Code
Name Success
Mani
Bhaumik is scientist extraordinaire
whose accomplishments include the
invention of the Excimer laser that
has made LASIK surgery possible.
But Michel W. Potts
finds out that there is more to
this Bengali that includes insights
into eastern spirituality.
Whenever
he has been promoting his book “Code
Name God,” scientist Mani
Bhaumik has compared himself to
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic
character Jay Gatsby, who celebrated
his rise from obscure poverty to
vast wealth by throwing extravagant
parties for people whom he hardly
knew.
Once
he had accumulated his own wealth,
Bhaumik virtually followed the same
trajectory, indulging himself in
a rags-to-riches American dream,
throwing extravagant parties at
his Bel-Air (near Los Angeles) home
modeled after Le Petite Trianon
in the Gardens of Versailles, which
he had replicated on a smaller scale
according to his own design.
But
one night, after a party, finding
himself alone after the guests and
the caterers had gone home, he had
what he called his Peggy Lee moment.
“I was walking around the
pool, and I asked myself: Is this
all there is?” he confides.
Realizing
he was spiritually adrift, Bhaumik
soon sold his home and became a
recluse, searching for a way to
fill the void within and reclaim
the feeling of oneness from his
youth that he had lost. A rationalist
by training, he delved into the
study of quantum physics, psychology
and cosmology.
“Not
that I mastered all of them, but
I got the gist of what would help
me find the answers that everyone
is looking for,” he says.
“So I went into a period where
I did my research to convince myself
that this feeling of oneness really
has a correspondence in reality.”
Ten
years later, Bhaumik emerged with
a book in which he detailed how,
through purely empirical means,
he found the answer. He had succeeded
in avoiding Gatsby’s fate,
because for all his wealth, Gatsby
“was self-destructive and
did not know how to have abiding
happiness,” he now acknowledges.
Consequently, an underlying message
of “Code Name God” “is
that it is possible to be a happy
millionaire,” Bhaumik says.
But there is a caveat: “Happiness
is an inside job,” he maintains.
Like
Gatsby, Bhaumik began his life mired
in deprivation. Although his father
taught Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit
and English at a high school near
his home village of Krishnaganj,
West Bengal, Bhaumik was raised
in “the most abject poverty
you can imagine, barely hand to
mouth, so to speak,” he recalls.
He
also was a victim of discrimination.
At school he quickly discovered
his affinity for math, being able
to see the answer to a problem before
the teacher had barely finished
writing it on the blackboard. Proud
to show off this young protégé,
the school’s headmaster had
invited him to dinner. And yet,
because he was a Vaishya guest in
a Brahmin home, Bhaumik had to sit
a distance of six feet away from
the other guests and later had to
wash his own dishes.
“That
was an eye-opener to me,”
he recalls. “Even the other
kids in the school used to say to
me that I was such a nice guy that
they would have me marry their sisters
in a jiffy, if only I were a Brahmin.”
Academically,
however, he continued to excel,
winning a scholarship to Scottish
Church College at the University
of Calcutta, where, under the tutelage
of the famed Dr. Satyen Bose, he
discovered that the science of physics
had an elegance of its own. “The
beauty of it, the logic of it, was
almost like a spiritual feeling,”
Bhaumik recounts.
Graduating
in 1953, Bhaumik went on to attend
the relatively new IIT in Kharagpur
and was among the first to graduate
with a doctorate degree five years
later. While teaching at the institute,
he published a paper in the American
Journal of Chemical Physics which
caught the attention of Dr. William
MacMillan of the University of California,
Los Angeles, who offered to bring
him to Los Angeles on a Sloan Foundation
Fellowship that allowed Bhaumik
to continue his post-doctoral work.
On
the trip from Los Angeles International
Airport to Westwood, the home of
the UCLA campus, Bhaumik was overwhelmed.
“It was mind-boggling. I thought
I had died and gone to heaven,”
he says. “No matter how many
Hollywood movies you have seen,
no matter how many stories you have
heard from other people who had
come here and gone back, unless
you see it for yourself, you had
no idea of how everything was so
clean and manicured.”
The
scholarship also provided Bhaumik
with a stipend of $7,000 a year,
a staggering amount for a poor village
boy. He soon got his own apartment
and had enough left over to send
money back home.
Originally,
Bhaumik had planned to spend only
a year at UCLA and then return to
India, where he would continue teaching.
But fate intervened in 1960, when
the first laser was discovered at
the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu.
Eager
to recruit the best and the brightest,
the Xerox Corporation hired Bhaumik
to develop lasers on a part-time
basis. “At that time, they
used to say that lasers were a solution
looking for a problem,” Bhaumik
remembers.
Awarded
a grant of $250,000, he remained
with Xerox until 1965. His first
published work was on the liquid
laser, “but I was scooped
by IBM on that,” he says.
When the editors at Nature magazine
rejected his paper, saying that
his discoveries were far-fetched,
Peter Sorokin, who worked for IBM,
managed to steal the glory when
he published similar findings in
a competing scientific journal,
according to Bhaumik.
The
young scientist was devastated.
“It’s an unfortunate
thing to say, but when it comes
to getting in the scientific credit,
it’s like the mafia,”
Bhaumik explains. “Scientists
are nice people in every respect
except when it comes to the competition
for credit.”
Bhaumik
took a leave of absence from Xerox
and returned to India to teach at
the Bose Institute. Far removed
from the competitiveness of the
scientific community, he found time
to meditate. “That’s
when I really had that wonderful,
so-called mystical experience of
oneness with the source of everything
that others have gone through,”
he says.
The
experience “is as real and
genuine experience as anything else
you experience in life,” he
explains. “And now we’re
finding out that it has a very distinct
brain pattern that is repeatable.
In fact, if you look into any major
religion of the world, the founders
of those religions usually had this
experience of oneness with the source.”
Returning
to the United States after a brief
teaching stint in Germany, a rejuvenated
Bhaumik joined Northrup in 1968,
working this time on the development
of a carbon-dioxide laser. Later,
as group leader, he went on to develop
the Excimer laser, where molecules
that do not exist come into being
when xenon, argon or krypton gases
are excited.
Though
it was originally developed for
military applications, the cold-cutting
attributes of the Excimer laser
“turned out to have the best
application in surgery, and that’s
how our application all these years
later became applicable to the LASIK
procedure,” Bhaumik says.
Bhaumik
announced his discovery in May of
1973 at a meeting of the Denver
Optical Society of America in Denver,
Colorado, and again he was greeted
with skepticism. “When I presented
it, everyone said, ‘What have
you been smoking? It cannot work.’
But when they saw the result, then
pandemonium broke out, with everyone
saying, ‘Oh, I did it too!’”
he laughed.
“I
also had the rare distinction of
being elected by my peers to the
American Physics Society and the
Institute of Electronics and Electronics
Engineers, two of the most prestigious
societies. You’re lucky if
you’re elected to only one
of them. So it’s a rare distinction,
almost like a Nobel Prize, so to
speak, that shows I have done something.”
While
the patent is in Bhaumik’s
name, Northrup retained the rights.
For his efforts, Bhaumik was rewarded
with stock options, which he parlayed
into real estate ventures, first
as a tax shelter, but later as an
investment. “By 1986, I had
enough income so that I could retire
comfortably,” he says.
Having
accumulated immense wealth, “I
said goodbye to science and dove
into the fast lane of Los Angeles,”
he concedes. “I had parties
with famous people like Norman Cousins,
Ashley Montegu and Deepak Chopra,
and I had my share of beautiful
women.”
The
women included actresses Catherine
Oxenberg, Roberta Collins, and Eva
Gabor, “who was the epitome
of womanhood,” he confides.
“In person, she had a different
persona, the dumb blonde image,
but she was a whip smart businesswoman.
She was as endearing as you could
think of.”
Yet
he never married. “I had different
priorities then,” he admits.
“During
the weekdays I did my science and
during my weekends and nights I
did my investments, so if I had
gotten married, my wife would have
felt like a widow, since I wouldn’t
have spent any time with her.”
Nor
does he really have time now to
consider marriage. “I’m
not fully retired yet,” he
says. “I’m still promoting
the book and then next year my animation
series will be starting on television.
So right now, I’m having fun.
But I haven’t given up. I’m
waiting for the time when I can
deal properly with a meaningful
relationship, because that takes
time and focus.”
The
more he enjoyed the good life the
more Bhaumik became a connoisseur
of wine, his favorite being a 1959
Chateau Lefite Rothschild, which
sold for $2000 a bottle. He still
has a few bottles on hand, although
these days, whenever friends come
over to visit, he will serve them
a Chateau Haut Brion, a Chateau
Margaux or a Le Monte Rachat white
wine.
These
days, his reading is as rapacious
as ever. “On a regular basis,
I keep up with the latest developments
in cosmology and quantum physics,”
he says, noting that he is a subscriber
to Science, Nature, Physics Today
and Scientific American. “I’m
like a kid when it comes to something
new coming out. I just have to get
it and understand it.”
His
home was featured on Robin Leach’s
“Lifestyles of the Rich and
Famous” television show in
1989. But by then, he was already
having second thoughts about his
way of life. “With money,
you can do anything you want to.
One excitement leads to a bigger
excitement. It’s intoxicating,
but it’s almost a neurosis,”
he says. “I thought that once
you had enough money, you’d
be living happily ever after. It
just doesn’t happen that way,
and I started to think: Why am I
not happy? I had the company of
the most beautiful women in the
world and yet I felt a hole inside
me.”
Withdrawing
to his home in Malibu, Bhaumik reflected
on where he had gone wrong. He remembered
that at the age of 14, he spent
a couple of weeks with Mahatma Gandhi,
who had set up camp near his village
in an effort to organize the local
Quit India Movement. Bhaumik’s
job was to clean the Mahatma’s
toilet. “We all fought for
the job, because in his Zen-like
conviction, he said that no job
should be considered lowly for people
to do,” he recounts.
Bhaumik
was mesmerized by the Mahatma. “He
spoke very sparingly, but when he
spoke, it was with the confidence
of a man who declared that his life
was his message,” he says.
“You
could see in his face that he was
a man who had experienced the oneness.
That gave me confidence that what
people say is just not words, it
is possible to experience that.
One of the things that stuck in
my young, impressionable mind was
when he said that we had to be the
change that we want to see in the
world. That always stayed in the
back of mind.”
Secluded
from the world, Bhaumik spent the
next several years searching for
that same oneness he had seen in
Gandhi’s face by reading everything
scientific he could get his hands
on.
“The
human brain has evolved to the point
where it cannot only experience
that oneness with the source but
also, in an empirical way, through
the method of science; you can prove
there is one source,” he believes.
“What
really boggled my mind was that
all the empirical indications were
pointing to the fact that, lo and
behold, everything is coming from
one source. We can see 100 billion
galaxies in a universe that is unimaginably
vast, and yet, would you believe
that everything came from a space
smaller than a peck of dust? That
is cosmologically verifiable. The
universe has a blueprint in this
very initial element of space that
sequentially unfolded, and yet,
that same source is still present
everywhere in the fabric of space.”
Bhaumik
concedes that there is an Intelligent
Design at work, “but not the
way the fundamentalists would have
us believe,” he declares.
“Evolution is fact, and as
scientists, we read the book of
nature, which is the act of God,
not God’s word supposedly
told to somebody. If you study nature,
there is a preponderance of evidence
that man came through evolution,
and if that is God’s way of
working, then one should believe
in that rather than God’s
word.”
The
compilers of the Vedas were the
first monotheists, Bhaumik points
out. “In the West, when we
think of monotheism, we think of
a being. But the Vedists did not
think of a being, they thought of
an abstract entity that they called
Brahma, which some people deify
and think of as a being. But God
is the source of everything, not
a being but a transcendent power
that is encoded everywhere in space.”
There
are those who, once having found
their spirituality, renounce the
material world. “I think that’s
a cop-out,” Bhaumik asserts.
“I believe that one should
be spiritual to live, not live to
be spiritual. Most of the people
who renounce or go to the Himalayas
to become a recluse are checking
out of society. If you look at the
14 billion-year history of the universe,
it started from the most simple
state possible and has since been
manifesting and evolving. So, evolution
in society and our personal life
is the law of the universe.”
