India figures in the Nobels this year, on the 100th anniversary of the most coveted prize on this planet. The physics prize is a direct tribute to the talent of the best theoretical physicist that India has ever produced, Satyendranath Bose. Carl E. Weiman, of the University of Colorado in Boulder, Eric A. Cornell, from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder and Wolfgang Ketterle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, were selected for the prize for producing a bizarre state of matter, called Bose-Einstein condensate, in which atoms merge together into a single wavelike entity, much like a beam of laser light. The trio's feat is a vindication of an idea propounded by Bose and extended by Albert Einstein in the Twenties. In its millennium bash, Time magazine chose Einstein to be the 'Person of the Century' in 1999, arguing that he alone was the face of the remarkable advance of science that marked the 20th century. The accolade was justified. Of the two most important upheavals in science that the last century produced - relativity and quantum mechanics - Einstein singlehandedly accomplished the former and flagged off the latter. The Nobel prize, not exactly a measure for Einstein's genius, came his way though. But what about Bose? Why has he become the most famous icon of deprivation in science? The Nobel prize, like any other award, is bound to be a victim of subjectivism. In fact, physics, like any other branch of science, has its own list of unforgettable left-outs. Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann (omitted from the prize when Otto Hann got it in 1944 for splitting atoms), George Zweig (excluded in 1969 when Murray Gell-Mann got it in 1969 for propounding the quark structure of matter), and Fred Hoyle (ignored when the award went to William Fowler in 1983 for showing how chemical elements are produced in stars), to name a few. Bose's figure, however, towers over all these epitomes of negligence as not one but many Nobel-winning feats owe their accomplishments to his valuable insight. Physics, at the beginning of the last century, was going through a state of upheaval, a not-so-unhappy outcome of some tantalizing discoveries during the 1890s. Three of those came in successive years. First, there was the detection of an invisible light, called X-ray, by the German experimental physicist, Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen (incidentally, the first Nobel prize winner in physics) in 1895. The next year, the French expert, Antoine Henri Becquerel, discovered that the element uranium emitted a radiant light, a phenomenon called radioactivity. And then the British physicist, Joseph John Thomson, stumbled upon a universal fragment of all atoms, the electron. All these discoveries came as a pleasant surprise to a German professor named Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck. In 1900, upon conjecturing, somewhat reluctantly, that atoms absorb or emit light not in a stream but in little lumps, Planck ushered in a revolution in our understanding of nature. On a New Year's day walk with his small son he told him that a new era of physics had begun. Although Planck's daring hypothesis meant to say that light was grainy - just like matter, in the final analysis - his contemporaries did not take the new concept seriously. They were still glued to the idea that light propagated itself in waves. This was despite the fact that in 1905, in one of the five papers that Einstein wrote in Annalen der Physik (the one that eventually earned him a Nobel prize in 1921), he suggested that light itself must be made up of its grains, rather than just being emitted and absorbed in those grains. The man who changed this scenario by a stroke of genius was Bose, then a physics professor from Dhaka University. An avid follower of Albert Einstein's works, and one of the first translators of relativity into English, Bose took the idea of light particles seriously. In 1924, he wrote a paper arriving at what Planck had achie- ved long ago, but getting there in an ingenious way. What Bose showed was that you need not assume that light is absorbed or emitted in little lumps, light itself is somewhat like a gas of particles. To arrive at this, you only have to adopt a new statistics, or, simply put, count those particles in a manner different from the way others had been using. Bose sent the paper to the Philosophical Magazine for publication, but, for some unknown reason, did not get any response from it. Desperate, he then sent it to Einstein, introducing himself as one of his distant disciples. Requesting him to go through the paper, Bose urged Einstein to pass it on to the Zeitschrift fur Physik if it was worth it. Impressed by Bose's brainwave, Einstein himself translated the paper into German, and sent it to the journal with a note, saying, 'Bose's derivation of Planck's law signifies, in my opinion, an important step forward. The method used here gives also the quantum theory of an ideal gas, as I shall show elsewhere.' He kept his promise and wrote three papers in the Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin in 1925 incorporating the idea of the new statistics. The Bose-Einstein statistics was born. That was Einstein's last major contribution to quantum theory. Extending Bose's statistics to describe the behaviour of gases under different conditions, Einstein showed that just as light could be explained in terms of particles, so particles ought to behave as waves. Einstein's paper meant that if a sample of atoms were cooled sufficiently, a large fraction of them would lose their individual identity. They would, in effect, merge, occupying the same space, and behave as though they were a single 'superatom'. This is what came to be known as Bose-Einstein condensate. That bizarre state of matter is but one prediction of Bose-Einstein statistics. The roots of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of interaction of light and matter which earned Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga the Nobel prize in physics in 1965, go back to that statistics. Quantum chronomodynamics , the theory of quark structure of matter for which Murray Gell-Mann bagged the prize in 1969, is modelled after QED. And it is through QCD that physicists hope to achieve their Holy Grail - a single concept to describe all phenomena in this universe, the so-called Theory of Everything. Physicists classify all particles in this universe in two groups, bosons and fermions. Bosons are the ones obeying the Bose-Einstein statistics. Fermions, named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, obey the statistics enunciated by him and the British physicist, Paul Dirac. It is believed that fermions interact with one another by exchanging bosons among themselves. Bosons have been figuring, directly or indirectly, in the Nobel prizes for a long time now. When Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow bagged the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honoured them for having shown that electromagnetism and radioactivity, although diverse activities apparently, were essentially the same phenomenon. The trio had predicted that the unification of those two phenomena would require three boson particles - W-plus, W-minus and Z-zero - to exist. When Carlo Rubbia and his colleague, Simon van der Meer, detected those three bosons at the European Centre for Nuclear Physics near Geneva in early Eighties, they were awarded the physics Nobel in 1984. The next big prey in the boson family is called the 'Higgs boson'. Its detection would surely bag another Nobel, for it's believed to solve a great mystery of nature -that of mass. Physicists do not know why particles have masses at all, or, more importantly, why they have the masses that they do, and not a bit more or less. As billions of euros and dollars are being allocated for the race to track that high-profile member of the boson family, the importance of Satyendranath's brainwave is looming larger than ever. And, with that, the image of a colossus unrecognized. Nobel Winners List of Nobel-winners whose feats go back to Bose's idea: 1965: Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga 1969: Murray Gell-Mann 1979: Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow 1984: Carlo Rubbia, Simon van der Meer 2001: Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle