"YOU HAVE NOT ACHIEVED SYNCHRONIZATION"

Our high school used to hold an annual science exhibition. It lasted for a few days, and a great many people came visiting. Every year that I was there, I had an entry. These were heady days. You forgot your daily routine, your meal time, your bed time, and immersed yourself into your project. For this particular year, I chose a long and very beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore on how the evening falls on earth in imperceptible stages, gently, languidly, sadly. I got a teacher with deep, sonorous voice read the poem into a tape recorder. Then I requisitioned a large classroom, emptied it and set it up so as to serve as a wraparound theater. I borrowed projectors, lighting aids and assorted other implements. The idea was to create a visual impression as well as a physical sense of the evening falling on earth and on you as you listened to the recitation. All the various effects were to work together to give you shivers. The project was named "Literary Circarama".

The central note of the poem is a lone, sad bird flying across the landscape and across the poem and across your very being. And the refrain is that even though the world is darkening all around you and everything is being stilled around you – even the ocean waves, do not close those hopeful wings. Never close those dynamic wings.

Each year we had a distinguished guest visit the Exhibition. On this year it was the great Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Naturally, every exhibitor was all agog what comment he might make. This was to be the crowning glory for all your intense efforts. In my case he said: "You have not achieved synchronization."

To this day I wonder if I have achieved synchronization in any project in my life.