What is your favourite monsoon memory?
Category: Campus Chronicles
Sulochana Gadgil
A life in pursuit of the monsoon The year was 1944. Across Poona (now Pune), then in the Bombay Province of British India, the call for Independence echoed through homes, streets, and public spaces. At the heart of the city stood a house that the locals called “Liberty Hall”. It belonged to Dr VD […]
‘If you want to learn something, IISc has people who know it’
For KG Haridasan, IISc is truly home. It was on the campus that he grew up, did most of his schooling and on-the-job training, culminating in a nearly four-decade-long stint which ended with a role of Multi-Tasking Staff at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. One thing that always drove Haridasan was his interest in learning. […]
Third Spaces for Science
How informal settings unlock new ways of thinking When he started working at IISc many years ago, Rishikesh Narayanan used to pull people from his lab to get coffee at Prakruthi, an outdoor campus cafeteria that closed down in 2020. “I am a coffee addict,” says Rishikesh, now Professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit […]
Inside UG Labs
Where chaos, curiosity, and clarity reign equally Amrit Mahendra Joseph still gets a faraway look in his eyes when you bring up his first-year undergraduate physics lab at IISc. The former UG student, who just completed his Master’s in mathematics, laughs about it now, but back then, an incident involving the impulse-momentum theorem felt […]
Age of Analogue
Research before the digital era When Raghavendra Gadagkar, Professor and National Science Chair at the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), IISc, was a graduate student, he came across a 1958 article in Scientific American by American psychologist Eckhard H Hess. Hess had done research on imprinting in animals and written about how early experiences […]
‘It requires a peculiar type of personality to groove on chemistry’
Over the past 45 years, Gautam R Desiraju has made contributions to science that have put him in a rarified international plane. A pioneer in crystal engineering, Desiraju has been at the vanguard of the field he helped create, though his interests have extended well beyond his scientific area to philosophy, history, geopolitics, and even […]
Post on Wheels
Picture a typical morning at the Indian Institute of Science in the early 1980s. Three attenders set out on bicycles, each assigned to a different part of the sprawling campus. Their task is to collect the day’s mail. They stop at departments and offices along their route, gathering letters, handwritten notes, official messages, and […]
Cloudy Trail
The case of the missing radioactive stones As the last flowers cling to their trees, and the spring blossoms begin to fade on campus, the onset of summer is marked by a very special time at IISc: the arrival of Open Day. Gates open, labs light up, and thousands of people throng the campus, […]
‘Life on Earth is so Precious’
Growing up in rural Andhra Pradesh, Murthy Gudipati sometimes slept in fields looking up at the stars. A few decades later, he now studies them as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. An IISc alumnus from the 1987 batch, he studies the evolution of different kinds of ice […]
