The other guy

Jerry Seinfeld had a bit about the "Three Tenors" in his hit show, playing on the notion that people could name Pavarotti and Domingo, but couldn't name the third of the trio, who then became "the other guy."  It is perhaps the story of people who don't get no respect!

Growing up, we knew the names of India's Nobel laureates.  Three at that time: Rabindranath Tagore, C.V. Raman, and the other guy.

That other guy was Har Gobind Khorana. 

It is not that we didn't know his name.  We did.  It is just that while Tagore and Raman lived and died in India, Khorana lived abroad.  Further, he was technically born in Pakistan.  Even worse, Khorana gave up his Indian citizenship in favor of living in America, which did not appeal to some of us kids who were quite jingoistic after the Indo-Pak war of 1971.

My father's friend, RV, visiting from America a few years after the war challenged my ideas of what it meant to be Indian.  I remember asking him if he knew the American national anthem.  After all, those were the days before the internet and we relied on books or people for information.  A good sport that RV was, he sang the first couple of lines.

Here I am now blogging this as an American, which has been my nationality for more than two decades.  It is now a different world in which people from India are spread far and wide across the world.  The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world.  There are no crocodile tears over the alleged brain drain.  As I like to joke, my exit was no brain drain.  With my move from India to the US, I simultaneously increased the IQ levels in both countries ;)

So much have the conditions changed over the decades that an American with an Indian parent is now the Vice President of the US is celebrated in India as one of theirs--a contrast to how Khorana was treated decades ago.

This year marks the centenary of Khorana's birth.  But then we aren't sure of that: "The exact date of his birth is not known, because Khorana was born in poverty in a British Indian class that rarely recorded such dates."

What a tragedy that they did not teach us kids Khorana's life story as a shining example of one who was born dirt poor and yet became a Nobel laureate!  How awful that a bizarre and twisted notion of nationalism prevented us from understanding his accomplishment.  As an older man, I have grown to become highly suspicious, to put it mildly, of people and politicians being very nationalistic.  Need I remind you about trump and modi in my adopted and birth lands?

In 1949, Khorana returned to India after earning a PhD in chemistry, "but his promised government job never materialized because the newly independent country was bankrupt."  India's loss was perhaps for the betterment of humanity; Khorana would not have been able to conduct the research that he was able to do in the better funded and equipped labs in Canada and the US.

"In spite of his acknowledged success and prominence, racism marred Khorana’s life through much of his career."  Seriously, why did they not teach us about Khorana's life in order to inspire us kids?

Though the rate of change has been slower than what I prefer, I am nonetheless glad that conditions have changed for the better.  There have been two other India-born Nobel science prize recipients since Khorana--Chandrasekhar and  Ramakrishnan.  (No, economics, for which Sen received a Nobel, is not a science!)  They were not given the silent treatment that was directed at Khorana, but were warmly and enthusiastically celebrated.

Some time soon, I hope, that a person whose work and life was only in India wins a Nobel Prize in the sciences.  If and when that happens, I won't be surprised if that person is a woman.