If he hadn’t secured a scholarship, Mani would not have been able to attend college in Calcutta. He attended the famous Scottish Church College and when he first landed in the erstwhile capital city of India in British days, Mani was awe-struck. He would later go on to say that for him it felt like landing in Paris or London, Calcutta was grand in so many ways with its large boulevards, defining architecture, big markets, and a thriving culture. He was blessed to be mentored by the legendary Satyendra Nath Bose, co-founder of the Bose-Einstein condensate and Bose-Einstein statistical theory. He was also fortunate to be initiated in physics by Professor Debi Prasad Roy Chaudhury, also a student under Bose. It was while attending a lecture series by Nobel Laureate Paul Dirac in 1950 that Mani realized that an abstract quantum continuum produces fundamental particles that pervade the boundless Universe. Dirac himself would name the class of particles that obey the Bose-Einstein statistics as bosons, after Bose. Mani considers it one of his life’s greatest privileges to have met Bose in his heydays when the world was beckoning him from all corners.

Spirituality and philosophy began to interest Mani Bhaumik somewhere along the line. It was then that he realized that all he had learnt had a cosmic connection, and that the Vedas had described them as one abstract reality. He would put it thus: “In quantum physics, we find the unified field theory depicts the blueprint of the Universe. According to Vedas, Lord Brahma is the Creator of the entire Universe. Don’t you see physics and our Vedic heritage as two sides of the same coin?”