Chandrasekhar would recall how one Father Saldanha, a Christian missionary from Kerala, would slip books into his cabin that characterised Hindu gods as primitive, evil and corrupt. While other Hindu students would fume at the missionary, Chandrasekhar would silently listen to him “more out of politeness than anything else” and yet he “never left him in doubt that he did not share his views”.

But a more decisive blow was dealt after one of the most remarkable discoveries of young Chandrasekhar. By 1930, when he was barely 20, the South Indian boy, having spent just one year pursuing graduate study at Trinity College, Cambridge, had come to the audacious conclusion that challenged the prevailing wisdom on the burning of stars.

Physicist, historian of science and author, Arthur Miller, in his engaging book on Chandrasekhar’s work (Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, 2005) writes: “In ten minutes, sitting in a deckchair overlooking the Arabian Sea, Chandra (as he was universally known) carried out some calculations that augured a disturbing fate for small, dense stars known as white dwarfs.”