“Together, we must work toward absolute equality for all, promoting love and charity. This is not one way of moving forward; it is the only way,” Kapany, who died on December 4, 2020 aged 94, nine months after completing his memoirs, maintains in “The Man Who Bent Light” (Roli Books).

The spark was ignited in a high school in Dehradun, where a teacher told Kapany that light could travel only in a straight line. Determined to prove his teacher wrong, he went on to graduate from Agra University before going to Imperial College to work on a PhD in optics from the University of London.

In 1953, working alongside physicist Harold Hopkins at the Imperial College, Kapany, after a great deal of trial and effort, was the first to successfully transmit high-quality images through fibre bundles, coining the term fibre optics in a 1960 article for Scientific American.

He describes the breakthrough rather modestly:

“On my request, Professor Hopkins appeared in the lab... I (had) affixed a black mask with the cut-out word ‘eFIBRE’ to a lens that I had set up in front of the business end of the remaining (optical glass) bunch and beamed it to a makeshift projection screen on the far wall.