Amar Gopal Bose may be no more but he leaves behind a precious legacy in true sound reproduction that no one who has listened to wondrous music or the rich harmonic content of the human voice emerging from a Bose speaker will ever forget.
Be it the holy Sistine Chapel or the humblest supermarket, the quality of high fidelity audio that emerges from the public speaker system from what seems a minuscule speaker is testament to a man who was driven by the spirit to do better by challenging himself every day.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology should consider itself fortunate to have had a student, professor and benefactor in Bose, son of a migrant from Kolkata of the Independence Movement days, for so many decades even as the genius of audio engineering pursued excellence with a tunnel vision that marks out the committed men from the ordinarily intelligent.
To the middle-class Indian, the Bose system could still be out of reach; it always was something to which they aspired. Bose may have been the first Indian billionaire as he wedded research and the fruits of the rigorous US patent system to manufacturing and reaped the profits. What we would like to remember is his single-minded devotion to finding the purest sound, as true to the original as possible, and taking it to the audience in a theatre or opera house or to fans in vast sporting arenas. His pursuit of excellence made “Bose” eponymous with quality sound.