|
Ramesh Bist
, May 25, 2007
We have our own times of defining moments in our lifetime. Sometimes sudden fleeting thoughts bring a vacuum in us and a first trembling of new beginning immediately fills it up. While most of us let it go as a short-lived flash, a few preserve it to open their mind and soul to the marvels of cosmos and The Creator. In his spellbinding and exquisitely written biography, Code Name God, Mani Bhowmik has recounted his life?s story that is full of such defining moments -- all leading to the eternal entity -- one source.
Dr Mani Bhowmik, one of the pioneers of laser technology and co-inventor of the excimer laser, used in corrective eye surgery, LASIK, was born and brought up in a poor family in village Mahishadal near the ancient Buddhist port Tamluk in Midnapore district of West Bengal. His father Gunadhar Bhowmik was a schoolteacher and an ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi. In due course of time, Gunadhar Bhowmik ?left his job to join India?s freedom movement fulltime? -- ?leaving the family admiring his dedication but without a source of income.?
In Code Name God, Mani Bhowmik has expressed his indebtedness towards three persons, his grandmother Sarada, Matangini Hazra and Mahatma Gandhi. He owes his life to Sarada, drew unconquerable will -- ?Never give up? -- from Matangini Hazra and enlightened his soul by Gandhi?s guiding force. He says, ?I had life lessons to learn, and for these lessons, I am indebted to my grandmother, Sarada, to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and to an extraordinary woman by the name of Matangini Hazra.?
He writes about his grandmother: ?Sarada spoiled me, but what child living on a relief agency diet does not deserve a little spoiling? She often shared her food and sweets with me, and some years later at the point of our greatest peril, she would, in this way teach me the great love is more verb than noun.? In ?the greatest peril?, he is recalling the great Bengal famine of 1943.
During the famine, the Bhowmik family barely managed to survive with one meager meal a day. It was on the verge of total collapse that his grandmother Sarada used to give her share of food to little Mani so her posterity might survive. One night she had her last supper with Mani by giving her ?bite-sized? piece of bread to her grandson and slept to peace smilingly. Bhowmik acknowledges, ?I would not be alive to tell you this but for the transcendent love -- the faith in action -- of one person.?
Bhowmik?s ?mentor and friend? Matangini Hazra is one of a few women freedom fighters of India who sacrificed her life for her motherland. She was a staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi and lived with Bhowmik family. People called her Gandhiburi, the Gandhian woman. On one day when she was leading a peaceful procession in Tamluk, British soldiers shot her dead. She died with Bandemataram on her lips and flag of freedom flying high in her hands. Bhowmik writes: She was to become one of India?s founding daughters.
During his high school days, at the age of fourteen he got a chance to live with Mahatma Gandhi for a few days. Bhowmik says he was ?fortunate to live with him, to drink the wisdom that came from his lips, and to serve him for a short while.? He passed his high school with flying colours in 1947 and obtained a scholarship to study at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta. After his graduation he pursued his master?s degree at the University of Calcutta under the guidance of his ?beloved mentor? Satyendra Nath Bose, famous for the Bose-Einstein statistics. He also met physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac who named a class of elementary particles ?boson? after Bose?s name. After the completion of his M.Sc., the Government of India offered him a scholarship to conduct research for his Ph.D. in physics at Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. He was given a scholarship of Rs. 150 for his living expenses -- ?more money than he has ever seen?.
The scientist in Bhowmik had a heart of a mortal that beat for a bewitching girl ?above his station?, who had grown up along with him. Armed with a stipend of Rs. 150, he thought, ?Now surely -- she will see past the mud floor of his birth and mark of his caste? and he asked her to be his wife. However, his La Belle Dam Sans Merci turned down his proposal reminding him of his poverty, social status and caste. Bhowmik felt it as a devastating blow to his self-esteem and did not talk to any other girl for long time. He soon overcame his trauma and with a ?zeal of a soldier wielding a ramrod against palace gate, strapped his intellect to the pursuit of fame and fortune? all the way from India to the US.
In 1958, he received his Ph.D. and on the recommendation of Dr S.N. Bose, UCLA?s famous professor of chemical physics, William McMillan offered a Sloan foundation Fellowship to him to underwrite his living expenses. He did not have enough money to go to the US, so ?with a hat in his hand? he approached many of his well-to-do acquaintance but nobody came to his rescue. His villagers collected money for him to buy a ticket to the US. He has expressed his gratefulness towards his villagers in touching words.
Like a Columbus reborn, he reached shores of America to rediscover it. He found that in the United States ?even the most lofty ambition was encouraged if backed up with a will to work hard, whereas in India ambition was often seen an overriding pride?. For him it was a ?revelation that if you are good at your work, all doors are open. It does not matter whether you were born in a hut or in a ch?teau. What matter is what you produce.?
Within one year, he got a job as laser scientist with Electro-Opticals Systems in Pasadena. The giant Xerox later on acquired it and rewarded Bhowmik with its shares for his hard work and extraordinary contribution to the field of laser technology. He invested his money and earned huge profits. He writes: ?My journey form mud to marble was complete ... I owed six hilltop houses with millions dollar postcard views, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Palos Verdes, Malibu.... I also drove a Rolls-Royce.?
He was a man who rose from dire want to overabundance and for it he fought all odds with a steely resolve. So, it was a time of a merry-go-round for him. In his own words, ?at the age of fifty-five I took an early retirement from Northrop and set my sight on satisfying every desire that had ever seemed beyond my grasp.? ?I gave James bond a run for his money, and I lived out my own international version of the Beach Boys? ?California girls?. He threw extravagant and ostentatious parties. He writes, ?I created an A-list of my own....... My gated, hilltop home furnished the dramatic backdrop for spectacular parties of hundred or more at a time, typically seated in an intimate, conversational groups beside my Olympic-sized swimming pool. Among the regular attendees were such luminaries as Ashley Montagu, Laura (Mrs. Aldous) Huxley, Eddie Albert, and Norman Cousins, and, always, there were glittering constellations of beautiful young women.?
He appeared in the famous TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He had steaming affairs with many women of substance including the famous screen star and celebrity, Eva Gador. After the breakup with Eva, he comes out of his delusion, ?Once I?d deluded myself that the party crowd came for me, but the party crowd comes for other reasons: Food, drink, networking, and, most of all, for the affirmation of being seen in the company of success and money. Now comes a defining moment for him at his Bel Air estate in California, ?when the limousines had departed, the caterers had packed and he was alone beside the swimming pool on a breezy night following yet another soiree.? It was a restless moment in the desolate hollow where he saw himself within crying aloud: ?Is That All There Is?? A realisation dawns on him, ?That presence which the Vedic rishis called Brahaman, and that Lao-tzu called Tao; He that the prophets of the Book called Yahweh or Allah ......... was missing.?
He says, ?I had reached a point in my life, where material abundance and ceaseless excitement could no longer hold off the question I had been dying to ask since my boyhood: Could science, in some manner, vouch for the existence of the one whose singularity seemed to anchor all great faiths and whose presence I had felt so keenly as a young man with his eyes on the dome of night? Could science restore God to those starry skies?? He is now a disillusioned man of science, feeling overfed and undernourished. He has cloyed his appetite to the brim and still is famished. There is a hunger that there is something amiss. He again looks back to his roots and finds the manna of bliss within himself.
He has given scientific examples galore from many great scientists? works like Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton, Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Stephen Hawking etc, to prove his one source. One of them is of the quantum visionary, Erwin Schr?dinger. According to him Schr?dinger?s biographer, Walter Moore ?claims that Schr?dinger was intuitively influenced by the ancient Indian school of spiritualism known as Vedanta when he formulated quantum mechanics. Perhaps the concept of oneness in Vedanta also led to Schr?dinger?s decade-long search for the unified field theory. From the Upanishads, Schr?dinger finds it to be really so simple and so clear: Tat twam asi, this is you.?
?Schr?dinger believed in Vedic concept that all conscious beings are aspects of the same universal entity. Expressed in terms of our scientific worldview today, consciousness would be manifest when the individual brain?s quantum state is in resonance with the cosmic potentiality of consciousness. After Schr?dinger, we may humbly assert that we are all equipped to be tuners of the universal source of consciousness.?
He concludes:.....it is the universal potentiality of consciousness that we resonate with when we tap our mind?s well. We access the very power of existence, a power which is encrypted everywhere in the foundation of space itself. It is the power of the one source, the order that underlies and enfolds al orders, that unifies all fields and forms, as well as consciousness, and it will not, by now, surprise you to hear my assertion that we call this source by its code name: God.
But alas, he took eons to know the earthy philosophy of Kabir that he might have read or heard from his grandma in Class 1.
Kasturi kundal base mrig dhoondey ban maahi
Aisey ghat-ghat Ram hain duniya dekhe nahi
(A musk deer has the fragrance in itself and runs throughout the forest in search of it. Similarly God is everywhere but the world doesn?t see.)
After the realisation he is living happily in the US.
|