Patriotism is an abstract concept and no one can measure it. However there is a crisp way to define it: anyone who puts the country’s interest before one’s own is a patriot. By this yardstick, Dr Homi Jehangir Bhabha was a perfect fit for the title.

Bhabha was at Cambridge during the 1930s. After obtaining a degree in engineering and a mathematics tripose and then the doctorate, he worked with very famous physicists of the time like Dirac, Bohr and Pauli. This association polished Bhabha’s scientific work to an international level. Some of his theories in cosmic ray physics are text book topics even now. He visited India in 1939 at this level of recognition, but could not travel back as the war broke out. To bide away his time, he continued work on cosmic rays at the Indian Institute of Science, headed by Prof C.V. Raman.

Anyone else with the stature that he enjoyed would have taken a journey back to Britain after the war. He knew the difference between the scientific infrastructure at European labs and here. Having worked with Nobel laureates all along he also knew the importance of the prize, which he could have won by a longer exposure to European or American facilities. He was already a Fellow of Royal Society, at the young age of 31. But he stayed back. This itself was a momentous decision; but there was more to it. He stayed back because he had a dream for India. Here’s what he wrote to the trustees of the Sir Dorab Tata Trust in 1944, asking for a financial grant to establish a school of physics. “....When nuclear energy has been successfully applied for, in say a couple of decades from now, India will not have to look abroad for its experts but will find them ready at hand”. When he wrote this, no one knew about the nuclear bomb or even about the nuclear chain reaction established by Enrico Fermi in USA. When exciting stories about the developments in science came out in the open after the war, it was time to join the “mainstream”. The same year his “school of physics”, which he wanted to be “comparable to the best anywhere”, opened in June ‘45. He built this Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), only with the idea of creating research facilities in India, the likes of which he had seen abroad. His example inspired more scholars to return to India and work at TIFR and at the Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay ( now called Bhabha Atomic Research Centre).

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