Unlike the 150th year of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the 100th year of Einstein’s paper on relativity—Jagdish Chandra Bose’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations (beginning 2008) were relatively low key.

Maybe, because it coincides with the 100th anniversary of Guglielmo Marconi’s Nobel Prize, for radio telegraphy???? aka the first of that long list of “Indians-who-could-have-won-the Prize-but-never-did”

There’s much written about how Bose was not given his due, and how he anticipated microwaves and transistor logic, years before Marconi.

But to me here’s where Bose was wrong. In an interview to an Italian newspaper (where he met Marconi) the scientist expressed his “disinterest in commercial telegraphy.”

So let’s not even BEGIN getting into patents and credits and the scheming machinations of the Nobel Committee. Marconi was a technician, Bose an Indian scientist bred in the prevailing British-Indian school of wisdom that ‘true’ knowledge shoudn’t be commercialized.

Bose, the gentleman he was, never cried and ranted about the Nobel committee’s omission; he just turned his prodigious mental abilities to understanding plant’s reaction to electrical stimuli (Now, whatever happened to that?)

That was science circa 1909 and today, nothing much has changed. Independent India continued this church and state separation between KNOWLEDGE and TECHNOLOGY. “Basic” research and teaching it decreed was to be in the universities, “Industrial research” was to be at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Today. the CSIR is toying with establishing a university, offers PhDs and is yet to figure out how to attract industry to massively dip into its stock of patents. And our universities..?

Well—-