Erode Subramanian Raja Gopal (1936–2018)

Professor E. S. Raja Gopal, popularly known as ESR to all of us, a well-known experimental condensed matter physicist of the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru passed away on 15 November 2018 at the IISc campus. His demise brings to an end of an era of high-quality indigenously trained physicists with a lifetime commitment to the subject and to its spread in the country (of the sort IISc seemed to host in numbers). He was an exemplar, in the sixties and seventies, of world-class instrumentation confronting cutting-edge problems of physics under conditions of almost no financial support.