Page 41 - PROF-DHAWAN-COMPILED

Satish Dhawan would’ve been 99

Posted by srinivasbhogleOctober 1, 2012
This is a report of a meeting held at Indian Institute of Science in 2010 in memory of Satish Dhawan

Satish Dhawan was a visionary, a leader, a motivator, a patriot, a scholar, a scientist, and a teacher.
He was affectionate, wi y, kind, handsome and incredibly charming. It is hard to believe that
someone can be so abundantly endowed. But Dhawan was truly an exceptional Indian.

He would have turned 90 on 25 September 2010, and the Indian Institute of Science, of which he was
the Director from 1962-1981, decided to celebrate his birth anniversary at what proved to be a heart-
warming function.

One was a li le worried that IISc’s Faculty Hall would be less than full, especially because it was a
lazy sort of Saturday afternoon. That would have been both disrespectful and sad. To one’s relief, and
joy, the hall was packed to capacity. In the irreverent times that we now live in, it was reassuring to
note that we still venerate a towering national figure like Dhawan, instead of just a Dhoni.

Dhawan’s first, and most illustrious, student, Roddam Narasimha
(h p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddam_Narasimha)was one of the afternoon’s three lead speakers.
Narasimha spoke of Dhawan as a teacher and a mentor: his “informal, cheerful, but extremely
serious” morning lectures, his strong focus on the role of science in engineering, his endearing habit
of handing out li le sheets of paper with notes, sketches and equations to his students, and his
considerable generosity when it was time to grade his students.

Dhawan, Narasimha recalled, taught his students never to complain about the apparatus “because
there’s always an ingenious alternative”; and he demonstrated this himself by building India’s first
supersonic wind tunnel at IISc. Narasimha also fondly looked back at the path-breaking investigation
on the performance of the Avro aircraft that Dhawan led. “They used to joke that the investigation
was going on and on, but we eventually figured out many things that even the manufacturer
probably didn’t know.”

K Kasturirangan, who worked with Satish Dhawan when he led India’s Space Programme, and
eventually headed the Space Programme himself, talked of his days as the master’s protégé. “He was
methodical and focused; he could see everything both in its totality, and in its deepest detail. I once
told him that there were no problems with a camera system that we were designing for the Bhaskara
satellite. Dhawan shot back: ‘Did you say ‘no problems’ Rangan? Then, I’m worried!’”

Kasturirangan also recounted how, after a major design exercise, his team went to Dhawan expecting
accolades. Instead he sent them right back to the drawing board: “Just one design? I want to see
alternate designs too!” When they went back with multiple design options, Dhawan still didn’t seem
satisfied: “But where are the implications of these different options?”
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