A nobel relationship

When R Rajamani sent a congratulatory note to Nobel Prize winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan,way back in 2003 for being selected as the Fellow of Royal Society,he intuitively mentioned that it would be no surprise if he wins the Nobel Prize one day. When Ramakrishnan has bagged it now for the pioneering work on ribosomes,R Rajamani,his cousin,who is based in the city,is elated. “Being conferred the highest honor is a moment of pride for the whole family,” he says.

Although both of them have had scarce contact all these years,Rajamani remembers their childhood and the vacations spent together. “He was always brilliant. In fact,the whole family is very talented. However,we never expected him to reach this high. I have been sending him congratulatory notes and poems expressing my feelings each time he has made it big and this time too,I am penning down a poem. My maternal uncle’s son,he is almost 12 years younger to me and we would meet during the vacations in Baroda where his father,C V Ramakrishnan was a professor at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and started the Biochemistry Department,” adds Rajamani,who stays in Kondhwa.

Ramakrishnan’s other cousin B Nagarajan,who resides at Wagholi,has however been trying to call him ever since he heard the news. “The phones are perpetually engaged and I am yet to congratulate him personally,although we have e-mailed him. I have very vague memories of our get-togethers. I had once traveled with him and his sister Lalita Ramkrishnan who is MD,Ph D in Internal Medicine to Jamshedpur in the seventies. It was a very interesting interaction then and he was extremely intelligent,” adds Nagarajan.

Although not in steady contact with him,Nagarajan has been in touch with Ramakrishnan’s father and his uncle and adds,“The family has been an inspiration for our generation. His mother Rajalaxmi is a Ph D from Mcgill University,while his father C V Ramakrishnan is a scholar in biochemistry and we met around six months back. It is a moment of immense pleasure for us to see someone from our family win the prize,something we had never dreamt of.”