In 1954 a young professor in Madras walked to the leather institute down the road and asked them for a piece of kangaroo tail. With it he worked out the structure of the most common protein in the human body. Then Francis Crick, who had just cracked DNA, told the world he was wrong. His name was Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran. He was born on 8th October 1922 in Ernakulam. His father taught mathematics. He topped the physics honours course in the whole of the Madras Presidency, studied under C V Raman at the Indian Institute of Science, and took a second doctorate at Cambridge under Lawrence Bragg. At 29 he was made a full professor and the founding head of the physics department at the University of Madras. He decided to work on collagen. Collagen is the protein that holds you together. It is in your skin, your bones, your tendons and your muscles. It is the most abundant protein in the animal body. Nobody knew what shape it was. The tools he had were not the tools of Cambridge or Caltech. He needed a sample rich in collagen, so he got kangaroo tail tendon from the Central Leather Research Institute nearby, and studied how X rays scattered off it. In 1954, with Gopinath Kartha, he published a model in the journal Nature. 3 chains, twisted around each other. Europe and America started calling it the Madras Triple Helix. In 1955 Francis Crick and Alexander Rich published a criticism. They said certain atoms in his model sat impossibly close together. Crick said the idea was basically correct but the actual structure was wrong. He was competing against Cambridge, King's College London and Caltech, from a new department in Madras, and the most famous molecular biologist alive had just said he was mistaken. He did not write a rebuttal. He went back to first principles and asked a much bigger question. Forget collagen. What shapes can any protein chain physically take, and which are impossible because the atoms would collide. In 1963, with C Ramakrishnan and V Sasisekharan, he published the answer. It is a simple graph, and it is now called the Ramachandran plot. Every structural biologist alive uses it. When any new protein structure is published anywhere in the world, it is checked against that plot to see whether it is physically possible. He turned an attack on one model into the rule that governs all of them. And his collagen model, in its essentials, is accepted today. C V Raman nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He never received it. He was never given the Bharat Ratna either. He gave most of his prize money away. He funded a bed at the Adyar Cancer Institute in his parents' names and gave one award entirely to the Prime Minister's relief fund. In his sixties he developed Parkinson's disease. He retired in 1989 and died on 7th April 2001. A scientist writing in The Hindu called it the prize that missed the master. The leather institute that gave him the kangaroo tail named its auditorium Triple Helix.

On 27th November 1981, a scientist at IBM brought his leftover Thanksgiving turkey to the laboratory and shot it with a laser. More than 40 million people can see without glasses because of what happened next. His name is Rangaswamy Srinivasan. He was born on 28th February 1929 in Madras. He took his bachelor's and master's degrees in science from the University of Madras in 1949 and 1950. In 1953 he went to America for graduate school, and finished a doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Southern California in 1956. In 1961 he joined the IBM research centre at Yorktown Heights in New York, where he stayed for 30 years. His work was on what ultraviolet light does to organic matter. In 1981, using a new kind of laser called an excimer laser, he found he could etch fine designs into plastics. Then he and 2 colleagues, James Wynne and Samuel Blum, asked a question. Human tissue has some properties in common with plastic. Could the same laser cut flesh. At the time, lasers were already used in surgery. The problem was that they worked by burning. They left heat damage and scarring on everything around the cut. They needed something to test on. The day after Thanksgiving, Srinivasan brought in cartilage from his family's turkey leg. They fired the laser at it. The cut was clean. Microscopically fine. No burning, no charring, no damage to the tissue underneath. He named the effect ablative photodecomposition. The laser was not burning the tissue. It was breaking the molecular bonds and lifting off one thin layer at a time. In 1983 an eye surgeon named Stephen Trokel came to the IBM laboratory to work with him on whether this could be used on the cornea. It could. That is the foundation of PRK and LASIK, the surgery that reshapes the front of the eye and removes the need for glasses. More than 40 million people around the world have now had it. He published over 130 scientific papers and holds at least 22 American patents. He was inducted into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013 President Barack Obama gave him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He is 97 years old. A man from Madras worked out how to cut a human eye without burning it, using a piece of turkey left over from a holiday he did not grow up with.

Her name was Janaki Ammal. She was born on November 4, 1897, in Thalassery, Kerala. She came from a large family and belonged to a community that faced deep social discrimination. For a woman from her background, pursuing higher education was almost unheard of. She ignored every barrier. She studied botany, travelled to the United States, and in 1931 became one of the first Indian women to earn a doctorate in science, receiving her PhD in botany from the University of Michigan. She returned to India with a purpose. At the time, Indian sugarcane produced less sugar than imported varieties. Working at the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore, Janaki Ammal developed new hybrid varieties better suited to Indian conditions, helping improve the country’s sugarcane crop. She did pioneering work in plant genetics and cytology at a time when very few women were accepted in scientific research. Prejudice did not stop her. She later worked in Britain, where her research on magnolias became so respected that one variety was named in her honour. In 1951, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally invited her back to India to help reorganise the Botanical Survey of India. She accepted. Years later, when the Silent Valley rainforest in Kerala was threatened by a proposed hydroelectric project, Janaki Ammal became one of the scientists who argued passionately for its protection. The forest still stands today. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1977 and remained active in science well into her eighties. She died in 1984. Her name may not appear in most textbooks, but millions of Indians have benefited from the crops she improved and the forests she helped save. Follow for stories India deserves to remember.

Her name was Arati Saha. She was born in 1940 in Calcutta. Her mother died when she was two years old. Her father served in the armed forces and was rarely home, so she was raised by her grandmother in North Kolkata. At four years old, her uncle took her to Champatala Ghat for a bath. She refused to leave the water. Her father enrolled her at the Hatkhola Swimming Club, where coach Sachin Nag spotted her talent and took her under his wing. In July 1952, she stood at the edge of the pool at the Helsinki Summer Olympics. She was 11 years old, the youngest Indian Olympian in history and one of only four women in the entire Indian contingent. In 1959, she decided to cross the English Channel, 42 miles of freezing, choppy water often called the Mount Everest of swimming. She was 18 years old and had almost no money. A West Bengal government grant of Rs 11,000 helped fund the attempt. Her first attempt on August 27 failed. She swam for more than 16 hours and came within five miles of the English coast before a powerful current forced her back. She did not go home. On September 29 1959, she entered the water again. She swam for 16 hours and 20 minutes before reaching the English coast, and the first thing she did was hoist the Indian flag. She was 19 years old. She had become the first Asian woman to cross the English Channel. In 1960, she became the first Indian sportswoman to receive the Padma Shri. Arati Saha died in 1994 at the age of 53. Five years later, India issued a postage stamp in her memory. Most Indians have never heard her name. Follow for stories India deserves to remember.

Her name is Divya Deshmukh. She was born on December 9 2005 in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Her parents are both doctors. At five years old she sat at a chessboard for the first time. At seven she became India’s national Under 9 Girls chess champion. By 18 she was competing against the best women chess players on the planet. At one tournament the audience was not watching her moves. They were watching her clothes. Her hair. Her accent. She wrote about it publicly. She named it. She did not apologise for naming it. In 2024 she helped India win gold at the Chess Olympiad. Her performance rating at the tournament was 2608. She scored 9.5 out of 11. In July 2025 she went to Batumi, Georgia as the 15th seed. She had zero Grandmaster norms going in. She defeated the 2nd seed. Then the 10th seed. Then the 3rd seed. In the final she faced Koneru Humpy. India’s first female chess Grandmaster. A legend 25 years older than her. Divya won. She became India’s first Women’s World Cup champion. India’s 88th Grandmaster. Only the fourth Indian woman to earn the title. She dedicated the win to her first coach who died in 2020. She said he shaped everything. She carried a banana as a lucky charm throughout the tournament. She wore the same kurta on every match day. Before the tournament she had zero norms. After it she said I think it was fate. She is 20 years old.

Her name is Swati Mohan. Born in Bengaluru. Moved to America at age one. Grew up in Virginia. At nine, she watched Star Trek and told her parents she would find new places in the universe. They expected medicine. She chose aerospace. Engineering at Cornell. Masters and PhD in Aeronautics from MIT. Then NASA. In 2013, she joined the Mars 2020 mission. She spent eight years making sure a rover would safely land on a planet 300 million miles away. On February 18, 2021, she sat at her console at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Bindi on her forehead. She was the voice of the mission. The Perseverance rover was falling through the Martian atmosphere at 12000 miles per hour. Seven minutes of terror. No human could intervene. She narrated every second. Then she said three words. Touchdown confirmed. The room erupted. She stood there calm and said Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life. She was born in Bengaluru. She landed a rover on Mars. Follow for real stories India never makes headlines about.