Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath, a pioneer in wireless communication and plant electrophysiology. In 1917, he set up the Bose Institute in Calcutta dedicated to scientific research, but as a scientist he was misunderstood, as is clear from this letter to Patrick Geddes, written in 1917: “I do not belong to any special fold — the physicists think that I have given up physics and gone over to the botanists; the vegetists think that I am the physiologist and so on...” In his new book, Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist, Sudipto Das profiles Bose and his contribution to science. Edited excerpts from an interview:
