Amit Roy from London in The Telegraph, Calcutta:
Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan feels he has been deliberately humiliated by the mobile phone company O2 which treated him less favourably than most customers by forcing him to pay a £325 deposit and refusing to budge even after he had explained he was an established scientist with an impeccable record of paying his bills.
“I am actually slightly suspicious that there is an element of racism at play here as well, since I can’t think of a logical reason why I should be denied credit,” said Ramakrishnan, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry, worth $1.4 million, with two other scientists.
The problems began on December 2 last year when Ramakrishnan, a US citizen settled with his wife in Cambridge for the past 10 years, went to a city centre O2 store to buy the highly recommended iPhone 3GS black, 32 Mb.
Ramakrishnan had no difficulty with the young white assistant who served him but the store’s manager insisted he would have to pay a deposit if he wanted the phone. Customers considered credit-worthy are not usually asked to pay such a deposit. More:
In an interview with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk. From The Indian Express:
Tell us about your journey in science — you started off as a physicist.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: I originally thought I might go to medical school. And I got admitted to the Baroda Medical College , but I also appeared for the National Science Talent exam. That was at the encouragement of my mother. I made a deal with my father — that if I got the scholarship, then you shouldn’t force me to do anything. He wanted me to be a doctor. I got the scholarship, and while he was away, I transferred my admission from medical college to study physics. The clerk thought I’d made a mistake, and I actually meant the other way round.
For our generation, the first choice was medicine. Next was engineering. If you failed in both, you went for the IAS.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: One thing that motivated me was that a group of professors, some of whom had come back from the US, had completely modernised the curriculum. 30 years later, my son studied basically the same curriculum at Harvard. So that was a motivation for me to go into physics. Somewhere along the line I realised that I was not going to be a good physicist. I would just be doing some boring calculations and not have any real insight. I believe physics is on a difficult plane, because to make truly fundamental breakthroughs in physics is very hard now. At the same time, molecular biology was blossoming. It seemed every week there was an important discovery being made. More:
When India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two others, he was flooded with adulatory emails from India. He expressed disenchantment with people from India “bothering” him, “clogging” up his e-mail box and dubbed as “strange” their sudden urge to reach out to him. “There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect. I find this strange,” he said.
In a subsequent article in the Times of India, he clarified what he meant:
I am distressed by the reaction to my comment about being deluged by emails from India, and realize I have inadvertently hurt people, for which I apologize. I hope people realize that I have no personal secretary and use my email mainly for work, so finding important communications became very difficult.
I want to make it clear that I was delighted to hear from scientific colleagues and students whom I had met personally over the years in India and elsewhere, as well as close friends with whom I had lost touch. Unlike real celebrities like movie stars or people in sports, we scientists generally lead a quiet life, and are not psychologically equipped to handle publicity. So I found the barrage of emails from people whom I didn’t know or whom I only knew slightly almost 40 years ago (nearly all from Indians) difficult to deal with.
People have also taken offence at my comment about nationality being an accident of birth. However, they don’t seem to notice the first part of the sentence: We are all human beings. Accident or not, I remain grateful to all the dedicated teachers I had throughout my years. Others have said I have disowned my roots. More:
