Page 20 - PROF-DHAWAN-COMPILED

PERSONAL NEWS

TRG during his recent illness was ex- he would try to preserve this inheritance country looks to young, gifted organic
emplary and heart-warming. for which he had trained himself. Natu- chemists to carry on the work of TRG.
I visited the family a few days ago to ral products chemistry is another be-
express my condolences. Rajagopalan quest of TRG which needs to be
was kind enough to show me one of preserved and pursued. N. S. Narasim- K. NAGARAJAN
TRG’s bequests, his orchid collections, han at Poona University practised it
Dendrobiums, Vandas and a few other very ably for several years. I have re- Hikal R&D Centre,
species. Some were on the ground, tained a significant interest in the area, Bannerghatta Road,
while about a thousand were in the cli- but circumstances took me into syn- Bangalore 560 076, India
mate-controlled terrace. He told me that thetic medicinal chemistry. Now the e-mail: n_kuppuswamy@hotmail.com

Satish Dhawan

Satish Dhawan, former Director of the Engineer’s Degree in 1949 and a PhD in and intriguing experiments but could
Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Aeronautics and Mathematics in 1951 also play with hypergeometric func-
Chairman of the Space Commission, with the eminent aerospace scientist and tions, quote Shakespeare for every oc-
and President of the Indian Academy of fluid dynamicist Hans W. Liepmann casion, and regale his friends with
Sciences during 1977–1979, passed (Honorary Fellow of the Indian Acad- stories about the camel answering to the
away on the night of 3 January. Al- emy of Sciences) as adviser. This edu- name of Greta Garbo in the Khyber Pass
though he had been growing physically cational breadth, covering science, (Dhawan grew up as a young man in
infirm during the previous half-year, he engineering and the humanities, and his what is now Pakistan). The charm of his
had remained his usual cheerful self till distinguished family background, ap- personality overwhelmed everybody
the very end, and died peacefully within pear to have given Dhawan an ability to that came to know him, especially as it
twenty minutes of complaining about view the world from many different was accompanied by a very Indian sense
difficulty in breathing. With his angles, and may explain in part his of grace and modesty.
death the country lost one of its most unique qualities as a leader. At the time that Dhawan began his
distinguished sons, and the scientific Dhawan had spent a year on the shop career in aerodynamic research, super-
community a truly unimpeachable rep- floors of Hindustan Aircraft (now sonic flows and shock waves were still
resentative. He had at various times in Hindustan Aeronautics, HAL) before rather exotic phenomena; his earliest
his career been teacher, research scien- leaving for the US on a government papers dealt with these subjects, and
tist, engineer, technologist, manager, scholarship. As a student at Caltech he one of them, which had detailed obser-
leader and adviser – sometimes many of made an extraordinary impression, and vations of how a shock wave bounces
these at the same time. And to every- left a glow of fond memories behind off a solid surface (such as that of a
thing he did he brought dedication, him when he left to return home in wing, for example) became widely
breadth of vision, meticulousness and 1951 – for here was an Indian who was known for its revealing and defining

humanity, which, combined with his not only ingenious at hooking up new observations. For his Ph D thesis he
remarkable scientific and technological
abilities, transformed every organiza-
tion he worked for or led, and made it
achieve what it had often not thought
itself capable of.
Satish Dhawan was born on 25 Sep-
tember 1920 in Srinagar, and was edu-
cated in this country and the United
States. He graduated from the Univer-
sity of Punjab (Lahore) with an unusual
combination of degrees: a BA in
Mathematics and Physics, an MA in
English Literature, and a BE in Me-
chanical Engineering. In 1947 he ob-
tained an MS in Aeronautical
Engineering from the University of
Minnesota, and moved to the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech), Dhawan laughing away with young scientists at the First Asian Congress of Fluid
Mechanics, Bangalore, 1980.
where he was awarded the Aeronautical
222 CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 82, NO. 2, 25 JANUARY 2002