‘fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously … All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive.’

Hubert Airy (1838-1903)

From soil and seed his story grew,

A gardener’s son with mind askew;

He learned to read by chance, by fire,

And fed his hunger, heart’s desire.

No school nor tutor paved his way,

He climbed by books through night and day;

From Latin lines and French discourse,

He mastered math with stubborn force. 

Disclosure: the poem is AI Generated

“At that time, sending children to English schools was an aristocratic status symbol. In the vernacular school, to which I was sent, the son of the Muslim attendant of my father sat on my right side, and the son of a fisherman sat on my left. They were my playmates. I listened spellbound to their stories of birds, animals, and aquatic creatures. Perhaps these stories created in my mind a keen interest in investigating the workings of Nature. When I returned home from school accompanied by my school fellows, my mother welcomed and fed all of us without discrimination.” Jagadis Chandra Bose by Visvapriya Mukherji