COMMENTARY

Learning from Obaid Siddiqi

Dinesh Mohan

Obaid Siddiqi (7 January 1932-26 July 2013), a pioneering biologist, passed away in Bangalore after battling injuries from a trafc crash in his neighbourhood.

Dinesh Mohan (dineshmohan@outlook.com) is professor emeritus at the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme and the WHO Collaborating Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

n a late July evening I got a text message from Dunu Roy saying that Obaid Siddiqi (OS) had been hit by a moped and was in the intensive care unit (ICU) with a serious head injury. The next day I went over and spent time with Dunu and his wife Imrana (who happens to be Obaids sister). The mood was sombre. Obaid had barely recovered from a spinal and arm fracture for which he had spent three months in hospital. According to his sister, he had healed himself out of sheer grit and focus on getting well to get back to his work, with his youngest daughter Diba and music as constant companions. I came home agitated and unhappy. OS had not been my teacher or even a very close friend. Yet, I found myself brooding over his condition in the ICU. I had met him a few times over the previous 30 years at his sisters place and found him inspiring and unexpectedly gracious. I knew that he had done pioneering work in bacterial genetics and on understanding how nerve signals are generated and transmitted. And I knew of the string of awards he often came to collect, but our discussions were mostly on subjects other than science. I was also aware of his continuing leadership at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. On 26 July I got another SMS from Dunu that OS had passed away. I was again surprised at my emotional response to the news. It could not be just that he was Imranas brother. I recognised the fact that the circumstances of his injury hit by a moped as a pedestrian on a peaceful residential street reminded me of my failure as a road safety professional. But more on that later. In my next class on trafc safety at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi I informed my students that Obaid Siddiqi had died the previous day and that his death should be considered the joint responsibility of all civil engineers and law enforcement agencies of the country.
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I then realised that none of the students knew who he was. The penny dropped. I now knew what was bothering me. In our runaway hedonistic world, the OSs of the world matter less than they should. They only matter because they bring honour to the country and because some scientists can claim that we also have the worlds nest. I am reminded that decades ago OSs guide, Guido Pontecorvo, professor of genetics at Glasgow, wrote to Homi Bhabha saying: In fact, Im really bafed as to why India continues to promote mediocre scientist politicians and does nothing to maintain the really good scientists. Are we any better off today? Not a Scientist-Politician One thing OS certainly was not, a scientist-politician. That is why my students had not heard his name. I met OS mostly on social occasions and not at scientic meetings as there was not much in common in our areas of work. But whenever I did mention what I was doing he showed great interest. I could not reciprocate because I was afraid that I would not understand the details of his work! Everything that is said about his wider interests is certainly true. The last occasion when I spent some time with him was at a hospital canteen when Dunu was admitted there. Our discussion turned to the ongoing Anna Hazare fast. He was deeply curious and wanted to understand what was happening there and was somewhat irritated when I took a very critical view. He was not going to agree with me out of politeness unless he thought he knew enough. Though I had met OS a couple of times in the early 1980s I did not know enough about his work and views. In 1981, a few of us were helping Raj and Romesh Thapar put together an issue of Seminar on A Failed Science to focus on the ills that plagued the scientic establishment in India. P N Haksar insisted that I contact OS because he would offer insights that others might not. That is the rst time I made an effort to nd out who he really was. The few people I talked to responded in glowing terms about him. I do not remember now why I nally did not or could not contact him. In
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retrospect, I wish I had, so that I might have got to know him better. Numerous Awards People like OS can inspire you from a distance or even posthumously when you get a peep into their personal lives in addition to their professional accomplishments. Of the latter, OS received almost every recognition a scientist can hope for: the Bhatnagar Prize; Aryabhatta Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA); B C Roy Award for biomedical research; Fellow of the Royal Society London (FRS); the US National Academy of Sciences; the World Academy of Sciences, Trieste; the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore; National Academy of Sciences (India); INSA Golden Jubilee Medal; Birla Samarak Kosh National Award; Goyal Foundation Prize; Bhasin Foundation Prize; Science Congress Plaque of Honours and Firodia Award for Basic Sciences, Padma Vibhushan and Padma Bhushan. Others more competent than me have commented on his outstanding contributions as the father of modern biology in India. I could have never guessed only from my brief meetings with him that he was one of the most accomplished scientists of India. He did not push his fame or position on you. Others have said of him an aristocrat man, brutally honest, intellectually demanding, while he was very chilled out with his students, he could be frosty with his contemporaries, he was so self assured, never hesitant to enter rough waters and science to him was about nding new frontiers, so at the height of running a successful lab he sought out yet another challenge. Calling him aristocratic is not really a fair description. He did not come from the ruling class or nobility, nor did he project their characteristics or else he would be taking a car to the park for his walk and not going on foot like any ordinary being! If he looked aristocratic, it must be the weight of his intellect and dignity. Wide-ranging Interests The rest of the descriptions can only be considered complimentary. He is also known to have been deeply interested in
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classical music, Urdu literature, photography and sports. If you see beauty in your professional work it has to encompass other parts of your life. Maybe it is this characteristic that makes such people outstanding scientists as well. I wish more of our important scientists had the strength and condence of OS to be generous with juniors and abrupt and brutally honest with seniors. It would make our system a little more honest and hospitable to aspiring youngsters. Most of us do not like people with strong opinions. However, you cannot pursue what you want to do with brutal honesty and intellectual strength unless you have strong beliefs. This probably has to be an essential characteristic of pioneers like OS. The giants in my eld of injury prevention and road safety who inuenced my life in signicant ways were also very hard taskmasters, very self-assured and at times hard to deal with. It is important that we learn to value most of what OS represented and embed

it in our scientic and technical institutions. The excitement of pursuing the new has to be a part of any young group working in any discipline. Such groups need the support, encouragement, generosity and protection of seniors like OS. This is one reason why it is important that many more young people should know the details of how OS worked and lived. I wish now that I had got to know him better. That is my loss. Even worse, the moped may not have hit him if the principles of trafc calming known for the last few decades were followed in his neighbourhood. We know that neighbourhood roads can be designed such that no one can drive at speeds greater than 30 km/h. Under such conditions the probability of novice teenage drivers hitting others reduces dramatically. Unfortunately, road-building authorities and civil engineering professors in India have refused to move in this direction over the past two decades. An Obaid Siddiqi in this profession might have made all the difference.

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