It is very likely that I am his colleague who had known him the longest : I knew him from 1955 and his Madras Christian College (MCC) days where has was my senior in the B.Sc.( Hons) course.
He was senior to me by one year .Those were stressful days for me, very insecure about the future and far from my family in Ernakulam.The situation drove me to work super hard, to the
edge of nervous breakdown. But Rajaji, who led his class in academic performance, seemed calm and from what we heard, never even lost his sleep before exams. He was a wunderkind to the rest of us. It is only now from his Autobiography that I learn that he too had to work very hard during the B.Sc.(Hons) days.
Our ways diverged after MCC. He joined TIFR and was sent to Chicago ( FermiInstitute ) to work under Dalitz while I joined Alladi Ramakrishnan in the University of Madras I went to the Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago as a postdoc in late 1962.Dalitz had joined the Fermi Institute and brought along Divakaran with him. Ramachandran (RR) was already there working with Gregor Wentzel. I had a room in the International House while Rajaji and RR shared a flat. Divakaran too had a flat which he shared with Brij Khorana for three quarters.
With shared cultural backgrounds, it was natural for RR, Rajaji , Divakaran and I to meet often. And there was no decent vegetarian food available in the International House . So I used to
regularlly wander to the RR-Rajaji flat in Kenwood Avenue for dinner and socialising. RR and Rajaji had learnt to cook a decent Sambar and Koottu, My function was to cut vegetables. I learnt to cut them to subatomic sizes , maybe that was the forerunner which initiated the confirmation of the quark model ! But RR and Rajaji will not allow me to cook .They were fearful that I will overshadow them with my skills : I think so.
Rajaji accompanied Dalitz when he left for Oxford 1963 and we lost touch for a while. Then after he joined Madras University in 1976, we again started to meet often. I recall visiting
him in the tiny building in the A.C. College compound and roaming the city during the 1977 elections with Jayaraman and working with Govindarajan and Vijaylakshmi on a paper which got
published in Phys.Rev.D in 1978.
I continued to interact with him at Madras University which I used to visit regularly and then of course during all his years at IMSc from 1984 when he served this institute and CMI.I communicated with him on Thursday , on 27 May 2023 and had no clue that his end was near.
We will all dearly miss him. He has served science and trained students for such a long time, and also written many articles in tamil and even an autobiography iwhich I have read. He has taken science to the people. He has also contributed significantly to particle physics.
It was a tragedy for him , his colleagues and friends like me that INO was blocked in Tamil Nadu. Let us hope that it will soon be operational somewhere else.
Bal