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Stephen Hawking wheels into Mumbai

P. Devarajan

MUMBAI, Jan. 4

IN his wheeled-computerised divan, Stephen Hawking looked like a wounded, spectacled sparrow -- with an alert brain strumming the strings of an imaginary Universe. The neck hung limply to his right while blue-green eyes and a big mouth gave out a wry smi le to the camera corps shooting away like mad.

In front of him stood a computer screen beeping out a menu of words and an intro, `I am Stephen Hawking'. One grasped the spectacle but not the substance of the man as he was tucked away into a waiting, red, Mitsubishi Voyager. His assistants refused to say where he was being taken. ``The schedule is not known,'' said one of his male assistants.

Photographers shouldered their TV cameras and blinked away at Hawking as he wheeled out of the lift. No questions were asked. Well, how do you chat up a world-class scientist. Any dialogue could have turned into a monologue with most of the assembled cro wd unsure of any science.

On Friday, Hawking will have more than a dialogue with fellow physicists to whom he will make a lot of controversial sense. He will be at the Strings 2001, an international conference on the strings theory organised by Tata Institute of Fundamental Resea rch (TIFR). He is one of the three recipients of the Sarojini Damodaran Fellowship awarded by TIFR.

In the hotel, at one end of the foyer, eminent scientists were picking up folders and identity cards, and while waiting around one bumped into an Italian physicist who had just dropped into Mumbai from Jaisalmer. ``This five-star hotel makes me uncomfort able. We live in our own simple world,'' he said and introduced himself. One could not get his name. When he knew one was a journalists, the scientist said, ``My son works in Naples and writes on economics.''

Strings exist in the imagination but then all of top drawer mathematics dwell there. Hawking has been asking questions about the origins of the Universe from his teens and is still not fully satisfied with the answers.

Years ago, while reading about Hawking and his work, one was somehow reminded of India's lone mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. His biographer thought he was a man who knew infinity. Hawking, probably, is also somewhere there.

Pic.: The Physicist, Mr Stephen Hawking, in Mumbai on Thursday.

Picture by Paul Noronha