At the southernmost tip of Mumbai, the buzz and bustle of
India’s financial capital gives way to the quiet of green lawns
and the gentle lapping of the Arabian Sea around the imposing
edifice of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).
Here, it is not the rise and fall of stock prices that furrows
the brows of people you bump into, but the unsolved mysteries of
our universe. Conversations in the cafeteria revolve around the
string theory, the Big Bang, or how to get sub-atomic particles
to accelerate and collide meaningfully. India’s leading research
institute in the fields of natural science, mathematics and
theoretical computer science, TIFR is where the likes of Nobel
laureates Stephen Hawking and John Nash drop in for a lecture or
two; where scientists work to build parts of the world’s largest
particle accelerator; where neutrinos are detected, and the
human genome is unravelled. This thriving laboratory for
scientific ideas was the brainchild of Homi J Bhabha, nuclear
physicist and the father