India, Aug. 29 -- Is there a child today who has not been told the story of Newton sitting under an apple tree and the discovery of gravity? The story is entrenched in the folklore of science. In The Man Who Made Plants Write, Sumana Roy introduces the reader to another such story that deserves to be told just as much to every science student: Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) once stepped on a touch-me-not (Mimosa pudica) plant. He noticed the folding of its leaves and wondered how and why that response occurred. The touch-me-not was his apple; the impetus that led him to study plant responses and ways of communication. Roy's masterful translation of Bose's Abyakta is similarly captivating. In lyrical prose that retains the local flavour, Roy takes us on a journey through Bose's life, through the medium of his essays. Her own writing in the book gives the reader a sense not just of Bose, the scientist, but also of Bose, the writer, patriot, poet and thought leader, with her translation capturing the Bengali essence of the original. Words such as "jhankaar" and sounds like the "thorr thorr" of a tree's rustling leaves are retained, which makes the reader feel closer to the original writing. In the soulful introduction, Roy tells the reader about Bose: his love for Bangla, his childhood education and rise to fame, his dreams and his challenges. While doing so, it becomes clear that Roy is invested in the scientist's life and work. Like Bose, she is a "plant-mad parent", as someone once called her. In keeping with Bose's theme of interconnected life, Roy also ruminates on the leg-acy that childless people leave the world. Abyakta, literally "the unsaid", is not just a collection of science essays; it is an exploration of the poetic quality of science. Some of these pieces were written for children, some were lectures delivered to a largely lay audience, and one was addressed to the Bengali Sahitya Sammelani, a literature conference. Bose sees music in the susurration of leaves, in sounds that are audible and those that are beyond the human auditory range. Like Rachel Carson's A Sense of Wonder (1965), written 43 years after Abyakta, these works seek to sow the seed of awe and love for nature, in the general populace. It is only with love that one can understand the natural world, as Bose says. "Earlier, when I would go to the fields or mountains by myself, I felt an emptiness," he writes. "I then learned to love plants, trees, birds, worms, and insects. I am able to understand many of their words that I couldn't before. These trees that do not speak - that they have a life, that they eat like us, that they grow with time, I did not know any of this. I understand it now." The writing is full of interesting analogies: seeds are like a sleeping infant; pollination is a flowering tree that invites its dear friends, the birds and butterflies, over. He tells us of the special invitation trees extend to nocturnal insects. Since they cannot venture out in the day, he says, the trees release fragrances to guide the insects to the party at night. The homemaker is not forgotten. While explaining how a zigzag cut is more injurious to a plant than a straight one, he makes a tongue-in-cheek comment about how this may be applied while cutting a koi fish. The essays also convey a deep sense of patriotism; exploring a wish to make science accessible to the masses and touching upon the eventual establishment of the Bose Institute in Calcutta. The scientist recalls instances where he was treated with thinly veiled contempt by colonial peers. Even when he was appreciated, he was often singled out as an outlier in what was viewed as the largely uneducated, uncreative Indian population. His writing serves as vindication against those who have held such views. His writing shifts the anthropocentric focus of contemporary science too, and turns attention towards plant life. A polymath and a proponent of interdisciplinary science, he set up the Bose Institute as a way for specialists in different disciplines to come together and work towards solving common problems. Quite contrary to the scientific mindset of the era, he he did not shy away from showing his love for his test subjects. Just as Jane Goodall sought to name the chimpanzees she studied, Bose, in an earlier era, spoke lovingly about his plants and chose to explain the science behind them by using human emotional analogies. This was an unsurprising quirk, considering he was the inventor of the crescograph, an instrument that measured the movements and growth of plants, in ways that metaphorically let plants "write"....