- Lived:
- born Delhi, 4 June 1941; the working life ran through Delhi University, a research spell in London, then twenty-odd years at IIT Kanpur without a post of her own, before regular positions at last in Trivandrum (1993) and Hyderabad (1998), where she died on her sixtieth birthday
- Field:
- organic chemistry — specifically bioorganic and supramolecular chemistry, the art of building molecules that imitate what living cells do
- The Big Idea:
- Life's most intricate tricks — folding proteins, disposing of waste, assembling structures, even copying itself — are at bottom chemistry, and chemistry done well enough can be persuaded to perform them in glassware, without any living cell in the room.
- In their words:
- No reliable recorded quotation survives — her memorialists preserved her results more carefully than her sentences. Colleagues' obituaries describe her credo, in substance, as: the chemistry itself was the reward; the rest — posts, titles, committees — was noise. (A labelled paraphrase, not a quotation.)
- If you remember one thing:
- For over two decades one of India's finest organic chemists worked at IIT Kanpur with no faculty post, no salary line and no independent lab — barred by a rule against hiring spouses — and did first-rank science anyway; she got her first regular job at fifty-two and gave the country eight extraordinary years before dying at sixty.