These are my personal memories of Rohini Godbole. It won’t be about why she’s in the who’s who of particle physicists of her generation, her tireless efforts toward gender parity in Indian science, or her contribution to science communication. These have already been covered extensively in newspaper obituaries, and explain why she was awarded the National Order of Merit by the French government, conferred the Padma Shri, and had Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu tweet condolences on the day of her passing.
I got to know about Rohini Godbole during my graduation at the University of Oregon in 2011, when I started learning about a theoretical framework called supersymmetry, or SUSY, from her textbook, Theory and Phenomenology of Sparticles. It was a superlative resource, especially for signatures of the theory in particle colliders. Now, particle physics itself was quite new to me, and its phenomenology seemed exclusively an American and European endeavour. So, I had the vague impression that the person behind the author’s name must have settled in Europe. I distinctly remember the moment I finally Googled her, and was startled to find an elderly lady in a sari. Women in saris may have launched rockets and proved theorems, but until then had not broken supersymmetry via gauge mediation and pair-produced gluinos at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was a miracle to me that she existed. My wife-to-be joined in my laughter and gave her a nickname: Susy Maami. I hoped that this Godbole was visible to Indian girls in full sari-clad glory, and was pleased to find that she was indeed a leader in exactly that direction of outreach. I had found a new, unique hero.
My next brush with Godbole came a few years later, when I first met her PhD student and my good friend Kirtimaan Mohan, who spoke of her only in glowing terms.
Inquisitive
Once we had decided to return to India, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was my top choice for two reasons: Bengaluru and Rohini Godbole. My first interaction with her was on Zoom at the job colloquium I gave to the Centre for High Energy Physics (CHEP). I couldn’t see the person who kept asking on-point, incisive questions. Sure enough, it turned out to be Rohini Godbole. I was to learn that asking question after question until clarity was attained–or not, if the speaker was ill-prepared–was one of her defining aspects.
Of all the fantastic things about life as a faculty member of CHEP, the zingiest was the knowledge that Godbole and I were colleagues. I didn’t see her too often as she came in irregularly, but every time I did, it felt a touch unreal.
On at least two occasions, I have seen a seminar speaker wither in the face of her clinically phrased questions delivered in clear treble. She often followed up on a question of mine, or would coerce the speaker to answer it in more detail, which always thrilled me. She was the CHEP person with whom I have discussed “bread-and-butter” particle physics, my most favourite part of the subject.
Once my wife and I ran into Godbole while on a walk in the campus. She too was on an appetite-building pre-dinner walk, and gave us a standing invitation for tea at her place, a cheque we never encashed, regretfully.
I wanted to meet with Godbole more often over tea at the department cafe, which had happened only twice. During the second time, she regaled me and a fellow faculty member with a hilarious story on how, as a grad student, she arrived in Trieste, Italy, for a conference by a delayed flight, only to be told that the timetable had changed. Hence, she had only a few hours to write and deliver her first ever talk. She added that since PowerPoint slides and videos were unavailable back then, graduate students were tasked with keeping detailed minutes of conference talks, which then had to be presented as a seminar back at the parent institution. I think this practice must be revived.
Besides these, I also regret never co-authoring a paper with her.
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A cricket fan
Four of my encounters with Godbole stand brightest in my memory.
In the middle of teaching particle physics for the first time, I asked her what her syllabus had been during her time—it had much to do with developments in post-war physics. I then told her I was teaching the construction and deconstruction of the Standard Model of particle physics. “Those poor undergrads,” she said. “That’s too much for them.” I maintained that this was a graduate level course and the one chance for most PhD students to see the most up-to-date progress in particle physics. This was the only professional disagreement I have had with Godbole. Her charity here is actually a bit at odds with herself. She had once complained that the level of questions asked at student admission interviews had to be taken further and further down over the years as otherwise it was impossible to shortlist.
Since we were talking about the development of the Standard Model, she got happily chatty about her participation in it, and at one point said Steven Weinberg was her number one. As he is my number one too, I was thoroughly pleased, and blurted out, “I enjoyed reading your obituary!” Half a second later, I added in horror: “Of Weinberg, of Weinberg! Your obituary of Weinberg!”
“It’s OK,” she laughed, and we had a delightful expedition through Weinberg’s feats and wizardry.
I have seen Godbole during lunch at the IISc faculty club only twice. On the first occasion, we discovered a side of her I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. The weekend before I had seen cricketer Dinesh Karthik at the Mantri Square Mall and then ran into my colleague Prasad. So I asked him if he had caught sight of Karthik too. Godbole interjected: “You mean the cricketer?” I mildly said ‘yes’, and continued talking to Prasad. Then I mentioned that Dinesh Karthik was going to coach the England A team after the IPL. Rohini interjected once more: “It’s called England Lions.”
That was the day I went on to learn that it was none of us club regulars but Rohini Godbole who was the biggest cricket nut among the CHEP faculty. She followed every match and every development in the cricketing world. If her health hadn’t deteriorated over the summer, I would have talked plenty more about cricket with her.
Not long after that day, on 8 March, she was standing alone at the Physical Sciences Building entrance. She had left her umbrella in an auto, had called the driver, and was waiting for it to return. I laughed – the same thing had happened to me two days prior, only with my keys. What did she think of the ongoing Test match? She gave a spot-on assessment of where the game was heading, including her trust in the Indian bowlers. I then wished her a happy Women’s Day. Her instinctive reply put a grin on my face for the rest of the day. “Thank you, but this day should be for everybody. That’s what I always say,” she said. That it came from the editor of Lilavati’s Daughters and the Chair of the Women in Science panel in the Indian Academy of Sciences, is a measure of her depth. What a wonderful, warm way to say, “As a woman I don’t want to dismiss this day, but let this be for both men and women so we celebrate our differences together.”
On the last day of my one-year probation, Godbole had, by coincidence, made her second visit to the faculty club for lunch. And she voiced just what was on my mind: “I have never understood why there is probation for faculty.” The unwritten rule that faculty members cannot travel abroad during probation particularly jarred her. She had simply broken it to go be with her husband in Germany toward the end of her first year. When asked, “Can’t he come stay with you?” she had responded: “That is neither for you to ask nor for me to tell.” Our beloved phenom went on to entertain us – some 6–8 of us listening with undivided attention – with other tales, one of which was on her work in accelerator physics. At one point she said, “Accelerator physicists… are physicists”, and we erupted in laughter. “No, I mean they are not engineers as we tend to think,” she clarified.
Let there be no doubt that Rohini left us unwillingly. Palpable was her zest for life, and never did she miss a chance to complain bitterly of occupying an ageing body. Without question she ranks among the finest scientists to come from India, a fact that would have been more visible if she had chosen a field with experimental outcomes kinder to theoreticians. Had she had a better collaborative environment, no doubt her name would have been in the mix for the JJ Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. She left me with the revival of a good habit that I had followed in North America. She once became upset seeing me and another junior professor not using our own mugs for pre-seminar tea as opposed to paper cups. She couldn’t really scold us, colleagues as we were, but a scolding was what her ardent monologue was. Ever since, I’ve been scrupulous.
My last sighting of Godbole was on Zoom, at a seminar in September. After berating someone at home in Marathi on an unwittingly unmuted microphone, she did her best to help the organisers fix a screen sharing issue. She seemed misleadingly fine. I did not know then that she was already in Pune for her medication. It is, in a way, fitting that she made her exit when a Test match was on in her town. And with that I abruptly lost a kindred spirit – the one in IISc with whom I had the greatest overlap in scientific philosophy and outlook on life.
Who is the next Rohini Godbole? Who has her initiative, her all-encompassing curiosity, and the verve and acumen to match it? Who else can grace it all with a kind voice and an ear-splitting smile? These questions literally keep me up at night.
Nirmal Raj is an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the Centre for High Energy
Physics in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and tweets at @PhysicsNirmal. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
This post was originally published on here
