Photo from Twitter Tribute
The Wikipedia article on him offers a brief description of
his scientific contributions.
I will say a few words here about my memories of Prof Swarup.
My friend Ramesh Sinha and I joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research more
or less at the same time, in 1963. Ramesh joined the Radio Astronomy Group of
TIFR. I was completing my project work for my IIT M Tech as an intern in the
TIFR Computer Group during the first year and was recruited by TIFR in 1964.
Swarup was a member of the Selection Committee that had interviewed me. He was
deeply interested in the work I was doing in the computer field – building a real-time
data acquisition system. He was keen to equip the Ooty Radio Telescope he was
building with an UpToDate data handling system including a real-time computer.
Minicomputers were coming of age then. I became an informal consultant to the
Radio Astronomy Group. Ramesh and I enjoyed participating in the teams’
decisions in buying India's earliest real-time computers. I had a serious
interest in Radio Astronomy and had a number of friends in the group.
An interest
I shared with Swarup in later years was education. I will touch upon this by
mentioning a June 2011 letter he had written to four of us. It included a copy
of an email from another radio-astronomer, Prof Ananthakrishnan, describing a
visit to a school with 2600 students. Ananth had been asked to address the top
hundred students and found that not one had an idea of wavelength of light,
distance of the earth from the Sun, the nature of stars, etc. He pointed out
that students were more interested in getting marks in competitive exams and
less in real learning. Swarup agreed, and decided to do something about it. He
thought often about Indian education in general and what can be done about it. This
made him attach to his email a brilliant article by Sanjay Srivastava, “The End of Education”, published in the Open Magazine:
https://openthemagazine.com/features/living/the-end-of-education/ For those of you who want to read
more in this direction, I will mention another excellent article: “How Kota became India's capital for
educational coaching”,
Prof Swarup’s prodding usually worked at different levels and
has had good effect, but talking it about requires another article.
Another act of Prof Swarup that had touched my heart was his
attempt to run science related activities for school children in and around the
villages surrounding the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope that the National Centre
for Radio Astronomy built under Swarup’s leadership.
A great mind and a caring heart do go together! Then you find a rare human being, like
Swarup!
Srinivasan Ramani
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