Back to = home

My ideas of good exper= iments has been always oriented towards physics, although I must admit that I did = not eventually get around to the type I really wanted to do. We had to make do = with what was available.

As young men we were m= ore influenced by G. N. Ramachandran, C. V Raman, J= . C. Bose, Meghnath Saha. They were all physicists. There were few origin= al physical chemists, in fact. It remains like that.

Those were the days be= fore IITK influenced India. After IITK there was considerable style and promise but very little deliver= y on substance.

Of the chemists I know= in India, only one in my mind has drawn world attention for his and his group’s original (emphasis on original) and (so far) lasting contributions on supramolecular synthons to crystal chemistry. In most other cases the empha= sis seems to be on a third world connection. There are others who have made fleeting contributions to originality. In many cases the “originality= ” is lost with the loss of a research collaborator from the group. The saying= “what is original is not good and what is good is not original” must be hurting. Still, one tries.

Listed below are some = of the experimental areas, I have been in. I did experimental chemistry because (R= ev. Fr. L. M. ) Yeddanapalli, my research guide, impressed upon us to do experiments and contribute to the nation’s wealth. His emphasis was on original applications and working with one’s own hand.

I always wanted to do crystal growth of the perfect kind. All I could do was to talk<= /a> on crystal growth from melt in space --- because of exhortations from the orga= nizers of a conference on space. Giving such a talk used to be alright in India even when you have not worked on an area. I needlessly spent considerable t= ime preparing for this talk.

The main areas of my w= ork are the following:

Photothermal Experiments
Air-= Water Interface<= /li>