Pardon me if I sound like an excited child in a toy shop but I am just back from CERN, the particle physics lab on the Franco-Swiss border that everyone knows of now, thanks to ‘Angels and Demons’. The best part of the trip, besides being able to see all the experiment hubs, was the Indian presence at CERN (and I am itching to write a bigger article on it soon).

It was lovely to be greeted by a Nataraj statue presented to CERN by India’s department of atomic energy.

And then to be greeted by CERN physicist Archana Sharma, the woman from Jhansi whose infectious ‘science patriotism’ is something I identified with. There’s another story to be told on her efforts to put India on the CERN map and vice-versa. For the first time ever, a contingent of Indian students is visiting CERN to get an exposure of a lifetime, thanks to Sharma’s perseverance.

I can’t but mention Dilip Jana, a young scientist I found working late on a Sunday night in a CERN library, wife in tow. His fascinating personal journey from remote Nandigram (now famous as a political hotbed) in West Bengal to the US for higher studies and then a deputation at CERN is awe-inspiring. Something all young students aspiring to be scientists must be told about. More about him in the India article on CERN soon.

Being at CERN was an experience in itself — a glamorous particle physics lab, the Large Hadron Collider and loads of talk on matter, anti-matter and Higgs — in the middle of small villages on both sides of the border, vineyards and the Alps. Worth a longish travelogue, actually!