Former UNHCR staff member and author Vatsala Virdee was accorded the honourable title of Lady Virdee on 17 October 2014 when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II knighted her husband, Tejinder, at Windsor Castle for his services to science.
Vatsala’s career in the United Nations spanned 28 years. She first worked for UNDRO (OCHA) in 1981, followed by a long and successful career in DIP, SMS, DIST and the Staff Council at the UNHCR. However, it was only in 2005 that we discovered that we had a writer in our midst when she published her first novel, Rubies and Rickshaws, a romantic story set in the Himalayas. Inspired by her experiences while living in India in the early 70’s, Vatsala wrote it all down creating this fairytale romance.
Born British to parents from India, Vatsala’s father took a big step when he decided to leave India. Her father had been displaced from his home in Karachi following the partition of India and, in 1947, decided to leave the Indian sub-continent altogether to start a new life in the UK. He borrowed just enough money to buy a ticket on the first passenger steamer to leave Bombay for Southampton after independence, arriving alone and penniless in post WWII London. He would become a successful businessman and repay the borrowed sum a few years later. He also built a school in his native village back in India, which Vatsala and her husband, Tejinder continue to support.
Having grown up in the UK, Vatsala decided to move to Geneva in her late teens where she met her husband, particle physicist Tejinder Virdee, in 1975. I asked her to tell me the story behind her husband’s recent knighthood.
She explained that Tejinder, who is Professor of Physics at Imperial College in London, is based at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory located on the Franco-Swiss border. In the early 1990s physicists at CERN began designing an accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could recreate some of the conditions present in the universe immediately after the Big Bang. The LHC needed powerful detectors so Tejinder and a handful of colleagues designed and then with colleagues from all over the world built the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which had the potential to record any new fundamental particles the LHC could produce.
On the 4th July 2012, CMS and a sister experiment discovered the elusive Higgs Boson. CMS can be described as a gigantic state-of-art digital camera, able to take 40 million 3D pictures per second of some events similar to those that would have been occurring moments after the Big Bang. CMS is located 100 meters underground in a vast cathedral-like cavern, and weighs a hefty 14,000 tones. The LHC is like a super-highway 27-kilometer tunnel smashing sub-atomic particles at speeds very close to that of the speed of light. All this is only accessible by way of a lift shaft designed to take physicists, engineers, and equipment up and down to the underground tunnel. The Higgs Boson is the last of the fundamental particles of the Standard Model of Physics, the most powerful scientific theory humankind has ever devised.
Tejinder, also of Indian origin was born at the foothills of Mt. Kenya, Nyeri, and studied in Kisumu, Kenya until the age of 15. In 1967 his family settled in the UK. Now, as one of the UK's most distinguished physicists, Tejinder is well known for developing new technologies within CMS that enabled it to prove the existence of a field, whose quantum is the Higgs boson, and hence the mechanism that explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, and ultimately why our universe has substance. To acknowledge his extraordinary contribution to science he was awarded a knighthood, which was bestowed by the Queen herself.
Angelina Jolie, the UNHCR Special Envoy, was also among the recipients in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list of 2014, becoming an honorary Dame.
I asked Vatsala how she sees her life now that she is titled Lady Virdee. “Nothing has really changed. Life after UNHCR carries on as normal,” she says, “I’m delighted for my husband who risked so much professionally to stick with a project he firmly believes in. To achieve success and then get the recognition for it is a bonus. We met the Queen and that was a fantastic moment – one we’ll never forget!“
During her retirement, Vatsala has always stayed connected to UNHCR and helps the Staff Council whenever she can. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Vatsala for this interview and extend sincere congratulations to Professor Sir Tejinder and UNHCR’s own Lady Virdee! By Peggy Brown