In 1963, a young Indian confronted a dilemma that few in the present generation would have.
Ramamurti Rajaraman had just obtained his doctorate from Cornell University, his supervisor being the future Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, who had played a major role in the Manhattan Project. In those days of frenzied armament, Ramamurti, just 24, with a doctorate in nuclear theory, was a prized catch for America. But he wanted to abandon his chosen discipline, return home and devote himself to social service.
As his first death anniversary falls on July 12, Rajaraman’s life reflects how much India has changed since then. Born in 1939 in Coimbatore, Rajaraman shifted to Delhi with his parents. His father, Dr B Ramamurti, taught mathematics before he joined the founding team of the Central Statistical Organisation.
Around that time, Tamilians had begun arriving in Delhi for jobs in British bureaucracy. With command over English, they soon occupied government posts. And then emerged a concern: How to inculcate Tamil education in their children who had been removed from their culture? To meet the need, the Delhi Tamil Education Association founded its schools, popularly known as Madrasi Schools.
It was an era of political churning. Next to the school at Mandir Marg was the Hindu Mahasabha’s office. Stories of a certain Nathuram Godse who once conducted target practice with a gun in the office premises spread on the school’s campus, leaving young Rajaraman curious and shivering.
The actor Hema Malini was a few batches younger than Rajaraman in the school. Among his classmates was Shyamla Gopalan, who later migrated to the US and gave birth to the future US Vice President Kamala Harris.
Rajaraman also went to Cornell, but his heart lay elsewhere. Driven by idealism, he returned to India in 1963 and visited C Rajagopalachari to seek advice about his future. Not that he knew the fellow Tamilian, but in those days young people often sought the counsel of respected elders. Rajagopalachari was also the grandfather of his closest friend and fellow Stephanian Ramchandra Gandhi. The old man gave him a patient hearing before offering a suggestion—leave politics to others. The country needs you in physics.
Six decades later, when Rajaraman narrated the incident to me, he still regretted having followed Rajagopalachari’s advice. “I really wanted to do social service,” he said.
Rajaraman stayed back in India, but he could barely focus on physics. He would spend hours meeting ordinary people on the streets, understanding his country. Unable to undertake any research or lend his life any meaning, the drifting young man returned to Cornell before joining the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton following the invitation of its director Robert Oppenheimer.
It still couldn’t extinguish the flame of social service in him. He came back in 1969 and began teaching at Delhi University. This time, he took an even rarer step. He returned his Green Card, leaving the American officers surprised. Barely anyone had returned the coveted document before.
“I knew if I had the Green Card, I’d keep visiting,” he told me. He wanted to sever all the ties that could weaken his commitment to his nation.
Teaching now became his mode of giving back to society. He taught at several Indian institutions over the next decades and became a major voice committed to nuclear safety.
In 1970, years before India tested its first bomb, he wrote against the dangers of nuclear weapons. A couple of years after India tested its second bomb in 1998, he joined Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security and worked for its Project on Peace and Security in South Asia.
I met him while writing the biography of the philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi. Rajaraman remained a physicist, but Ramu, as Ramchandra was fondly called, had made a shift from physics to philosophy. They remained lifelong friends until Ramu’s death in 2007. In December 1958, when Rajaraman boarded Frontier Mail to Bombay, Ramu came to see him off at New Delhi Railway Station with a handwritten notebook of Kierkegaard’s quotations. The stapled notebook also carried a little personal note in which Ramu recalled his friend’s “wit, charm and unerring honesty”, and underlined that “because of him and in spite of myself I discovered that to seek honesty separately and to hug close to it is the law of life even if it involved death.”
Rajaraman changed several cities and continents, taught at various institutions, lost numerous belongings, but the notebook, yellowed and brittle, remained with him.
I met Rajaraman in his final years and always found him agile. Even after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he continued to visit his office at JNU, where he had been appointed Professor Emeritus.
I completely missed the news of his passing last year, having been lost in my own maze after my father had crossed over just weeks before. It was much later, gathering threads of my life, that I came across tributes by his students of how great he was as a teacher, an educator who could swiftly resolve the complex problems of quantum and theoretical physics.
And then, one conversation I had with him a few years ago returned to me. He was reminiscing about his philosopher friend when I posed to him a question that had been simmering in me for long: Was Albert Einstein a scientist or a philosopher as well?
Professor Rajaraman emphatically said, “Einstein only dealt with physical phenomena that can be measured. Anything that can’t be measured he was not interested in. He was deep, reflective, but not a philosopher.”
That distinction Rajaraman had reserved for his friend.
Bhardwaj is a journalist and writer
He taught at several Indian institutions over the next decades and became a major voice committed to nuclear safety. 
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