JOIN USJust like receiving telegrams in the old days at odd hours made your heart skip a beat, the calls on mobile phones late in the night or early in the morning sounds ominous. And so it happened a couple of days ago, when the early morning caller Tara Natarajan gave the sad news of her uncle M R Chandrashekara passing away.
I suddenly heard my mother’s voice, who had passed away three months ago, asking me to go and pay my respect to this renowned food scientist from CFTRI. After all it was Chandrashekara and his wife Indiramma who had welcomed my mother to the outhouse in Lakshmipuram when she, as a 20-year old came to join my father. Both my parents belonged to different religions. But this did not bother that wonderful couple at all in those days in the mid 1950s.
As we grew up in that sprawling bungalow, little did we realise that he was one of the greatest scientists this country has produced. He was the project leader for infant foods based on buffalo milk which resulted in establishing the production of the first national infant food ‘Amul baby food’, which went on to revolutionalise the country’s dairy food products.
We used to play all kinds of games, including cricket, and there was not a day he or his wife would complain about our pranks of which especially my little brother was known for.
Chandrashekara quietly would go about his work and on Saturdays and Sundays we would see him tinkering his old Austin of England car going under the hood. Coming from a very distinguished family, he had kept it a secret from many of us that he was one of the grandsons of the first vice chancellor of Mysore University, H V Nanjundaiah. Incidentally, he was born in the year the university came into existence.
How cosmopolitan in outlook he was, was shared by one of his relatives at his funeral. During the partition Chandrashekara was living in Delhi. A Muslim was being chased by a fanatic crowd and seeing the predicament of the boy, the diminutive Chandrashekara pulled him inside the house and gave him shelter. When the mob came to the house and demanded to give the boy to them, he quietly but firmly told them that he had not hid anybody in the house, thus saving the boy’s life.
His interests were varied and this I came to know when he gave me a book titled ‘Choice and other Stories,’ which was also reviewed in this newspaper. I always thought that he was a scientist doing serious research work, but after reading the book, I was surprised to see what a fertile imagination he had.
Living to the ripe age of 94, he was active till his last breath, working on developing computer software for nutrition studies. As somebody rightly remarked, an era had ended with his passing away.