Mr Narlikar also served as president of the Marathi literary festival, and his autobiography received the Sahitya Akademi Award. At the age of 85, he started a blog to share his stories about science and life, which now has over 3,000 subscribers.Mr Narlikar was a beloved science communicator. He wrote books and articles, and created programmes for radio and television in English, Marathi, and Hindi. In 1996, UNESCO honoured him with the Kalinga Award for science popularisation.Jayant Vishnu Narlikar was born on 19 July 1938 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He spent his early years on the campus of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), where his father, Vishnu Vasudeva Narlikar, was Professor and Head of the Mathematics Department.His mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar in Sanskrit. He earned his B.Sc degree from BHU in 1957. In 1966, he married Mangala Rajwade, a mathematician with a PhD. They had three daughters.He then moved to Cambridge University for higher education, where he became a Wrangler and won the Tyson Medal in the Mathematical Tripos. He earned multiple degrees from Cambridge: BA in 1960, PhD in 1963, MA in 1964, and ScD in 1976, specialising in astronomy and astrophysics.At Cambridge, he was awarded the Smith’s Prize in 1962 and the Adams Prize in 1967. He remained at Cambridge until 1972 as a Fellow of King’s College (1963–1972) and a founding staff member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (1966–1972).Mr Narlikar returned to India in 1972 to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where he led the Theoretical Astrophysics Group to international prominence.In 1988, he was invited by the University Grants Commission to set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. He served as its founding director until his retirement in 2003. After retiring, he continued as an emeritus professor.From 1999 to 2003, he led a space research experiment to collect microorganisms from the upper atmosphere (up to 41 km). The discovery of live cells and bacteria suggested that Earth might be continuously bombarded by microorganisms, hinting at possible extraterrestrial origins of life.In 1965, at the age of 26, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour. Later, in 2004, he received the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award. He was a Fellow of all three national science academies of India, the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and the Third World Academy of Sciences.
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