"The award was in the waiting for a long time and he truly deserves it. Having been associated with him for over 40 years, I have seen him work calmly towards achieving all his targets and also encouraging all his colleagues to give work their very best."

“He is a cosmologist of international repute and best known for his work on the conformal gravity theory, together with his mentor Fred Hoyle. He also set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune. More recently, he was involved in an effort to sample air from the atmosphere at heights of 41km for microorganisms. This study reported at least two strains of bacteria and one fungus that were cultured in the lab. If these findings hold up to further enquiry, they provide a new perspective on life on earth and its beginnings.”

“So it was better to think of formulations which could explain the creation of matter without violating the law of conservation of matter...For that we used what is called as negative energy, which at that time was considered unrealistic. There was a good example of negative energy, mainly Newtonian gravity. Newtonian gravity is a negative energy system because gravitational potential energy is negative and we i.e, Fred Hoyle and me, worked out a fairly consistent method of describing this whole thing. Today what people call phantom fields, an idea which is catching up with people trying to explain some problems of the big-bang, these phantom fields are what we had proposed way back in the 1960’s.”

“Cambridge was my goal, so once I got admission and scholarship, I decided to go there - I went there after my B.Sc at 19, I did my Masters in 3 years, by age 22 and PhD in another 3 years, by 25 years of age.”

“It was around dusk when my companion and I noticed the position of sun closer to the west horizon, and the sun was going up.”

“We all know that sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and earth spins on its axis from west to east. But on that day my jet plan was at 60 degree latitude near Greenland and the plane exceeded the speed of rotation of the earth on its axis so the sun was found moving from west towards east.”

“The Gran Sasso results could be seen as tentatively offering support for the big bang theory – if we could find a way to test that they are indeed travelling backwards in time.”