Story of a journey: Rutherford to the Large Hadron Collider and onwards

In this article, I set out arguments why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) : the machine and the experiments with it, are a watershed for particle physics. I give a historical perspective of the essential link between development of particle accelerators and that in our knowledge of the laws governing interactions among the fundamental particles, showing how this journey has reached destination LHC. I explain how the decisions for the LHC design; the energy and number of particles in the beam, were arrived at. I will end by discussing the LHC physics agenda and the time line in which the particle physicists hope to achieve it.