Dinesh Kumar Srivastava, an eminent nuclear physicist, took over as director of the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata, on 1 July. I joined VECC when it was in project stage in 1971 (the project started in 1969). Initially my job was to set up a library of fortran programs needed for the study of nuclear reactions.

A little later I started using this code to start theoretical study of nuclear reactions. Slowly I was allowed to build a modest group of theoreticians at VECC and in 1989-1990 I started working on the theory of quark gluon plasma.

I provided all the theoretical and teaching support needed for the team which built the Photon Multiplicity Detector for CERN SPS, RHIC, and LHC. Later as the Head of Physics Group, I supervised building of a large number of detectors for use with the super-conducting cyclotron, e.g., a large area modular barium fluoride array for the study of high energy gamma rays, a gamma multiplicity filter, a charged particle detector array, a neutron multiplicity detector etc. I was also in charge of all the research in nuclear physics at low and high energy as well as material sciences. A successful graduate school with slowly increasing number of Ph. D. students was also started during this period and now we have about 35 Ph. D. students and post-docs at VECC.