My Brilliant Friend Dr. Nagabhusan Senapati
I feel both a sense of joy and deep sadness as I gather my thoughts to reminisce about my brilliant friend Nagabhusan Senapati. I had known him for 48 years, having first met him at I.I.T.-Kharagpur in 1964. He left a mark on me, as indeed on many others who knew him well, with the gentleness of his soul, the values he held in his life, and the brilliance of his mind. I miss him dearly.
I had the pleasure of knowing Nagabhusan (for some reason, I always called him Nagabhusan, although everybody else addressed him as Naga) for three years at I.I.T.-Kharagpur. When I arrived there in 1964, he entered the third year of the five-year B.Tech. course. Although he was two years my senior, and also we were in different departments (Nagabhusan was in Mechanical Engineering and I in Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering), somehow we clicked. We were in the same dorm (Rajendra Prasad Hall); in fact, in the same wing (C Block, 2nd Floor). We liked each other’s company. We talked about many things, both technical and nontechnical. In the R.P. Hall Common Room, we would look for the same newspapers and magazines; but since most often they would be missing (somebody having borrowed them), we started our own magazine club for our wing. We found common interest in many similar topics and issues.
In I.I.T., Nagabhusan’s academic performance was of the highest level. He not only ranked first in his department every year, but at the end of the five-year course, he ranked first in the entire graduating class of the institute, which earned him the President’s Gold Medal (P.G.M.). Needless to say, he was a role model for me. But more than his academic brilliance, what I remember with great amazement is how gentle he was as a person. Beginning with the I.I.T. days and all the years up to the last time I visited him in March of 2012, I never once saw him angry or upset with anybody! What a kind-hearted person he must have been; how much at peace with himself he must have been; how completely devoid of negativity he must have been all his life!
During one of the term breaks in 1967 (I.I.T.-Kharagpur then had a three-term academic year system), Nagabhusan invited me to accompany him on his trip home to Cuttack, Odisha. I had the pleasure of meeting his parents, and got a glimpse into how he came to be so gentle. As a side trip, Nagabhusan and I visited Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark, where, as can be expected, I was completely blown away by the magnificent Sun Temple. (Following that amazing experience, Konark would indelibly remain on my mind, with the desire to visit again forever present, a wish I finally fulfilled 42 years later with my wife, Vijaya, in a memorable trip to Orissa in 2009.)
I again had the good fortune of spending some time with Nagabhusan in the Boston area when, after getting my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I came to M.I.T. in 1975 as a post-doctoral fellow. Soon I found out that Nagabhusan, after receiving his Ph.D. from M.I.T., was also a post-doctoral fellow there. For Vijaya and me, being new to Boston, this was indeed a very happy coincidence. On campus, Nagabhusan and I used to have lunch together several times a week. In addition, although we lived in different suburbs (Nagabhusan and his wife, Raju (Rajkumari), in Somerville, and we in Watertown), we used to visit each other often. For Vijaya and me, being with Nagabhusan and Raju was especially comforting because we were new in the area, we had just been blessed with our first child, Vivek, and we knew very few other people there. So going to their place some evenings, enjoying their warm hospitality and the delicious food prepared by Raju, and having meaningful conversations with an old friend, gave us much-needed comfort in what was otherwise a very new environment for us. What Vijaya and I both remember fondly is how caringly both Nagabhusan and Raju made us feel welcome and at home every time we saw them. Needless to say, those feelings of mutual affection would continue for decades.
After M.I.T., Nagabhusan got a position at Battelle in Columbus, Ohio and I at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. We were now physically quite far from each other, but periodically kept in touch. Once we managed to get together when Nagabhusan and Raju visited us. It was a short visit, but it was great to see them again after so many years. We did a very enjoyable day-long outing with them to San Francisco and, of course, caught up on all the news of the years we had not seen each other. Then in the 1980s, we moved to New York and our telephone contacts continued at greater frequency. As our children were older now, we had more things to talk about, especially because both their daughters, Suneeta and Sangeeta, went to medical school, as did our son, Vivek. We often repeated our promises to each other to visit.
In 2006, we moved to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Nagabhusan and Raju continued to stay in the Columbus area. Since we were now only four hours apart by car, our desire to see each other gained momentum. The frequency of contacts by telephone and email also increased. In these conversations, sometimes Raju would briefly mention how Nagabhusan was not keeping well. Vijaya and I would get a worrying sense that his condition may be worse than what Nagabhusan made it sound like. We would ask, but Nagabhusan was never the one to talk much about his own difficulties.
So many years had gone by since we last saw each other that it was very much time again to meet. We finally made it happen when we visited them in March of 2012 in Westerville, OH. It was such a joy to see them! Both Nagabhusan and Raju were equally delighted that we came. However, coupled with our mutual joy was a sense of sadness Vijaya and I felt as we realized that medically Nagabhusan had deteriorated significantly. Raju was able to talk about the complex diagnosis and the many associated difficulties they were dealing with, but Nagabhusan did not want to make his health much of a topic of our conversation; he wanted to talk about our children and their children and science and work and all sorts of happy things. That’s how he always was. That’s what made him such a special person. That’s why he left such a mark on his family and friends.
On that afternoon of a cold day on March 15, 2012, as we were having lunch at their home in Westerville, OH, I would have never imagined that we would not be seeing Nagabhusan again. On November 26, 2012, when I got an email from their daughter, Suneeta, that he had passed away, my heart was heavy. Images after images of this gem of a person that I had the privilege of having known for so many years flashed through my memory.
Kantilal Jain, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
Dr. Kantilal Jain was two year junior to Nagabhusan at IIT, Kharagpur. He rejoined him in MIT in 1975. Currently he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.