Dr. Jayant Narlikar replies in long hand to every letter he receives.
My childhood was spent taking pride in Har Gobind Khorana, an Indian American molecular biologist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968.
Luckily I never sent an e-mail or a letter to him.
The Times of India reported on October 14 2009:
"...Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has expressed disenchantment with people from India "bothering" him "clogging" up his email box and dubbed as "strange" their sudden urge to reach out to him.
"All sorts of people from India have been writing to me, clogging up my email box. It takes me an hour or two to just remove their mails," he said...
..."There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect...
...He expressed anguish over "all sorts of lies" published about him in a section of the media..."
Maybe he could have used technology to filter out the messages he did not wish to see, the way commoners like me do. Instead, he chose to attack the well-wishers in public.
Why do educated Indians have this overwhelming urge to take pride in Indianness found anywhere in the universe, from knowledge of Sanskrit to Obama administration to NASA to Slumdog to Chicken Tikka?
Does Nobel prize matter? (Henry James, W H Auden, J L Borges, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Nabokov, M Proust, L Tolstoy, M Twain, and E Zola among many others never won literature Nobel!)
Does a person of Indian origin winning it matter?
I will never understand.