Planning for Surplus Capacity

November 28, 1970 siastic 'speculating on the origin of stratospheric winds, studying systematically the nature of the pigments of flowers, etc. Not infrequently he disagreed with what one may call the dogma', sometimes with little more justification than his confidence in himself. But that was part of the man, enthusiastic, a little sardonic, self-confident and superbly articulate. At the age of 70, he was capable of telling a vast audience of students in Madras, in response to a request from the principal to exhort them not to miss classes, that during his two years as an MA student he had attended only two lectures, both of which he considered a waste of time ! In many ways, the Raman era has been an extraordinary period. And in these days of borrowed knowledge and, almost, borrowed wisdom, it ought to be considered a baffling period too. Here were these men like C V Raman and S N Bose working at Calcutta and Dacca (and not in Cambridge and Got- tingen), in the backwaters of international science, doing profound and permanent work on the very frontiers of knowledge. What made these men transcend their surroundings? Raman himself maintained that it was the luckiest thing that happened to him when bad health prevented him from going to England at the end of his studies in India. Is there not a lesson here?