt a lot from him. And firstly to be so committed to the job you are at with regard to the education he was taking up for school education at the Homeover Center for Science Education in many different ways. Going to various schools, organizing lectures over there, workshops over there, writing books in Marathi, Hindi and also part of the curriculum making at the NCRTs. And many different ways he was total commitment, total commitment for education and no wonder of course HBCSC tried very well under his leadership and then he organized the Olympiads. As part of the chemistry Olympiad, their international Olympiad which was organized very meticulously. He was very careful in going through every small detail of the organization, how things are done and what are the equipments required. Where are the locations where these experiments can be done, coordinated with various different institutions in this regard and that was wonderful. That was a great experience in the Olympiads and of course the Olympiad program has been going on very well for so many years and the students are becoming better and better with all the education there. And then he organizes the new US as a new initiative to teach at those who are classed past the school and going towards the college and they are at a different level now. And they need a different kind of education. He actually made appropriate adjustments to accommodate these kind of people, conduct classes at the Homeover Center for Science Education to give them a training which will make them good scientists in the final place. He also was a great scientist, outstanding theoretical physicist with his training we had and we go through every detail and to make the understanding very fundamental. So that was very clear from his approach and in the meticulous way. And then in the UMDA Center for Excellence and there is CBS and he and Professor Chitre actually steered the center. And with the commitment with lot of difficulties over there as one can imagine that the place where you are going in the university environment and funding coming from the DAE it is a very complicated situation. But the commitment to education did not change. Actually very great idea that using the resources available in different colleges and institutions in Mumbai to improve the quality of education in the university. Universities was a great idea and this was actually to do provide an initiative which can be taken up at other universities to improve the quality of education all over the country. This was the great thinking because establishing standalone institutions is so expensive and it is not possible to do it too many times. Therefore this was a model which was actually conceived by Dr. Kakkar and then Professor Chitre and Arvind Kumar they were all the founders of this place. And it was a struggle there and one could see I got a lot of advice from him while making the changes over there, building up the institution and he was a great advisor. Taking every detail looking at every detail of the things which are practical and which are not practical that is something which is outstanding. And of course he continued to teach for so many years and the students would enjoy his teaching and discussions even outside the classrooms. And that was a great experience. He created a kind of an atmosphere of Gurukul for the students over there who are living there. They are taking a lot of interest in physics and initially it was all physics only in the center for excellence and subsequently other fields were added like chemistry, biology and mathematics and all of those things were there. Mathematics also came up and Dr. Balwant Singh who was there actually spearheading the mathematics program over there. So it was a continuous growth in the center and it has seen through many branches now and all of them are doing extraordinarily well at various places in the world. Many of them are in the country and many are abroad and you can hear the compliments from them as to how they benefited by being in this. It is a great place because of the quality of education which was there and the intense interactions between the teachers and the students. That is something which they remember forever. So that was a great occasion for me to be with Dr. Ravind Kumar who has been a mentor, the inspirer and in various capacities and his commitment to education and commitment to the job at hand that is something which is outstanding. And 80 years is not too much actually I mean he has many more years to go. Surely he will continue to complete the century and surely he should be able to continue with good health and the peace of mind. So I think it is very difficult to describe too many in the short period of time but I wish him all the best and keep being active and with you wish you good health and peace of mind. Dr. Ravind Kumar wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Haseer. May I now call Professor P.K. Alubaliya, President IAPT. Thank you, Anwish. I am really very happy to be present on this occasion and meet Professor Arvind. I first heard Professor Arvind in Lucknow. So you must be remembering Professor Wagner was the President of IAPT at that time and you gave a lecture on alternative conceptions if I am remembering that correctly. And that was my first initiation on physics education research itself. So that was very interesting. And after that we were corresponding with you also and you sent us the American Journal of Physics Resource Laterals on Physics Education Research and I think that was how we got interested, could gather literature and do work in a university setup itself. I really am thankful that you initiated us into that kind of an area. And there is one other interesting thing which we recently actually had the occasion to have from Professor Arvind. We started a physics education research series of lectures on online lectures under the banner of IAPT. We made a request to Professor Arvind and he readily agreed and then he was very particular that on one topic, what topic he is going to really talk about. And he picked up the topic which was disciplinary practices in physics education research. That lecture went on for almost one hour and 15 minutes and I want to tell you something very interesting at the end of that lecture. One of the participants raised hand and he said that, sir we want to find the error in the derivation of error in 1 upon r is equal to 1 upon r1 plus 1 upon r2 for resistances. And I have used two methods. One method gives me one answer and the other method gives me the other answer. And Professor Arvind said, okay all right I will look into this problem and come back to you. And around 12 to be precise 1147 Professor Arvind sends me solution of that by both the methods giving the same answer. I mean that is the kind of dedication which you find is rare. It is unimaginable and he also said that rather very humble way of Professor Arvind I liked it. That I request you that you please share this solution with the gentleman who really asked this question. So now you can imagine the kind of dedication which Professor Arvind reflects on each one of us and that is inspirational. I think sir has been a member of IABT right from the very beginning. Sir your member number is 386, life member number minus 326 sir. I was a member before you. But it is very interesting that you have been there with us and ever since we have been on now web we are very much connected with you. You are receiving our mails and we hope that you will keep on guiding us and blessing us because IABT has a very big mandate to work upon. And your guidance and your deep insight into physics education and science education I think are an asset of IABT itself. I look forward to your guidance sir and I wish you on behalf of IABT and on my personal behalf a very happy birthday maybe slightly belated sir. And healthy life and I hope you will keep on blessing with your insights on physics on the IABT forums also. There was one other thought also sir which was coming. I was seeing that when your CV was being discussed by Professor Anvesh you have written lots of articles in IABT bulletin also. Maybe what we can try to do is bring them together and publish those as a volume in an e-format. And I would seek your permission to do that. If you will give us that permission we will be very happy. Thank you very much. Thank you Professor Alubaliya. Thank you Anvesh it is such an honour to be able to meet Professor Arvind Kumar again. And I had my fan moment because I got a beautiful picture with you. And I can only say what a pleasure it has been to get to know you and the very many ways in which you have supported many of us across the country. I think I first met you in 2002 in Goa. There was this Kasmi Unesco workshop that Homi Baba Centre did. And there you were and Professor Agilkar was in charge but there you were sitting at the table. And all the bills that were coming you were personally looking into it. And I smuggled in just one line and told you you know what I want to do a physics conference. And you were so busy surrounded by people you said count me in I'm interested. And I held you to that word when we did the 2005 conference. And one didn't know from where how we would set it up. The ICP had invited us to do it in the Einstein year 2005. And the support that came from Homi Baba Centre showed that we are a community in India. And you just had to walk up to Shobha Bhattacharya the director TIFR and we could bring a host tour. The Nobel Laureate to speak at the conference funding came in from there. And that kind of a support is really incredible. And then you came down to help us with reviewing and looking at the abstracts and spent couple of days at Miranda House. And it has been such a wonderful experience also to have then come to the Homi Baba Centre to make presentation of one's work get some feedback. And in 2011 when you nudged many of us out of slumber to write articles for the physics association special issue I think it helped one to pull together one's thoughts and do a review. And today when Professor Vijay Singh pulled out that so well maintained issue I realized that I had not maintained my volume but it made me very very nostalgic. So in more ways than one you have really been a role model and you've touched our lives and in a very quiet and gentle manner you've nudged us to do better work but you also supported when support was needed. So in 2005 Dr. Chidambaram sat through the conference and he said he called you and he called me to his office and he said just come why is there only one Homi Baba Centre why doesn't the country have more and he nudged and said create a consortium and today yesterday we had a panel discussion on that but we did call everyone from the country who was engaged in physics education to come and discuss how we could share our resources and create them together but much more importantly there was a follow up. You may not remember but for someone who was at that point you know had an uphill task to establish a career in physics education and physics education research it meant a lot to me that you and Dr. Mr. Rotala from the National Science Museum and three of us met and we brainstormed and the result was an invitation to set up the DS Kothari Research Centre at Miranda House which was a game changer and today I presented the journey and so I will always remember those milestones and at all those milestones your help has not been told it's not been talked about and that's why this fan moment of my photograph with you is very very precious. Thank you so much. Thank you Professor Jolly. Professor Vijay Singh. As we reflect on the past there is a certain warmth that comes with reminiscing about the good old times and how should I put it? And there's also those moments that hold a special place in our hearts. So I'm using Professor Arvind Kumar's 80th anniversary as a prop to remember a few good old times, happy old times. Can you turn it on for me please? Yes. And you will see different people and they are there for a certain reason. It's not coming. I'm sorry. So basically in 1998 when the Olympics program was put into place with the memorandum of understanding between Professor Arvind Kumar and Professor Dharkar and the late Professor Dharkar I was very pleased to write editorial in the bulletin of the Indian Association of Physics Teachers of which I was the, how should I put it? I was the editor. And as Arvind Kumar saw it, A.K. saw it, I will just use the word A.K. if you don't mind, instead of saying Professor Arvind Kumar it takes two seconds extra which Anvesh doesn't like. So without my soliciting he invited me to Homi Baba Centre to participate as a resource person in the first Olympiad. In 1998 when we went to Reich Javik, where is this? And A.K. always placed the back, he did a lot of work I would say but he always was in the background and never pushed himself forward. But anyway, this is not to say the others pushed themselves. Let me go ahead. It's not going forward, why is that? Maybe I'll go like this. I'm really sorry, it's not working. Click on what? Good. But it's not showing there. So what you see is 1998 and that is Professor Pradhan. Pradhan was the lead at that department, that is Reich Javik 1998 and Professor Nagrajian but the reason I point this out is because Professor Pradhan and Rajesh Khapar Day, I'm not sure if he's in the audience but Rajesh Khapar Day were the, I mean, were saved our lives because they were in charge of the experimental program and they had the experiments ready. Not ready but at least they had something that we had a fig leaf to cover ourselves for the Asian physics, for the international physics Olympiad. So that is Professor Pradhan and we, when we went there, I mean those were magic times. They were like miracle and miracle times because there's a story I have to tell you and I'll take one minute more to tell you the story and the story is that when Professor Pradhan went for the visa and when you go for the visa, you know that you're going to get rejected. Your heart starts beating faster and you find that it is impossible to and you're sure that it's going to get rejected on some technicality but he was invited by the Reich Javik person to come upstairs and have tea and cookies with him. I mean, not only did they get the visa, he got the other things also and when they went there, one of the students, I think Vijay Bhatt got the prize for a thematic problem and that problem was in Iceland, how do the hot springs work? And no Icelandic student got it, no American student got it, no Russian student got it but an Indian student got this award and we were very, very happy. He got a bronze medal. The next slide which I want to show is this Professor Harkar 1999. He was the other mainstay of the Physics Olympiad program and the Science Olympiad program so that's Professor Darkar there and that was in Italy. One student that I want to point out is Sivrat Raju whom some of you would know. He is a leading string theorist and he is at this place in Bangalore, ICTS. So that is Sivrat Raju. You go to 19, 2000 now, that is Turkey. No, not, sorry, England. In England, I mean something amazing happened. For the first time we got two gold medals and Professor Arvind Kumar was not the leader. The leaders were Professor, a very good friend of mine and another mainstay of the experiment program, Dr Desai and of course Sirish is here so I should acknowledge him also and Arvind Kumar landed there and because they say someone landed in Ahmedabad and the Indian team lost and there is a lot of noise being made about how Panwati happened. Here what happened, the opposite of Panwati happened. The opposite of Panwati was that we got two gold medals and we were number three. We were number three in among 65 nations and we were on top of the world at that time but at that point Professor Arvind Kumar did something which is absolutely amazing. He went from there to Amsterdam and maybe Savita can correct me and he threw the hat in and he said next year we will hold the International Chemistry Olympiad. That was a big leap because we were in the second year or third year of the Olympiad program and he decided that we will do the ICHO because one country had backed out. I have to tell you I was in Berlin and I went to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the conductor does very little. He puts his finger up and all the violins are playing and he pushes his hand down and all the drums start beating very hard and that is the way Ike used to work. He would just get everything done by a gesture and everything in the home of my centre works because of a gesture. So I thought that was a great way to work. I mean he never really said now you do this or something but it was done. So ICHO was done, it was amazing. I never thought it would work. I said this is crazy. But then you have heard Satyamurthy saying that it was very successful and Savita will certainly testify to that. And the last one I want to show is just to say what good times they were. This is again international physics Olympiad in Italy and this is Dharkar again, Professor Dharkar, the late Professor Dharkar and this person is Abdullah Sadik from Pakistan. He is the Pakistani leader. He was an absolute gentleman and all the fear you have about Pakistan all vanished. It was just that we always thought that everybody was very friendly and everybody over here was very friendly to me. I don't belong to this department but the entire office was put at my disposal as they became the academic coordinator of the Olympiad program and I have to really remember where is Sumanna, she is not here, and Gajanan, they worked round the clock. I mean it was an impossible task. This is again Turkey where we won about three gold medals but look at the student over here. That student here wrote me a letter about last year when he became the CEO of Twitter, of the Twitter program. And then of course something else happened, something bad happened to me. I put it in the palm of my hand because he wrote to me. But you should remember the first guy. You must remember the guy in the front. This is Arvind Tyagarajan, J.E. rank 1. He remembered everything. I mean 1937 and loads, how much did India score? He had a phenomenal memory. Okay, so they were like that. This is 2004, chemistry, you can see some old friends here and some of them are in the audience, Sopan Ghosh and Dr. Samant. And you see this, we were also very happy because for the first time in physics and chemistry a girl got the gold medal. That is Priya Gupta and before she went I thought I will test her out. I just wanted to take a test so I asked her, started describing a question in physics. By the time I had ended the question she went down and wrote the answer. So even before you opposed the question she had known the answer. What kind of students we got? And we still get sometimes not as lucky as those good old days. So as they say given you write it right down. So like the second poem I remember, I am sorry. It is that, And here is biology lumped, I kept this particularly because they all look so happy. We are all looking glum, we are not that happy but they look very happy. And this one I think Anvesh has already shown. But I kept this deliberately to say that people wanted to be associated with the Olympiad program. You call up somebody to be the chief guest. You call up somebody to get money, some government agency. In those days, I don't know, I am told that nowadays these things are not that good. But you could always get it. And that is because I think the program was so solid. And Prof. Arun Kumar's reputation was also very solid. By the way, since I see Rajaram Nityanand, he said something when we got three gold medals here. He used a statistical mechanical phrase in Turkey. He said that now we are saying you are in trouble because there is very little space space at the top. I mean now you only can go down. Instead of standing third, you will only stand fifth or tenth or something. So I remember that. Anyway, so now let me tell you about A.K.'s contribution. He led from the front in the beginning. I wish he would continue in the end also and set these thematic problems. But in the beginning he led from the front. There was a healthy competition in making what is called thematic problems. And the thematic problem is one in which you make judicious approximations, use a variety of concepts, and use a variety of techniques to arrive and to understand natural phenomena or a modern topic in physics. And in 1998 he began with a bang and here is the bang. He set a problem on the Dirac monopole and quantization of charge. At that level for the 12th standard student, where the student had to make, understand momentum, angular momentum conservation and make use of the impulse approximation. He said if a monopole exists, show that charge is quantized. I think you remember this. This is meticulously typed by Sumanna. I also remember Sumanna typing it. I can still visualize her late night typing it. The next one is, of course, another problem in 2000 based on a resonance article by Professor Mukunda on the genesis of the photon picture of light. Arvind Kumar read through that article and constructed that problem. As I said, there was a healthy competition. There is one I made on the magnet arm. And at one late night when we were making the problem on the Chandrasekhar limit, which is actually a brilliant problem to make because it's just gravitational collapse and Fermi pressure outside, probably exclusion principle. We all remember, and I have to remember also Sunil Dutta. Arvind Kumar, Sunil Dutta. At times Ravi Bhattacharji would come up and join in. We made this problem and Sunil Dutta quoted a brilliant poem by Harvind Sharaya Bachchan. You know. It's a bit relevant for today. It was a star. It was very beautiful. It was broken. It was broken. Look at this amber. How many stars are broken in this. Every day thousands of stars get destroyed. How many stars are broken in this. How many beautiful stars are broken in this. Is amber a shock? It was a star. And this is the last problem I would just want to show. This is the discovery of the neutron which Arvind Kumar made. And this uses also a variety of concepts including a very meticulous two-page derivation on why you have to have a head-on collision for maximum recoil velocity. And the rest are also in Arvind Kumar's handwriting but they are photocopies. But I have this one in his original handwriting which I have dug out. And since we have to give gifts on the 80th birthday, this is my gift to you. I will give it back to you from Arvind Kumar. I case is very popular nowadays. Like Vishwapitama was told that he was thirsty when he was sleeping on the bed. So everyone brought water, water, and everything. But Arjun gave the right gift which you might know. Arjun turned on the water and Ganges came out. And he was thirsty. So this is the gift. Okay, clearly that will be hard to match. But Prasamayang Bhaiya. So following Arvind Kumar is probably the most difficult assignment I have ever had. So I want to quickly say a couple of things. There is one incident I want to recall which is the reason why I came here actually. Arvind Kumar doesn't remember it because it was a rather minor incident in his life. This was 77 hours, a MSA student in Bombay University. And Arvind Kumar had gone and given a lecture at some college. And he had started with Arvind Kumar's side. So he said these great scientists have done some great work. I will now explain it to you. And these are the things we don't know about it. And the students were completely surprised. The students were expecting a lecture saying, oh, these are great things that happen in nature. I am explaining it to you. I will be very grateful to me for explaining it to you. That is generally how popular science lectures go these days. But Arvind Kumar gives the other way around. Talking about crediting others, talking about limitations of ideas and stuff like that. And the students were quite surprised and one of them was my friend. So he called me up and said, you know, Arvind Kumar gave this kind of a lecture. And it so happened that few days later I caught Arvind Kumar while we were going for tea. And I asked him that look, this is not the kind of lecture students expect what happened. And at that time he told me. Louder. Okay. At that time he told me that look, man, at the end, I don't think he knew my name. He said, look, at the end of the day, science is a continuing enterprise. And you must make it clear to the students that it is something that is dynamic and that happens. And that evolves from human mind. And you should not dehumanize science at all because that is the worst thing you can do. And that single five minutes changed my life. Because till then I was doing physics because I was just curious about what great minds had done. Suddenly Arvind Kumar pointed out to me that I also could do research. And that came as a surprise to me. And the rest, as they say, is history. So I joined TIFR and all that. So that was a life changing experience of just five minutes of interaction with Arvind Kumar. Then Arvind Kumar joined TIFR. I was at TIFR and lots of committees I came to and I wish famously maintained that you could never win an argument against Arvind Kumar. And there were many, many committees on which I said I attended every one of them hoping to defeat Arvind Kumar at least once. I never succeeded. Arvind Kumar always managed. Because whatever objection I would raise, he would have thought about it, worked about around to it and come out with an answer. So you were obviously helpless. You felt very foolish actually raising a point because Arvind Kumar had already thought it through and worked it out. His meticulousness was phenomenal. His commitment to what he told to students, however casually, was phenomenal. And in many ways that made me what I eventually became. So thank you very much, sir. And while other wish you good health, I would like to request you to continue to pose more interesting questions for the rest of my life. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Vaya. Professor Ogla Purkar. I am very fortunate to have long association with Professor Arvind Kumar for more than 20 years. Since 2001, I am coming here for OCSE physics, RGC, PDC and so on. So at least 50 times I have stayed in this campus for more than 200 days. So we had a lot of interaction with Professor Arvind Kumar. Before about 20 years, the center has only two buildings. This main building and that hostel. No other building, Olympic facility in the US, no there. So HBCSE was short of space and some programs were arranged outside. And again I am very fortunate that two programs were arranged in Abbasabh Garware College Pune and I was the convener of these programs. In 2002, at that time there was an exponential component of INFO, INCO and INBO. For all the three examinations, the exponential component was organized in Garware College in 2002. Professor Arvind Kumar was personally present there. I was looking after all the arrangements and so on. Of course, physics chemistry team, Swetha Ladge and Rekha Vartak and all the stuff was present there in Garware College. That was 2002. In 2003, HBCSE Physics was organized in Garware College. Again, being head of physics department, I was the convener of that program. Entire physics team of HBCSE stayed in Pune, guest house of Garware College. Of course, Arvind Kumar, Vijay Singh, Sirish, Rajesh and others. They stayed in Pune and we carried out the program very successfully. I remember on the last day of that OCSE, it was final selection. After completing three exponential tests, three theory tests, results was compiled and there was selection. President procedure of arbitration was not there at that time and there was a long discussion of selection of team with marks of all these students, particularly first ten students we were used to discuss for each student. And our discussion went long till quarter to two in the midnight. Arvind Kumar was present personally. He was looking after everything. He was looking after the list. He was taking part in the discussion. And the other team was finalized by about 1.45 in the late night. And next day at 7 o'clock, he was there in the Garware College three kilometers away at 7 o'clock. They showed his dedication to the work. Again, I also remember that maybe in 2006 or so. Again, the discussion went long. We were in his office till 1.30 in the night. And he was very carefully observing and finalizing the list. Very active. So, very dedicated person. I have attended some of his lectures in the earlier OCSEs. Particularly, I remember his lectures on special theory of relativity. Excellent teacher. I have experienced that he is extremely good teacher. Also, I have read some of his books. Particularly, I remember his book on chaos and practice. Excellent. Very difficult ideas presented in a lucid manner. Different concepts presented in a very lucid manner. So, Arvind Kumar is a renowned physicist with exceptional command on the subject. As a director of this center and also during NHC meetings, I have attended actually five meetings, NHC meetings under the chairmanship of Arvind Kumar sir. I have always observed that he is expert or very efficient administrator. He handles the chairman position in such an efficient way. Sometimes, we are understructs when some unusual situation arises. He handles the things in such a nice manner. I talk to Darker sir only in case he can do this sometimes. So, in all these about 20 years, I never came to know how our friendship developed. In 2006, Astronomy or Impair was hosted by HBCSE. One or two days program was in Pune for that NCRA. Again, Professor Arvind Kumar and myself moved to different places for making arrangements. So, our friendship developed a lot. Very cooperative and helping. I remember twice I have used his car. I requested him to give his car. Once I got appointment with Chief Minister Villasra Deshmukh, who was my friend in young days, young ages. But in 2007 or 2008, I got appointment with Villasra Deshmukh. I didn't know how to go to Balabar Hill at 7 pm and return at 9 pm. So, I was afraid rather. So, I requested Arvind Kumar sir and without slightest hesitation he offered his car to me. And I used his car right from 6 pm to 10 pm. Similarly, in OCC Pune, I used his car once time. So, very cooperative, very helping. In fact, I am deeply impressed by multiple facets of his personality. My 1000 salutes to this gallant personality. So, wish you a long life, active life, healthy life. Arvind Kumar sir, thank you sir. Thank you, Professor Blaputkar. I call Professor Gagan Gupta from NCRT. Namaste everybody. I am from National Council of Educational Research and Training. And I still remember first meeting first with Professor Arvind Kumar in 2002. I joined NCRT on 26th of April 2002. And I happened to meet Professor Arvind Kumar on 27th of April morning. And since then we had a long association. And I am here on behalf of my organization too today. This is 50th year of HBCSE as well. My seniors have told me that the association with HBCSE and NCRT first came up around 1975 or so when the first set of textbooks for class 9th and 10th came up. And Professor Vijay Kulkarni was associated with it. So, right from 1975 and then 1988, your sir, your problem set which you set in 1988. And that edition of book was finalized somewhere around 1993 or so on the chairmanship of TV Rama Krishnan, I believe sir. So, are still showing light not only for the children of class 11th and 12th, but also for undergraduate students and also for the competitions, not only for the participants who are taking part, but also for the paper setters. And sir, a lot has already been said with the association with NCRT. I remember 2020 when we were in COVID period and we set up a small group where we were having weekly webinars. One find a professor of income or phone me and said that you are doing some job. I also want to be associated with it and give me six months time to speak on some simple arguments in mathematics. I hope you remember it sir. But later NCRT, I started a program which is called Listening to Learn. And that program was finally came up on PME Vidya channels on webinar series where this is the new program of NCRT which has been set up recently. It has been told that nearly 40,000 TV channels are tuned for this program across India. And some of these channels, some of these programs have been telecasted in American TV channels as well. Sir, I have a small souvenir for you and for this program, hope you will remember this program. And we hope that you will have a good time and good association once again with NCRT and continuing association with NCRT. And for HBCSE, I must say long live HBCSE and we are dependent on HBCSE for many reasons and we are like our sister organizations. We work hand in hand. Thank you very much. Lights here please. Thank you Prasad Gupta. May I call Prasad K Subramaniam, former center director of HBCSE. Thank you Anvesh. Hi AK. It's a great pleasure to be here and to say a few words. I met AK in I think around about 1993 and he along with Prasad Pradhan, HCP, both of them. And I think they were the main reason for me joining this center. Some of what I say will echo what Prasad Pradhan said. But there's a difference. I mean unlike Prasad Pradhan, this is not the place I was looking for. I somehow found this place and it's just because I accidentally met AK and HCP. And not only were there the reason for me joining the place, they were also the reason for me to stay on in this place after having wandered quite a bit. So let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to AK and also to HCP. I was mentored by HCP. I was supported by other colleagues like Jayashree. But I think AK gave the overall ambience and the vision which directed I think many of our work, gave it meaning and so on. I'd like to, people of course know about AK's contributions to the Olympiad, to the NAS program, how he built it, founded it and so on. But there are many other things he did to HBCSE and which make what HBCSE, what make HBCSE what it is today. In fact, soon after I joined in 1994, within I think three or four months, AK took over as the center director. So my period kind of initial years coincided with his taking over. And in the initial years, I think his concern was, as I understand it, to give sort of a solid basis of understanding of science for all our programs, equity programs. So there was these fairly strange sessions which AK conceived of, which were called reading sessions where we would sit and we would read basic books and science. Of course not textbooks, but say Asimov's guide to science I think was something that we all read together. And those were days where we were soaked in not only science, but also on things like history and philosophy of science. AK took a great interest in the nature of science and its implications for science education. I'll come to that a little later. So I think his concern was, he invented this phrase I think, equity and excellence. And I think it precedes the Olympiad program if I'm not mistaken. And so I think his concern was that there should be excellence in all aspects of work. These are not different dimensions or different kinds of programs at HPCSE, but that equity and excellence must underlie all these programs. So his concern was to bring deep physics understanding to every student explains his involvement in NCRT textbooks which go out to the masses. He was equally interested and took a lot of, he gave a lot of support for equity programs like the ashram schools program went there, interacted with teachers, took teacher training sessions. In fact that's where I first saw AK in action talking to ashram school teachers. I'd like to also recall some landmark steps in making HPCSE what it is today. Of course, I think the initial period was this building this basic understanding of science among the whole of HPCSE community. But soon after that, I think at some point it became a national center of the TIFR. I don't remember the history of that, but I assume it was through AK's efforts. But what I do know is that there was a very important and momentous step which I think AK took perhaps with support from other colleagues to convert, to create a faculty of science education in the center. I think till then there was no faculty of science education in TIFR. And so this was a new interdisciplinary faculty and I think he conceived of that vision and making research in science education very central to that vision and set up this faculty. So soon after that in a few years when the graduate school at TIFR became a deemed university and the graduate school was put on sound foundation. Science education was a separate subject. It had its own subject board and was given a full place along with physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and mathematics in TIFR. Of course the initial years I think we were all not very sure of the status of science education research. I think the center was still finding its foothold in how it should intervene in the larger education and science education space. But I think very quickly AK recognized the importance of science education research and part of it was establishing this faculty starting a strong graduate school and supporting other colleagues like Jayashri Ramdas in many exciting things which were happening at that time which were led by these colleagues. One of the first things I remember in the center was the workshop on cognitive basis of learning. I mean it was very exciting for me coming from a kind of interdisciplinary training background. Of course there were people who mentioned the Omibaba curriculum, the Olympiad and so on. I thought I should mention the creation of the Faculty of Science Education and setting up the graduate school. He also supported and actually I should say initiated the epistemic series of conferences. The first one was held in Goa in 2004 and since then I think it has been held very regularly. It's become a landmark, it's become a main platform for sharing science education, both research and development work. So just before this morning I read one of your pieces AK on the nature of science. I think it was written fairly recently and it struck me that it's, I mean the clarity with which AK writes about these things is very striking. So in this firstly he argues about the importance of nature of science for science education. Of course this comes because of his deep interest in history and philosophy of science which was there I think from his very early years in HBCSE. And he, after making this argument that it's important, he looks at two ways in which this is done. One is through enquiry based science learning which is a kind of buzzword for several decades now. It's a paradigm of science teaching and learning. And another he says is through the history of science and he proposes both of these could be tried out. But he's also skeptical object and as people mentioned very objective, critical. So he says that the evidence is not there to show that either of these actually work but they should be tried out. And I think that's very instructive and of the kind of the way AK approaches things. Also for me what is very striking and in a way inspiring is that he takes these big ideas from many fields and sees its interpretation and relevance for science education. I think that's his one of his main tasks and also his involvement in physics education research. I mean continues to this day and even here I think he draws from the early days where he worked on alternative conceptions. He's gone on to look at epistemology of physics and physics learning and how that plays a role in things which every physics student experiences in college. Things like derivations in physics. I think there's a very nice research project that they've set up. So it's been altogether wonderful to know AK to know about his work and to learn from him and to work in the center which was led by him for many years. I wish him continuing fruitful and productive life and health and many more years. I hope to see you again after some years here. Thank you AK. Thank you. So before I start saying something about AK in response to what I say it was Copenhagen Denmark where we had a mom shell fell on my shoulder about 33rd. I mean we are going to host the 33rd ICO. That's one thing. And I think historically if the physicists and the chemists work together often they lead to a fruitful collaboration. History shows that. The 33rd ICO show is one such example where the group of chemists and you know led by a physics person. We work together and historically if you look at the history of Indian science Olympiad is one of the milestone. I mean it is one of the event which basically led to rigorous standardization of the Olympiad program in India. It gave boost to several things and that is something unique. And just to let audience know we have 50 years of HBCSE but this year we are also celebrating kind of it coincides. It's 25 years of the science Olympiad program. In fact next year I mean physics completed this year. The chemistry will be completing next year and next to next year the biology will be so it's a very nice coincidence. We have 80th birthday of A.K. We have 50th year golden jubilee for HBCSE and we have a silver jubilee for the science Olympiad. So I thought I'll just mention that just for the benefit of the audience here actually. So let me wish you a very healthy life ahead and I certainly look forward to interact with in many more years to come. I have gained significantly from my interactions with A.K. And what I will do is that I will try to say things which have not been said till now because a lot has been said. So actually my interaction with A.K. started when the science Olympiad program started. Before that I was kind of a student and to be very frank I was very scared of A.K. In fact I used to avoid going to him and I always used to go to Professor Pradhan because I felt it was much easier to put my arguments. And I think there were occasions where I took Professor Pradhan to accompany me to A.K.'s room so that I say what I can say. And I used to rehearse my argument. I literally used to rehearse my argument before I go to A.K.'s room because I was not sure what question I will get and whether I will have answer. It was like an exam going to her. So basically but of course when we started interacting you know because of the Olympiad program slowly I understood him better and then we had real good interactions. So what I will say is that this event 33rd ICHO in fact helped HBCSE to grow. It helped all the individuals and Subana you will agree with me actually that it helped all individuals from HBCSE to grow. It was the first major international events which was successfully hosted by HBCSE. And what this event really helped us with. So all sections of HBCSE basically experienced for the first they got first hand experiences about how to do meticulous planning detailing how to think about backup plans and be ready with it. How to be patient when we are supposed to handle complex situations on behalf of HBCSE. And it also you know kind of indirectly we all understood that our actions communicate impressions about HBCSE. And it is so very important to be responsible because you are kind of representing HBCSE to the people and in this case it was the international audience. So that is something all of us whosoever is there we learned when the 33rd International Chemistry International Olympiad happened. Everybody has spoken about AK and all of us know AK always thrives for excellence and it he values it the most. Whatever you do whatever small things you do it's very important that you excel. Okay and that is something throughout his life he has followed and he also expected doesn't say but he expects that this should be done. And this is you know this comes across any of his activities. There are many activities which have been mentioned whether it is a study circle in the physics or whether it's an Olympiad camp or whether it is an IUS program or whether it is epistomy. So basically you should really excel and the only way to excel is do hard work. I still remember as a research scholar one day we used to go to Dhanu tribal region and we used to have lots of school visits which used to start 6.30 in the morning. And by that time we used to back it was 8 p.m. and after that we were supposed to feel all the perform only one single day. We asked Professor Harvind Kumar sir we want 5 to 10 minutes break and he said nothing doing you people are research scholars you are supposed to work for 24 hours a day hard work doesn't kill anybody. And then me and Sugra both were very angry why this person doesn't understand that we just require some break. But now I understand and I really know the value of hard work and sir we have tried to do that in the kind of activities which we have. I don't know I'm not going to claim that we are anywhere close to the kind of work which you are put I mean you are still putting. But that is something which we have learned you know. KS just mentioned about his major contribution for establishing the PhD school in science education especially when TFR became the university. There also what I what really I mean even today I find it quite I mean I have taken over as Dean and I don't know how he managed his time. I always saw if he wants to learn anything he was to go and attend. Okay all the graduate courses he will make sure that he goes and attend he contributes he has solid discussions. And I really don't know how you manage time with the responsibility of the center director. And that is something other thing which I have learned that if you have to learn something it doesn't matter you have to be in it actually and you have to go and really do hard work. That is how you will get knowledge or whatever. So that's another thing which I have busy. The most important thing about AK is that he always valued academic freedom. Okay he really respected that and he gave freedom to his colleagues. He never stopped any individual from doing what they wanted to do. There were a difference of opinion. Okay I mean it was not that there were not any difference but that is he never stopped anybody and it's really important to understand this and respect the people's space and you know the kind of academic freedom they have. Now one thing which I would like to say throughout his activities especially about the Olympiad and NIS and all that. I think what AK has tried to do is to make efforts to bring people from scientific community. That is people who are engaged with the research domain of research domain. Then teachers who are people and the stakeholders who are engaged with teaching and learning process and young students. Okay who will take careers together on the platform for a fruitful interactions. And I think in Indian context where there are I mean these stakeholders do not generally meet each other. This kind of this effort or you know having this kind of a forum whether it is due to Olympiad or whether it is due to NIS and right now we are having a VP program where also this effort is going on. This is so very important and why it is important because I think all these stakeholders will understand each other. They will understand the difficulties the plus minuses and I think together they will come up with solutions which are viable. And those solutions are so very important for science education within India. So thanks a lot sir for the same thing. Wishing you a healthy life again. Thank you Prasad Adge. Varsha Vandana Nanal from TF. It's a proud honor and pleasure to be here today and I stand here as a student of Prasaravind Kumar. You all heard about study circle many times it was mentioned. So I had a privilege to be part of the study circle from 84 to 86. I think ours was probably the first batch. I still remember when he was starting it I think he went around to different colleges. So I was studying in Ruparel college and he came and gave a lecture. It was a mesmerizing lecture. It was the first time I think at least I felt that what you can see in physics beyond the textbook. And that motivated us and many others to join the study circle. The study circle was really a turning point and a life-changing experience. We learned about it was to be used to go there every Thursday in Nana Chowk in the municipality school there which was there. And tentatively it will start around 3 and supposed to go on till 6, 6, 30 but there were days it went till 7, 30 if I recall correctly. And nobody looked at time. It was really a pleasure and it was a completely different way of looking at things. He started that time with quantum mechanics. It was mostly I think Bizer's modern physics which were following and learning about quantum mechanics. And I'm really indebted to you because that sort of showed us that what the research can be and I'm sure like me many other people felt the same. Almost after 36 years, I had an opportunity again to attend his quantum mechanics lectures as a part of Vigyan Vidushi course in 2020. So this is the TFR HBCSE summer school program which we started and on the very first year we had to have it online. We were all daunted by teaching online. But Sarvind Kumar was maybe a bit hesitant initially but when he started teaching it was he was completely on board with online teaching and it was again a realization of his great teaching skills. And all the students feedbacks over the years also when you will see it's unanimously that how fortunate they are to be taught by him. So really thanks for that. I must also add in Vigyan Vidushi since the program was online the interactions were virtual. So we had this question answer forum for students to write the questions and teachers will answer it. And among all the teachers the one teacher who answered all the questions in detail. I don't have to tell the name it was Sarvind Kumar doing that. It's in line with all the things which have been said about him. So one more incident I remember in the first day in the informal interaction some students said that I can't understand English. Can you talk in Hindi. Many of us would have said it's not possible it is there how many students have this problem. He just said OK I understand I will try to do as much as possible in Hindi and he did in his lectures try to bring in Hindi. I mean this approach again is very very characteristic of him. And many students will vouch for this. I don't have much more to add but since Sir Rangola mentioned his passion for films I will add something which is not mentioned. But many of you will know he is a father of an actor. His son was acted in late 70s. There was a very famous Marathi serial Chimandrao Gundyabu. His son has done the role of Chimandrao's son in that. So that's also his another thing. So thank you very much for all that you taught us and wish you a very happy life. Thank you. Thank you. We've heard a lot about you learn a lot about you today. But I'm here to express my personal gratitude. For having met you which was a very decisive moment in my career and it changed the way that I worked. And let me be a little bit more explicit. I had come in sometime in February 1998 to conduct a workshop on low cost instruments in the chemistry department invited by Professor S.C. Agarkar. And in the valedictory function we were having tea and I met I mean Professor he was the centre director obviously we were having tea with the centre director. And he asked me what do you teach. And I said right now I'm teaching quantum mechanics and electricity magnetism and electrodynamics. I said why don't you come for the Olympiad program. I didn't know anything about the Olympiad program right. Out of the blue it says that to me and ever since that my career has changed. Because 1998 when we started all this program as Vijay pointed out making this thematic problems was itself a research. I spent most of my time you know apart from teaching and things like that. Researching on how to make a good real good thematic problem. So and I remember that in those good old days the resource generation camps were a handful of people. It was a very small club and we met in Professor Arvind Kumar's room AK's room upstairs. Two days of grueling things challenging problems. And you know being very careful that the problem is good enough so that AK really you know does not crush it down. So but the best part of it was after the two grueling days of RGC. It was a nice evening in what was it called invitation right. Celebration. It was a nice evening in celebration. Celebration no longer exists is called mama's grandma's cafe. And I make it a point to go to grandma's cafe for the sake of old times every time I'm in Bombay. So thank you again. Thank you very much for getting me to this problem into this program. Well that's called a slip of the tongue. Doesn't mean much. But getting into this program and ever since 1998 I have been here and still trying to make some challenging problems. Thank you again. Thank you. So of course I think it's getting quite late and everybody is waiting to hear from Professor Vinkumar. But if anybody else would like to save within one or two minutes anything. OK. Otherwise I would invite Professor Vinkumar to say a few words whatever. And we will end the program with that. So we'll put a chair for you. Shall we put a chair for you. That'll be better. They'll bring in a chair. But you can come. Please sit here. Can you switch this off and put a color mic. Yes, can you. Hello. So you can hear me. First of all thank you Anvesh Mashood and Arnab for organizing this wonderful symposium. And the felicitation function at the end. First of all greetings and thanks to all the participants and speakers of this symposium. This three day symposium which unfortunately I could not attend. So thank you all the speakers at the symposium. For this afternoon session of course I am very grateful to all the speakers. So many of them distinguished speakers and all of them distinguished but some of them are very close friends. And colleagues for giving me compliments and tributes. I enjoyed many of them very much. And I really do not know how to respond to those numerous tributes. So all I can accept I can do is to assume that those tributes were more a matter of affection than anything very substantially true. But whatever it is I accept all the tributes in all my humility. On this occasion I want to thank the numerous people in my life who have guided and supported me throughout the various stages. I have now completed eight decades of life. So through the various decades of my life I would like to thank of course I will not start from all over the beginning. This is going to be a very long list. So for lack of time and because of the fact that some names may not relate to you. I will be trimming that list and I will be reducing it. In this process of trimming it I might omit some names just out of memory loss I might have just forgotten. So before I start my apologies for any inadvertent omissions. But before I give you that list of people whom I want to express my gratitude to I just want to say a few remarks. Now well as the you know all the wise people in the world have always said that our life is a product of chance and necessities. I think it's quite a famous phrase chance and necessity. What is this I mean something happens to us by chance and then we our life takes a certain trajectory. Another chance happens on the trajectory. There are many branches to the trajectories but one chance when you get along another branch of the trajectory. Yet another chance yet another branch of the trajectory. I think it's current complexity theory if I understand it right of physics. That is what sometimes say that there are bifurcations happening etc. The analogy is not perfect but that's something like that. And then those bifurcations it's more chance than anything you. Once you are on the trajectory of course the necessary laws of nature take you over. So like anybody else my life also has been a product of numerous chances and necessities. So many that obviously I cannot recount all of them here. But I want to recount just two chances of my life. One right at the beginning of my life when I was a school student. And one right at the end of very near the end of my career. At school I was immensely fond of languages. In our time in Delhi of course there was no Marathi there it was Hindi, English and Sanskrit. I was very passionately fond. I was actually fond of nothing else but those languages. But unfortunately for me for some reason I do not know. I also scored well in science and maths. I said unfortunately because once you score well in science and maths the writing is on the wall I mean in the family. So my father dismissed any fancy ideas of my going to the other branch and said no nothing doing. You have to do science. These are very old times 50 or there was no such thing that asking your words what you want to do etc. Those concepts didn't exist in those times. So if you know about Delhi system you had to do this branching rather early in your life. It's not after 10th it used to be little earlier. Those were the times of Delhi higher secondary school so called. Anyway I mean for example if chance had taken me to the other branch all things being equal. This function might have been held in department of Hindi, Sanskrit or English of Hansraj college or some such college in Delhi. So how important is chance you know the whole life changes. Anyway it didn't happen I branched to science and here I am the so called physics educationist etc etc. That was one chance I will now fast forward because to 50 years later this first chance must have been 1953 or so or 55 something like that. The second chance mobile phone can you take it out? Mobile phone. Fast forward 50 years I think it was around 2003. HBCC was in full swing you know Olympia's conferences as Ravi said you know the graduate school. The various courses in science education Olympia's everything was in full swing. They didn't have to be any chance occurrence I mean it could have been could have just gone on. But I remember that day distinctly one day I was sitting in professor Shobha Bhattacharya then director TIFR. His room you know for some HBCC routine matters. HBCC director often goes there every month or two just to brief the directors TIFR. I got finished with those routine matters and then he said he stopped me and he said Arvind I want to say something to you. I said what? He said Arvind I am getting a feeling in the scientific and educational circles in India that something is to be done at the undergraduate stage. We have this very first rate premier institutes in the country for higher level graduate schools and so on. Some of the top TIFR itself being one but many other ISC, IIT's and so on. They are excellent graduate schools. Also lot of work is being done by NCRT on higher secondary and now you have also started something at that level the Olympia's etc. But there is something missing at the undergraduate level. Substantial thing of course they have always been some efforts but some very substantial thing needs to be done at the UG level. And he said it quite is not casual remark it is quite serious and he said why don't you think about it. So I said okay I will think about it. I came back more as usual brought me back to at VCC and his remark started set me thinking as to what to do. It was clear that I had to do something and as somebody pointed out I think Anvesh or somebody else. That once I get an idea then until that idea gets out of mind and gets translated into something I just cannot rest. So there was one or probably two weeks of intense thinking. Sometimes consulting Professor Pradhan but usually I was thinking on my own. And the only person who knew was Sumanna who knew that this guy is thinking about something. And in those days there was no at least I was not very familiar with computer typing and so on. So my style was paper writing. So I spent 10 days drafting up the Anvesh proposal and then of course I asked her to type it out. So that's part of the chance that somebody triggering me to do that. But you can always write a highly great sounding proposal. Writing a proposal is no big deal. It's the easy part of it. HBCAC is very fortunate that the proposal as soon as it was known to Director Tia for any way he had triggered it so he liked it. But then decision maker Professor Kakkar. Actually when I was writing that proposal I thought my daydreaming or what because it was quite a substantial proposal. Inviting you know asking for buildings and this and that. And it's not an easy job to ask the government. It was midterm plan so it's not easy to get money let alone infrastructure. Anyway to the great chance Chairman Dey not only liked the proposal I mean or approved the proposal those are very small words. He got so enthused about it which actually surprised me. I was very happy approving it but he was proactively excited about it just as I was excited in writing it. So I mean Professor Shobho had caught the right right vibrations going on in the government of India. You know the TIFR director goes to various is always in apex committee. So the director knows what what is the feeling that was this feeling four years later was to translate into these big things called ICERS. It was just this feeling that undergraduate level something had to be done. But this was four years ago that is that that was the chance. If this had come seven years at VCC would not have got this proposal. It came four years earlier that time there was a vacuum and NIS filled that vacuum. Thanks to the tremendous support of Dr. Kaka Rukul. So NIS is a product of two chances. One an important person triggering it. The other of course the most vital important person in the chain feeling not only supportive about it but proactively taking it forward and getting it. Getting the done. So these are the chances I wanted to say there are many this. Of course as somebody pointed out once the NIS and the earlier Olympias gave HBCAC new infrastructure. Then of course it was open for all programs. It does not restrict to the infrastructure. 20 years from now maybe or 30 years from now NIS may take some other shape. Olympias may take some other shape. But the buildings will still be there and they can always become one can think of. So it will it's all to the imagination of HBCAC new generation how to make use of that. For example the latest Vigyan Vidushi which somebody Nanal pointed out. We did not think when NIS Vigyan Vidushi program but it came and the NIS infrastructure is just the right structure for Vigyan Vidushi. Also because of the labs the labs we got the labs which are advanced and so on. And that is what I meant by saying that life or institutions life itself is a product of chance and necessity. I think I can go on and on on this theme of chance and necessity so let me just before I close. No words are adequate to thank Prof. Shobho Bhattacharya and Dr. Kakodupar for what they have done to HBCAC. I was only talking of chance I am not talking of HBCAC all activities etc. They are of course very nice spectrum of activities on equity and excellence and all that. But this is not the occasion to talk about. Now I come back to thanking people expressing my attitude. Then since there are too many I have to make some criteria. The best criteria is Indian tradition first pay your respects to the elders and then come to colleagues and so on. I am grateful to Prof. Viren Singh and I will start from TIFR days otherwise it can take any time. So I will start from TIFR early days. I am grateful to Prof. Viren Singh my PhD guide, Prof. Uddh Gaukar my mentor. But there were many other colleagues senior colleagues Prasayal K. Pandit, Prasayan Mukunda, Rasekaran, SS Jhaar, DP Roy and SM Roy. In several others I might be forgetting some names. It is these people from whom I learnt theoretical physics. Of course all of these that I named they have become giants in their own fields etc. But I picked up what modern science education people call the epistemology. The epistemology of theoretical physics. I did not do great theoretical physics but I got the epistemology of theoretical physics. What is done in theoretical physics? What do you mean by doing research in theoretical physics? That is called epistemology and these epistemic inputs are most important. I got these on that but I was into teaching because that was my for whatever reasons the basic impulse. I went to UDP. UDP the elders they were not too many so they weren't too many elders or younger etc. Prasayam C. Zoshi I would like to pay my respectful tributes to him. And of course Professor Abbas Rangwala who was my elder there and from home over 10 years I learnt too many things to enumerate. And this was a different kind of learning because theoretical physics research is a different thing. Here also we were doing research but our main job was teaching. So I mean you know going off working out one textbook after another. Fortunately another chance Professor Rangwala has the same temperament as me. Namely that we all both like teaching and we all both working out in detail and you know giving long long classes. We coincide I mean we have this is again a chance because sometimes what happens in some faculties you get a course and then they then you have to just do that course all your life because people have people have sort of you know fixed their courses and you can't do it. But in this university one year I would teach one to me next year Abbas would teach next year I would teach electrodynamics next year he would teach. This was a fantastic experience. Why I call my UDP experience is because of this. If I were to teach only one subject for 11 years that would not have been fun and educated because after 2-3 years you get bored. Bored by that course and you just teach what you already know. But this was one course after another so there were some 10 all the core courses name any core course we both taught name any topical course except for one or two. I still miss solid state physics because that had got sort of controlled by somewhere so I we didn't get it. I wish I had a portion to teach solid state physics and electronics anyway is my weak point so I didn't teach that. But apart from that I am nuclear physics what did I have to do I mean I had I was a particle physicist nuclear physics and all together different discipline. But here was this Dishelitan flashback and we poured over it every page of it taught it for 2 years then then atomic and molecular physics then laser physics all sorts of things. So I think it was enormously useful and I am grateful to Professor Abbas who was my compatriot in this learning. I move on to this also Chetan Mehta I just want to remember him he was also one of the people. I come to Pomeva Centre quickly as far as the elders are concerned is Professor Vijay Kulkarni, Uddhgaavkar, Professor Lagu, Professor Bhagwat otherwise the rest of them are all younger than me so I can't say them. I was the eldest there so these are Pomeva Centre people and then CBS again I met Professor Chetan who was definitely senior and I want to pay my respectful tributes to him. And Professor Hosur Mathur although they were younger in the role they were bigger they were directors of the centre for basic sciences Mathur and the current director Dr. Jain etc. I am very grateful to them that they are very courteous to me and so on. I come back to my 14 years of centre director shape at Pomeva Centre. You see first of all I will tell you that HBCC thinks moon goes smooth unless the HBCC director has good contacts with TI for directors. I was extremely fortunate in having excellent rapport almost friendly with TI for directors starting from Professor Veeran Singh who was anyway my guide. Professor Jha who might be director but actually was my old friend at TI for then Professor Shobho I have already mentioned and then after Professor Shobho who was that? Professor Mustans in Burma Shobho was 2002. Although I was there only for a year with Mustans in Burma he was also very kind and grateful to all of them. But not only when I was there as a centre director after my directorship I had nothing to do with TI for directors after I retired. But sometimes one does go to TI for and I have always got extremely good kindness and curtsy by the successive directors after Mustans saying of course Ram Ki and Sandeep Trivedi and of course the current director. I was very honoured that he came to this function he is very recent and I have talked to him only twice but two or three on this few occasions I talk he is extremely courteous to me so I thank them all very much. I should express my deep gratitude to Dr. Chidambaram, Dr. Kakod Krahav said there was another person Dr. Ramarao who for some reasons had taken a liking for me and then the proposals with BRNS it is all used to when go through so smoothly there was never any problem. I come back to my junior as centre director of course Prof. Pradhan and Prof. Vijay Singh were my you know the dean as well as Vijay Singh came little later but nevertheless he was next in office. It is these people who ran the centre I was only there nominally and I am very grateful to them to take so much of responsibility. People somebody told me how could I do this or I could do this because these two people were there etc. I must acknowledge administrative support of Pr. Fadnavis and Madhavi like only. I believe that although may be not TRF up close at least at VCSE is a very close-knit institution there is not much difference between academic, scientific and this there is no difference we say very an extremely good feature of at VCSE. So Pr. Fadnavis and Madhavi and our important most important person I used to call in of the centre P.P. Rao because without his signature nothing can happen so our accountant P.P. Rao they were very kind to me and they. This is about management but academically also I learnt a great deal from of course my colleague Pradhan who is a very very capable person in many many different fields including maths and physics and so many things. He is a real broad general scholar and there is so much to learn from him but I learnt from a younger colleagues I starting from Agarkha Gambhir and even Gaisas when we used to go to trips. Shri Shbarve it was younger I was so regretted that he left the centre but after many years I saw him I was so glad. Jay Shree who actually introduced me to physics education research. Sugra is who gave different dimensions these social dimensions I did not bother during my UDP period I was not into these social dimensions but she made me aware of these dimensions. Subramanyam and Nagarjuna Chitra, B.S. Mahajan, Jyotsana, Rajesh all of these I learnt I mean because it has been such a long period of 14 years and I was interacting sometime or the other with all of them etc. So I learnt a great deal you can only say that I am a good student I mean I pick up if somebody tells me I try to learn it. I want to particularly acknowledge K.S. is he there? K.S. Subramanyam and Nagarjuna I think is not there. These people oriented me to philosophy of science. So now I doubt myself as a philosopher of science of sorts actually I am my main roots are only in physics but I really got I think my intellectual enrichment was much strengthened because of K.S. and J.N. because I learnt what is it just as I told you one has to learn what is it that is called theoretical physics. Similarly what is it that is called philosophy of science people have naive ideas about what it all means. So from that naive to something more subtle not as subtle as they know it but I got to know philosophy to the extent I had the courage to even give a course on philosophy of science. So that is my usual technique if I want to work hard then I just take up that subject. So philosophy of science learning theories cognitive development education etc these are not my topics at all I have never been trained in these topics. But I said why not I mean just let us just there are some very good colleagues here let me and the usual my usual pattern take a book and just saw just read it read it read it. And that is how I learnt some of these things I am very very happy that I am not a typical hard-nosed physicist which I would have remained if I was only in the physics. But my hard-nosed physics character sort of broaden to include these very intellectual horizons of behavioral science which I must say most scientists are not aware of. And so I am very happy and I am very privileged to be. Yeah Rekha I do not know if she is there I had really are you there Rekha yeah thanks. Yeah I mean I have a very special report for God reasons what reason reasons but I had a very special report I used to discuss with her though I do not know any that is one subject I still could not master. Not only master I could know I do not know that. Vijay Singh has been talking about it I think it has been one of the most exciting periods of my life the most cherished period if I want to reminisce about my academic things and that was those few years of 1998 to 2001. Later Olympiads became a pain and then too much of this thing but those three four years it was not so much pain and it was just you know designing problems designing the problems he related very nice incidents about it etc. But I Vijay Singh and occasionally Sanjay Sunil Dutta yeah but mostly two of us the excitement of it was almost as novel as doing research I would say even better than that because doing research you have a pressure whether you will somebody will publish it or not and all sorts of pressures. But this Olympiad designing problem is the most blissful activity because it is very challenging very demanding it knows it needs lot of subject expertise if you do not have you have to read it and then you have to design it in such a manner not only it is very demanding it is also accessible. These requirements are not simple requirement people underestimate the importance of the time that is needed for Olympiad design it is not that if formulate the problem these are the brightest people on the planet and how do you can't have a standard problem. IITGE problem is no model for Olympiad problems it is of the different kind you have to design it but you can't go outside the syllabus it is very easy to design very difficult problems take up a book of Jackson and write a write down a problem it is not that way. The technique we found was read Jackson read shape read reactor physics read this read that and water it down that was now I am giving you the trade secret of how to design Olympiad problem. So the Dirac monopoly problem was that way we first read the sections from but you cannot write Dirac Dirac is a graduate level sorry Jackson is a graduate level book how to bring it down here. The other requirement it should be accessible you know it should be examinable there should be clear cut marks and so on this is a fantastic exercise provided there is not too much stress on it and now I am told nowadays it is very stressful etc. But we found this period stress free and the most academically interesting period of my life. So thanks Vijay for those that very happy period the most the period I have cherished most in my life. Anyway there are many other in my naming all the individuals I must have I am sure I have forgotten many many people please forgive me I don't mean to ignore anybody but just some names might have gone. Some new very bright people have come to the center I have not had much interaction Ankush Deepa Sanjay Sanjay is one person I don't know if he is there but his fantastic is his depth of cognitive sciences incredible. And whenever I will listen to him whatever he says I find this is something oh this is not something trivial this is something a kuch bandha kuch but settle over I could that that sort of thing that I get from Sanjay I don't know is there. So these are my academic I am going to my younger colleagues in a moment I mean but before that let me formally also thank the succeeding center directors deans etc. It's a formality but I must go through Prasapradhan Ramdas Subramanyam and now I don't need to be formal but Aruna you are the director and I should thank you for all the curtsy that post retirement I am getting and all the deans later the lead Jayashree Ramdas Chitranath Rajan and then Sugra Chanawala and Savitalat Gey etc. So my formal thanks for when I come now post retirement at BCSE I am so warmly welcome so thank you all very much. And of course the center directors I am sorry the national coordinators I shouldn't take Anvesh I mean the center is quite an important person now in this but because of the age I forget it sometimes. And so these national coordinators Prasavijay Singh and Prasad Anvesh Majumdar so all the center directors deans and national coordinators post my retirement thank you all very much. I also want to write Prithvijay Sain if he is there he is now the national coordinator Maths Sulempia. So he is also very nice to me when I come here. Now one organization I will just go outside I have just I will just spend just 2 more I mean 5-10 minutes more. One organization that works hand in hand with at BCSE is IAPT and I thank professor Dharkar, professor Dharkar sadly no more. Professor Oglapurkar, professor Alu Alia and there have been numerous IAPT members and I am very good. Without IAPT HBCSE alone cannot do the Olympias it is IAPT HBCSE effort and that is the way it has been going also. Thanks all IAPT members all of them I may not take their names but thank you all very much. Also there was Dr. Prabhu of Indian Association of Chemistry teachers at Professor Sathya Murthy mentioned Dr. Kali Indian Association of they have been named something else but I call them Indian Association of Biology teachers Dr. Kali and so on. And with these chemistry and bio-olympias I came to know some very distinguished people who are not physicists but chemists and biologists. So that is another great advantage of being at HBCSE because otherwise in physics you just remain with physicists etc. You don't even know. Professor Sathya Murthy, professor Gadre, professor Uday Maitra they were all members of the international chemistry. Professor Madan Chaturvedi is a very capable person and it has been a great fortune of HBCSE that such brilliant people have also found it interesting to come to HBCSE. And they are giants in their own fields but they come to HBCSE and all this Olympiad problem solving or international bio-olympiads. So I have come in contact with some of them so my gratitude to all of them all these people. Now I want to say that my most special mention is Rajaram Nityanand. I had known his fame had traveled to me before I saw him. I had known from 1980s or something that there is a guy at Raman Research Institute. He is really really good. I had heard this but I did not have the fortune to have seen him. But eventually I saw him at CRT books and then this Astronomy Olympiad etc. And well I cannot tell you what he is and Rajaram is my role model as far as physics is concerned. You know great physicists they do not look different they are something similar. So he may look like all of us but he is a great physicist. His knowledge of physics I mean people are appreciating me. That is all just textbook but the real depth you know it is difficult to describe what that is. So I would not try to try. His depth and breadth of understanding of physics and the facility with which he goes from one subject to another and so on. I can only aspire and the remaining years that I have I am just trying to see if I can be you know it is the mathematical notion of limit. Can I approach that? So thank you Rajaram and not only for of course that is great but also being very very cooperative and very nice to me during the Astronomy Olympiad and your friendship. I mean he is he became my friend for many years and so it is one of my cherished achievements of life to have been friendly with Rajaram. Returning to the Astronomy Olympiad we had a see what happens is this astronomy thing astrophysics I can possibly manage. But this business of observational astronomy is something is I am not too good at it. Not too good not good at all but so observational astronomy. And when this Olympiad was happening I was looking for some person to help me because I could not have kept on on this. And professor why I was there but he is in TFR and but I always like to keep things under my thing. If I am in the committee for Astronomy Olympiad I should know it properly and I was finding it hard. So it was a godsend for me. This very young entrant at that time very young and even now very young Aniket Suley. He came just it was real godsend. I was looking for it I was getting tense and there was Aniket Suley right in front of the desk. He said I said where are you? I mean he said no I just returned from Germany. I think he did his PhD in Germany. And I knew from his early experience that he is a bright boy. I said just come along. You have to be part of HBCC. And that's why Aniket Suley who saved me from International Astronomy Olympiad. And of course professor Vaya has always been there. Vaya is not just about Astronomy Olympiad. Vaya has been my friend from 1970s. He was one of the students who would come and gossip with professors. Generally professors gossip among themselves or students gossip among themselves. But here is a guy who would come to Abbas room and I would be there and he would be gossiping with us. So he has been friend since then. Where is Vaya? And he is very good in a variety of fields and we have been often wanting to work together. But he is just too busy. A man like that is just too busy with this and that. We have been wanting to write a book and so on. But time passed. The pandemic came and so on. Before the pandemic we were thinking of writing something. What was it? The glimpses of science. No, flavour of science. But our function is that flavour remained unimplemented. But anyway thanks Vaya. And Vaya has been not only my friend, has been a friend of HBCAC. You have any HBCAC program, conference, Goa conference. He is there to help you. So he is a sort of quasi-HBCAC person. I am not sure where he exactly belonged. Did he belong to TIFR or was it HBCAC? So thanks Vaya and for your recent invitation last year for this summarizing. That by the way was quite painful because I took three months to review HBCAC. I mean that was too late of time for me to do. But for his sake I did that. Okay, so thanks Vaya. Paresh Soshi actually joined just around the time. I saw, I don't know, but I know Paresh Soshi by some other route etc. And he came close to me. I could not interact with him. I have known him for long otherwise etc. He has always been very kind and courteous whenever I come here. So thank you Vaya again. Thank you Aniket. Thank you Paresh for this. Now while I am on HBCAC I must acknowledge the help of some younger friends. I talked of my academic colleagues. There are too many of them and they all came spontaneously here to stand with me. Meena who is whom I should call my young friend for a long time. And Lale Deshmukh of Integrated Lab. We have been together. Shereesh is always there. I want to also name Indrani. She is a soft spoken person. Oh she is there. She is very self-facing. She does all the work but she keeps behind. She is a wonderful resource for Chemistry Olympiad and was also a ready help for me. When I was used to sit in this post retirement I was working with Savita sometime. So it was Savita Indrani who helped me tremendously. Anupama is there. I don't know if she is there. Anupama oh you are there. Good, good. And many other people please forgive me. The younger, the more recent ones who came after retirement. I know them but I don't remember their names etc. And Shweta, I have known her for a long time. She is excellent in maths etc. I had been wanting, I mean she impressed some maths faculty when they came here. So very well known mathematics educators. She went there and I have been associated with her for a long time. And finally Manoj, who is Manoj. Oh yeah he is Manoj. He is an amazing person. It is difficult to describe who or what. So I won't say. He is an amazing artist. Amazingly creative. A lot of creativity that you see in HVCC, various things. It is Manoj etc. And very, very nice man just to be there. I would also like to, there are some behind the scenes people who have helped me all my life. In fact without that nothing would have happened. I talked about an IUS proposal but that would have been only on my papers. But there had to be some people to help me etc. And the person who has been my help throughout from 1994 after retirement. Not only retirement, after that I take her for granted. There is some work. I just call her and say, Sumana you do this and Sumana you do that. So Sumana has been my most closest confidant you can say. And I tell her just about everything. This one person apart from my children that I take for granted is Sumana. And Gajanan is a universal, new useful person not only for man. But he is always there behind this. Smita she has now retired but I think. Sandhya Padnekar they are my very, very good. Even now I make use of them. When I go to the library I am very lazy looking for books. I have to just tell Sandhya or Padnekar I need this book and they just get me in 2 minutes etc. So thank you all very much. I might have missed some very important names. Please forgive me etc. Now I should mention Kagan Gupta is there. Please forgive me for 5 minutes just as another few lines. I enjoyed a tremendous rapport with NCRT people to so much so that I have now been put in a committee which I should not have been put just too old for such heavy work that is now going to come to at VCSE. But God knows what some of this I think the culprits must have been some of these NCRT friends who must have recommended my name there. And so anyway 20 years ago we had a very, very nice friendship with B.K. Sharma, V.P. Srivastava, Gagan Gupta, Hukum Singh all very dear to me and I very, very much cherished my visits to NCRT. Actually NCRT apart from of course these book visits and great things. You see Delhi is a place, I grew up in Delhi as you heard. I always miss some of its snacks. You see Mumbai snacks are no match for me. So whenever I went there I used to do the farmahish kibbeh bread pakoda. Bread pakoda is a dish there. Bread pakoda chaya mojaya. So these people would from somewhere get such tasty bread pakoda. And once they knew that Arun Kumar likes it. Every meeting that I had that bread pakoda would be there. So and various things and they know that I have taste for especially food from Delhi. Delhi food is fantastic and I keep teasing my Mumbai friends that you guys don't know how to prepare food. And so still I enjoyed but now it's too late for me to enjoy bread pakoda and all that. Numerous people at AES, Anushakti Nagar, Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai, Marathi Vidyan Parishad, many other organizations. I will not name numerous friends the time is getting late. But I would like to thank Sri A.P. Deshpande. He is still there. A.P. Deshpande for inviting me to be the president of Akhil Bhartiya, Marathi Addivation at Vani etc. It was wonderful. And all these people, particularly my HVCC colleagues, you see till although my mother tongue is Marathi, my preferred language is always Hindi but it is these guys who introduce me, Agarkar, Gambhir etc. so that now I am reasonably good in my own mother tongue. Though nowhere compared to Prof. Pradhan or somebody else but still I can manage. So I am very thankful to all them. I want to thank Pratipa Jolly. I met her two decades ago and since then she has been an important resource person for physics education research. Whenever I have some query about this as to who is the right person for this or who is the right person, she is there. She has international, she was chair ICP 2005 and she very kindly agreed to contribute to physics educations, that special news which are very nice thing. And from I think ICP 2005, ICP she organized so nicely in Delhi. It was real model of how nicely an international conference can be done. And I hope IPT and other people are organizing at Chandigarh now. I hope it meets the same standards as what she did in ICP 2000 and I gave a talk there etc. So I have very good memories of Pratipa Jolly. As for the physics news issue is concerned Prof. Alubaliya, Prof. Sapna Sharma. Thank you very much for all your help etc. I am now coming near the end but I cannot leave my, you must have noticed that the most important part of my life I have missed and that is my students. But they are so numerous, so how can I name so many of them? There are hundreds and I do not know how many of them. So I will only end by naming my PhD students of some of whom who take. So my PhD supervision is very peculiar. I mean I do not think there is any, there must be a few parallels. What I do is some student comes along and says he or she is interested in this topic. I was in particle physics but I say okay you are interested, let us do this. And then I start working with the student and learning that subject and doing PhD then. Next student comes, no no I am not interested in that, I am interested in this. Okay, why not? So I go to that subject. This is the way, it is a very peculiar way. Not if you are wanting to become great professional physicist, do not adopt this pattern. But I think for a physics teacher I was destined to be so-called educational but physics teacher. This is a good thing because then you get to know various subjects and your epistemology is never clear unless you do some research. No matter the research may not be earth shaking but the fact that you are doing research improves your epistemic understanding of physics etc. So this pattern was suited me, it will not suit an aspiring physicist who wants to become a great professional physicist. For physics education it is good. So one day you know when I was in 1970s Bala here came and he said from BSc days he is interested in general relativity. Now in those days general relativity was not, it was regarded in a certain subject. This current general relativity and particle convergence that had not arrived in that day. It was not something particle physicists knew actually. I am talking early 1970s. He said no from BSc I am interested. I said why not, let us go and he related to you so I would not repeat. We read those books which were meant for general relativity. It was a very productive collaboration. It was an exhilarating experience to have worked on quantum black hole physics originally coming from particle physics. Next year a lady came and she said no I am this general relativity is too much for me. I am more into earthy subjects like optics or atomic physics. I said why not, let us go today. So I did atomic physics, optical physics, a subject called coherent transients. It was just learning together something and producing some research and such. I joined Homi Baba Centre. There was a student, has Manjusha come today? Manjusha Deshpande, she was going to come. Anyway she was a bit mathematically oriented student and at Homi Baba Centre what will I do? I was yearning to do some maths and some kind of theoretical thing. So in disguise of theoretical physics I actually did mathematical modeling of educational processes. What is theoretical physics? Applying mathematics to some system. This was applying mathematics to an educational system. So we made this, that also was a productive collaboration in some journals called Journal of Mathematical Sociology. So it is all very strange you know some particle physicists publishing in Journal of Mathematical Sociology and so on. But this is because of this pattern of this. Anyway Jayashree taught me this PR etc. Meanwhile I never kept out of interest with touch with physics. And there was this friend Sudeer Pansey. He had some new ideas on thermodynamics of partially coincident cycles etc. And he came to me, he had lot of friendship and respect for me and said shall we think about it? I said yeah you can, you think about it I will be engaged with you. So basically he was not my student but I was quite deeply engaged with him when he did his PhD on a very original topic etc. Then after some time there was a young boy called Vikram Atle. He was into this quantum foundation, he was obsessed with quantum foundation. I said don't get obsessed with, do something useful. I mean quantum foundation is not an area and not certainly for me doing here now directorship of the center. Then I formulated a subject which is not foundation but it had to do with foundation, the de-coherence theory. So you know this quantum, the phenomena that classical quantum systems, how do they become classical? The emergence of classicality in quantum systems. This topic always fascinated me because this is a paradox. Why does classical physics work? Quantum is this and quantum physics should work even for macro bodies. Why doesn't all the, de-coherence theory is a satisfactory non-philosophical theory. Other things are too philosophical or God knows what they are and I never got into that. So de-coherence theory I said well you did it. People had done other things. I said let's go to molecular chemistry, I mean molecules actually. So we went to molecules and did some de-coherence, produced people. In general of chemical, what is the general term? The equivalent of general of chemical physics. General of chemical physics is the right, yeah. So I, we produced three papers in general of chemical physics because it was a molecular de-coherence etc. Anyway then I was back to this and I was more into this alternative conceptions etc. I finally took a student who was in proper physics education research but I took an extremely difficult topic. PR never does such difficult topics. Physics education research generally restricts to some simpler topics of BSc etc. But I was, by the way I had got converted to G of general relativity. So I said student conceptions in general relativity, let's formulate it. Again it was a difficult topic. I was not sure it will work but it worked and the student got PhD etc. So this has been my this thing. I mean incidentally Pansay, Pradhan, Rajwade and I, apart from our academic interaction, we form another circle. And we meet every 3-4 months or so. We used to now it's stopped because of the pandemic. We would go to restaurant, they would come every once. And we would discuss everything under the sun except physics there. So we would be discussing all kinds of politics and whatever is going on in the world etc. So I think that was a wonderful interaction in this. Among the study circle students I will name a few. Nanal DG Prabhu has he come. Sahana Murthy, Sahana Murthy probably not come, she gave a lecture here. I want to also mention Shekhar Dev there. He was going to come but he did not, it's college meeting stuck him. So I still recall Nanal in the study circle students. She was at that time, she looked like, now she looks but she looked like a young college head girl, sitting quietly at just one place. She was always there at one place and coming with unfailing regularity. It was not that one day you come, no, all years she came with failing regularity. And now she has been doing extremely well and she is in TIFR and so on. So I am very proud of her that some of my study circle students. I am very proud that some of my study circle students are doing extremely well in physics etc. Prabhu has been a very dear friend. I didn't see him, I thought he would come etc. I would also like to mention my friendship with BM Arora. I have not had direct interaction but Arora has had lot of interest in education and in that context we came quite a lot. So Prabhu sir Arora, thank you very much. And please forgive me any other omission that I have this thing. I close this now with four names, so called not my students but my younger colleagues Savital Adge with whom I did chemistry, education, produced a book on chemical thermodynamics and my more recent colleagues Anvesh Mashood and Amog. Amog is not in HVCC, he is in Kansas State etc. but he was here sometime etc. And I not only enjoyed the discussions but I also enjoyed the tremendous respect they gave me because of difference of age now etc. So I am really fine when I come to HVCC. These younger friends of mine are there to take care of me etc. But however it has not been just respect etc. Last ten years I have been very very productive with Savita on this book and last several years, six, seven years we have been doing this physics epistemology etc. It has been I would say quite a creative phase of my life so much near the end in which we have done this epistemology physics etc. and produced some nice papers. I think they are worth reading for many science education students of HVCC. Now this was all about friendships later but there are some people who you meet some friends who have come across at a younger stage when you are college etc. When your interest is more playful and fun rather than studies or anything like that although we were students even in colleges etc. Vinoth, Sani, my old Hansaraj College buddy, Kailash, Rastagi, my little later my early TIF of friend Deepan etc. The other day we met at there is some function just one or two weeks ago. So we met at TIFR. It must have been after I God knows with Kailash probably 15, 20 years Vinoth also after 15 years. It just doesn't feel that it has been so much appeal. It is as if we just met yesterday. So that is the great thing with these early friendships. The bonds are so strong that no matter how much is the time the relationships remain the same. There is no formality. I don't care one bit that they have become very distinguished people in their own fields etc. Nothing it doesn't matter to me at all. For me it is Kailash and Vinoth of the same old years and I have the same affection for them. They are independent of what they did later in their lives etc. So that is really all I would like to close. I have talked about everybody. It is not my usual habit as HBCC people know to keep to bring in my own family matters in this thing. I usually keep them away etc. But I think this is 80 decades and probably I am never going to come to this stage again. Here probably my last chance. So I would like to also acknowledge those whom I have always taken for granted Varsha my daughter here and Jitain her husband and my son Neeraj whom Nanal mentioned who unfortunately he might be. I don't know is it a way to see but he might be there watching. He is there in his wife Jain. They must have got up early and got disease. And of course Varsha Neeraj mother Shobha who gave me these wonderful two children. So I would like to acknowledge them. They have provided me the solid, stable, emotionally fulfilling life without which nothing would have been possible. Thank you very much.