Teacher tribute: Howard Stockley and (above) Tejinder Virdee

To Sir with love

Tejinder Virdee, professor of physics at Imperial College, London, is today one of the world’s top physicists widely honoured for helping to identify what is thought to be the Higgs boson fundamental particle in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

He recently shared the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize established by a Russian tech-investor, Yuri Milner, with six others.

Because of his commitments, Tejinder has been based in Geneva for 30 years. But on one of his regular trips to London, he and his very supportive wife, Vatsala, talked to me over lunch about how he had been inspired by his physics teacher at King’s Norton Boys’ School in Birmingham.

As a 15-year-old freshly arrived from Kenya in 1967, Tejinder came under the influence of Howard Stockley.

During a visit to Birmingham in June, Tejinder contacted Stockley and was touched to discover that his teacher, 80, had followed his career from afar.

“I understood why he was so demanding — he expected a lot of me,” acknowledged Tejinder. “He was very proud at one of his students doing so well.”

The retired teacher and former pupil spent an hour together. Tejinder told Stockley that he thought the Higgs boson had been found before the news was broken dramatically to the world.

Stockley had no family of his own. Sometimes if there was a particular unsolved science problem, he would even trek to Tejinder’s home.

As Tejinder and Vatsala took their leave of Stockley, their parting was emotional.

“He had tears in his eyes,” Vatsala remembered.

Tejinder remarked: “He was very glad I had come and I was very glad I had gone to see him. This is a bitter sweet story — a few weeks later I heard he had passed away.”

After a fall, Stockley was taken to hospital and died on July 23. A message sent by Tejinder was read out at a memorial service packed with old boys whose lives he had enriched.

Tejinder said: “Certain teachers have a gift of empathising with students, helping them out — and giving them wings to fly.”

prize pride: Marina (centre) and Shirin Wheeler with Jaimini Bhagwati Pic: Clayton Barreto

Bar comment

Sir Charles Wheeler, regarded by many as the most distinguished BBC foreign correspondent of his generation, once referred to the Queen as “that bloody woman”, his two daughters revealed last week.

Shirin and Marina Wheeler made the disclosure when accepting a lifetime achievement award, a Waterford crystal bowl, on behalf of their late father, who died aged 85 in 2008, from the Indian Journalists’ Association.

Wheeler was the BBC’s South Asia correspondent based in Delhi from 1958 to 1962. During that time, he met and married a Sikh woman, Dip Singh, the social secretary at the Canadian embassy who was described by one local newspaper as “the most beautiful woman in Delhi”.

In 1961 Wheeler was not pleased when asked to cover the Queen’s state visit to India.

As his younger daughter Marina recalled, Wheeler got into trouble when an irreverent comment made in a bar was overheard by a courtier.

Marina, a barrister who is married to the mayor of London Boris Johnson, said: “The young Queen Elizabeth in India wasn’t his idea of a ‘real story’, and so one night, he told us, he was overheard referring to the monarch as ‘that bloody woman’.”

“It got him banned from Buckingham Palace, but he was very unrepentant,” continued Marina. “But many years later, (in 2006) he finally did get into the Palace.”

“He was knighted and past differences were not mentioned by Her Majesty very graciously,” Marina added. “She actually told him how much she admired his work, and at that point he was a little bit shamefaced.”

Marina’s elder sister, Shirin, herself a BBC correspondent based in Brussels until three months ago, said: “He would have been very proud and very pleased to receive this award from the Indian Journalists’ Association. When you get an award from your peers it means a lot; also India was very close to his heart.”

Indian report

Journalists are so preoccupied with their day-to-day work that they seldom reflect on their journalism. So it was instructive to listen to the forthright speech made to the Indian Journalists’ Association last week by Jaimini Bhagwati, the Indian high commissioner in London.

He argues that British journalists in India and their counterparts in the UK have a role in “improving understanding between our two countries in the widest possible sense”.

As an example of how not to report India, he held up Neville Maxwell’s spectacularly ill- conceived articles in The Times of London in 1967 on the theme of “India’s disintegrating democracy”.

As India approached the fourth general election in 1967, “Maxwell concluded that Indians would vote in the fourth and surely the last general election.”

Bhagwati went on: “Every now and then you (still) see a withering comment about the millions of Indians who are illiterate.”

He pointed out that India’s literate, representing 12 per cent or 48 million out of a population of 400 million in 1947, had shot up to 60 per cent or 720 million out of a population today of 1.2 billion.

“I guess it is a similar story in many other fields,” commented Bhagwati.

The coverage of the UK in the Indian media was not perfect either — “we have sweeping statements all the time about this country in our media”.

“We perhaps need even more in-depth understanding of our respective histories and societies,” he urged.

cool ways: Alastair and Alice CookXmas HUEs: Gift wraps at Selfridges

Cook’s return

When conquering hero Alastair Cook returned home from India last week, he was overwhelmed at Heathrow by tens of thousands of wildly cheering fans, given a police escort, and garlanded by dozens of politicians who gifted him a cash prize of £1,00,000, a Mercedes Benz and five acres of land.

Actually, none of this happened. With not a coolie in sight, the England skipper loaded his own trolley without making a fuss and slipped home unobtrusively with his wife Alice.

Modi’s money

2013 will be 10 years since Narendra Modi was last in Britain. The British government, which is nothing if not “pragmatic”, will give him a visa and security if he wishes to visit “my people” — there are, at least, 4,00,000 Gujaratis in the UK, many of whom are keen to bankroll him.

I do hope this time he won’t cut short my interview with him after five minutes. Curiously, my intrepid Calcutta relatives who have visited Gujarat speak gushingly of him. In fact, they would like him to be chief minister of West Bengal — and bring back jobs, prosperity and the Tata Nano.

Xmas HUEs: Gift wraps at Selfridges

Tittle tattle

Buying Christmas presents in Selfridges last Sunday for my wife (perfume, face cream, jewellery, plus “anything expensive”) I chanced upon the most beautiful wrapping paper in the basement of the Oxford Street department store. Each sheet cost £2.95 or £3.25 — quite reasonable for something so exquisitely Italian or French.

But then the sales girl examined the label at the back: “Hand made in India.”

A dilemma: should I support cottage industry in Mother India or behave like a typically mean Bengali from Belgachia and calculate, “At Rs 250 a sheet, it would be cheaper to stock up next time I am in Calcutta?”

Merry Christmas.