Professor N.N. Bhandari passed away on 24 April 2018 after a brief period of hospitalization.As I sit writing this, I am transported to that Monday morning of 10 January 1972 when I first met him. Having just arrived from Poona (now renamed Pune) after completing my M.Sc in Botany, I was reporting to Professor B.M. Johri, the then Head of the Department of Botany at the University of Delhi to join as a CSIR Doctoral Fellow. Coming from a small place, and still wet behind the years, I entered the portals of the then well-known Department - also Centre of Advanced Study in Plant Morphology and Embryology - with great trepidation. It was there in the Head's Chamber that I first met Dr Bhandari, then a young and handsome lecturer in the department, and was assigned to work with him. After the preliminaries were over, Professor Johri advised me towork on a comparative study of antipodal cells in grasses and dismissed me with these words: "Young man, you now have a research problem, and you have a guide. So go ahead and work".
展开▼
