JOIN USHe was the eldest son of the family. When he was five, his parents sent him away to Bangalore to be educated. He stayed with an aunt in Shankarapuram, and attended a nearby primary school. As he described in later years, he unknowingly moved in the company of giants. Every morning, he would pass by D V Gundappa’s house. The poet would peep through the jasmnine bush where he was collecting flowers for his puja, and ask him what they taught him in class. The young boy little realised he was talking to one of the greatest philosopher-poets of our times.
He had a teen aged cousin who was romantically inclined. He would give him love letters to be surreptitiously passed on to T P Kailasam’s daughter. After school, he would make his way to Chamarajpet, and wait outside the ‘White House’ where the well-known dramatist lived. At the first opportunity, he would slip the love note inside. It never occurred to him to ask why she never replied those secret missives! It was only years later that he realised he had stepped into sacred territory. High school and college passed by with more encounters — this time with literary giants.
An engineering job in All India Radio and later in the Films Division gave ample opportunities to meet celebrities of another kind. He managed the sound system for the live peformances of artists, musicians, theatre personalites.Whether it was M S Subbulakshmi, Mehli Mehta or Rosselini, he had a brush with superstars of a different kind now. At age 93, he related his interesting interaction with them with amazing accuracy.
“Why don’t you write about them?” I asked.
He did. And published them too. His piece on Zubin Mehta reached that maestro through friends and elicited a warm response that thrilled him. Although age had caught up with him and disabled him of late, he carried on with aplomb. I marvelled at his ingenuity in dealing with his infirmities. A walking stick became a style statement. A walker was turned into a multipurpose device with reading glasses, magnifier and torchlite on one side; a mobile phone and hearing devices on the other. A makeshift tray designed by himself that doubled up as a writing table in the middle. His medicines, a water bottle and even sugar candy in case glucose levels dipped completed the picture! Always dressed with meticulous care, he refused to compromise on matters big or small.
Fastidious about his surroundings, preserving and recycling everything he saw, he still wrote on post cards and spoke in chaste, grammatical language — whether it was English or Kannada. Eloquent in conversation and elegant in appearance, even his fine handwriting spoke volumes about his personality. When he died last week, I felt we had lost a small piece of a bygone era.