Swapan Chattopadhyay - Early Life and Education - Early Childhood

Early Childhood

Swapan Chattopadhyay was born in Calcutta, India and spent his impressionable early childhood years in the Himalayan hill town of Darjeeling. His father, educated as a chemist but trained in telecommunications via his chosen profession, was posted, from mid 1950s till early 1960s, in Darjeeling as the “officer-in-charge” of communications in the mountain districts of Darjeeling, Sikkim, parts of Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet (now China) on behalf of the Post, Telegraph and Telephone (PT&T) department of India. There growing up as a young boy, along with developing an appreciation for the region’s famously exotic tea gardens and five-mile high mountain peaks, he was fascinated with spotting the Sputnik in the sky and was also one of a half dozen fortunate children who were offered hand-held mountaineering lessons by Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay, upon inauguration of the pioneering Himalayan Mountaineering Institute by the governments of India and New Zealand in 1957. This started his lifelong fascination with science on the one hand and climbing mountains and trekking on the other, in addition to an addiction for tea. At one point in his formative years, he had seriously considered the profession of mountain climbing and much later in life, has been driven to explore the remote regions of western Tibet, the sources of the rivers Indus and Brahmaputra, the sacred mountain Kailas and lake Manasarovar. The Indo-China conflict over the disputed territory of Tibet and subsequent flight of Dalai Lama from Tibet into India brought serious conflicts in the mountain region, putting considerable stress in the civilian population. He relocated with family to the metropolitan mega-city of Calcutta in early 1960s, where he received high school and university education. He was awarded a high school diploma in 1967 as a National Scholar, graduating from Ballygunge Government High school and was selected a National Science Talent Scholar in a nationwide competition. The high school had also previously graduated the internationally acclaimed Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, who along with another contemporary Bengali radical film director Ritwik Ghatak, had considerable influence on his young mind. It was in this high school, that he was the beneficiary of the gifted mentorship of the school’s legendary physics teacher, Pramatha Nath Patra.