Recruit the Person, Not the Credential
When Bhabha set out to staff the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research after its founding in 1945, India had no deep bench of trained physicists. The country had been systematically drained of scientific talent under colonial administration, and most serious researchers who had gone abroad showed little reason to return. Bhabha did not wait for the pipeline to fill. He wrote personal letters, specific, direct, flattering without being dishonest, to individual scientists he had identified as exceptional, and he made the case that Bombay could offer what Cambridge or Göttingen could: freedom, funding, and the chance to build something from nothing.
