Khushwant Singh may have decided to no longer write his weekly columns, but the “dirty old man of Indian journalism” has not said he will stop writing for good.

He has shot off a letter to the editor of The Hindu, which the family-owned paper, given its recent and continuing turmoil, has gladly boxed on the editorial page today:

“I go over a dozen morning papers every day.

“The only one I read from cover to cover including readers’ letters is The Hindu. I find its news coverage reliable, authentic and comprehensive.

“I cannot say that about any other daily, Indian or foreign.

“It is a pleasure going through its columns: they inform, teach and amuse. I even wrestle with its crossword puzzle every day. You, Mr. Editor, and your staff deserve praise for giving India the most readable daily in the world. Congratulations.”

Khushwant Singh, New Delhi

Also read: Top six dailies devote only 2% to rural issues

Shekhar Gupta: ‘Stimulating, intelligent, empowering’

The four great wars of N. Ram on Hindu soil

N. Murali: The Hindu is run like a banana republic

Filed under: Issues and Ideas, Newspapers, People Tagged: Churumuri, Khushwant Singh, N. Ram, Sans Serif, The Hindu

Seventy years after he started needling readers and 42 years after he wrote his first column, the “sardar in the lightbulb” will shine no more. Khushwant Singh, the dirty old man of Indian journalism, says he is now too old (and maybe just a little less dirty) to dish out malice towards one and all any more.

“I’m 97, I may die any day now… I’ll miss the money, and the people fawning over me to write about them in my columns,” Singh says in on his self-imposed exile into silence, in Outlook* magaqzine.

Singh began his career as a journalist in1940, writing for The Tribune, contributing book reviews and profiles under the byline ‘KS’. His first regular column appeared in the planning commission journal Yojana.

Editor’s Page, in the Illustrated Weekly of India under his now famous sardar-in-lightbulb logo, first appeared in 1969. The column migrated with Singh to National Herald, and in 1980, to the Hindustan Times. The now-defunct Sunday Observer was the first to buy the rights to it in 1981.

After he left Hindustan Times in the mid-’80s, Khushwant began syndicating his column. His two columns appeared every week without fail for the last 30 years in a dozen national dailies and translated into 17 languages.

* Disclosures apply

Also read: Khushwant Singh on his last day at Weekly

Why Khushwant Singh fell out with Arun Shourie

Barkha Dutt tarred by pure malice: Khushwant

Khushwant Singh stands up for Barkha Dutt, again

Filed under: Magazines, Newspapers, People Tagged: Churumuri, Hindustan Times, Khushwant Singh, National Herald, Outlook, Sans Serif, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Sunday Observer, The Tribune

DEV S. SUKUMAR writes from Bangalore: Right through our conversation, I thought those were slices of raw meat there, placed in water on a plate, all bloody and flies hovering around it.

Later I realized it was a beetroot. It’s hard to make things out in the dim light of a single bulb.

Rafiq’s been eating raw beetroot.

The man I spent so much time with, partly wishing I had inherited so many of his remarkable skills, is sinking.

It’s a horrible time to be him, a free spirit in a body becoming fast dysfunctional, memories playing tricks, abandoned by his wife, robbed of his fond possessions, his works of art, and having to depend on the charity of neighbours for food.

The last time I saw him, at the south zone climbing championships, I had a hint of the trouble he was in. His voice was slurring badly, and he was moving with difficulty. He was invited to the dais along with his contemporaries – three or four senior climbers – and when he spoke he broke down, briefly, as he wished them luck.

I had never seen Rafiq breaking down.

Rafiq was a character. I’d heard something of him, that he kept a snake at home and that he was a maverick artist, but the first sight of him startled me. The first thought in my head was that his Maker had put random things together and constructed him.

His bulging eyes were set in the middle of his face; his hair and French beard, all spiky, seemed nailed for good on a face that was leathery and weather-beaten. Tufts of hair exploded from his ears, and that on a head with no neck.

He had a generous midriff, cloaked in a jacket in which he had all sorts of things. And he rode a Bajaj Bobby – a sort of daschund among bikes — that had become extinct in the 1980s. The overall effect was of watching some character right out of a comic book.

But what a character! Rafiq was the most carefree person in the world. You could drop by at his place any time of the day or night, and he would talk – of animals, birds, insects, bike engines, snakes, mountains, grasslands, hills, boulders, photography.

He was your outdoors man.

He knew every insect, every plant, every bird and every reptile – their Latin names, the calls they made, the games they played. He could distinguish male bird calls from the female, tell you whether it was a mating call or something else.

Where and how he could store all this information, I do not know, for Rafiq was not an academic. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even been to college. He had picked up everything himself.

Similarly, his talents at art were self-developed and just as remarkable. He would do murals from dealwood, which was then considered just packing material. He told me he’d learnt it after seeing a documentary on TV.

He would take a plank of wood, study its grains, and see something in his mind’s eye: Cleopatra; a herd of horses; various forms of (his favourite) Ganesha.

He was just as good an artist of junk. He would go to the scrap yards, pick up some piece of metal – a discarded engine, a handlebar, a shock absorber – and weld it all into some magical piece: an armoured knight; a praying mantis.

He had made an owl out of dealwood. It was something between a mural and a sculpture, an owl on top of a pier.

“You know, that’s because owls have no more place in the cities,” he told me. “This is an owl at the edge of its existence. The pier is its last place on land… our cities have made it impossible for birds like this to survive.”

He had made the mural after the Surat plague, which he blamed on the extinction of natural predators of plague-carrying rats.

I’ve spent days and nights with him, listening to his tales of the Himalayas; of rock climbing in Ramnagaram or Savandurga or Turhalli; of the names they gave those rocks based on the difficulty of climbing; of how he once had a monkey named Jango and what a hit it was with the girls; of how snakes belong to the wild, they can never be domesticated.

(He once told me of the time he tried to carry a cobra in a train; he had put it in a bag, and soon the thing starting wriggling and scared the wits out of everybody.)

We used to sit in his office next to his house. He called it his machan – which it was, because you had to climb into it through a narrow ladder, and he kept all sorts of things there, including his sand boa.

With Rafiq, all of the outdoors came alive; it was not just facts or interesting information – it was lived knowledge, something that came with deep love and personal experience.

What made it all so special was that he was like a sage of the wild, always cheerful and ready with another wilderness story. Somehow, with such a man, you’d never expect anything to go wrong.

Of course, there was his fondness for pan masala.

I remember one conversation vividly. I knew a guy named Riki Krishnan who was an expert on bats, so one day I took Rafiq to meet Riki and they hit it off well. Apart from their common interests in other living things, they shared a love for pan masala. I’d heard horrible stories about it, so I asked them if they shouldn’t be dumping the habit.

Riki grinned, and said, yeah, I know all about it, how it causes fibrosis, how it screws your mouth and taste buds so you can’t eat anything else, but you know, once you’re hooked on to it, you can’t do without it.

And Rafiq nodded.

Riki’s dead. He was diagnosed with cancer.

Rafiq’s barely able to speak.

He says it’s due to a stroke he had after his studio, with all its equipment, was burgled. But he’s barely able to open his mouth, and his words are slurring, so I guess the pan masala must have something to do with it.

I think the burglary of his studio broke him. He had some expensive equipment there, and once that was gone, there was nothing to fall back upon. He told me he’d lost all his prized photo slides as well.

He had some excellent collections – of insects, birds, reptiles – that he would show school children during camps. Rafiq was so good with kids. He was like a Santa Claus of the wild, and he had a fund of stories and a booming laugh that made them all love him.

Once he told me, long ago, that he had had such an adventurous life, he wouldn’t mind it if he “kicked the bucket right now”. But right now he’s a shadow of that brave old self.

His words are slurring, he doesn’t have food to eat, and he weeps at every other thought.

“Life’s a funny thing,” he told me today. After a while he asked me: “What’s your name again?”

(Sports journalist Dev S. Sukumar is the author of a Prakash Padukone biography titled Touch Play)

***

Those who wish to help Rafiq may contact him at:

No.285, 20th Main Road

Marenahalli, Off Chord Road

Vijayanagar, Bangalore 560040

Filed under: Life Etcetera, Mysore-Bangalore, People Tagged: Churumuri, Cleopatra, Dev S. Sukumar, Ganesha, Prakash Padukone, Rafiq, Sans Serif, Santa Claus

What were the Really Big Things?

Proving that user experience matters more than anything
else in computer-based consumer products. Even more: that
it matters more than everything else put together.

Building polished, world-beating products on a
foundation of open-source software.

Bringing industrial-design values to the center of a
traditionally specs-obsessed consumer-electronics universe.

Breaking the telephone companies’ stranglehold on the world of
mobile-device software.

Breaking the media companies’ stranglehold on the world of retailing
music and, well,
anything whose value can be captured in a collection of bits.

No, I’m not claiming one human single-handedly did this stuff.
But these are things that quite possibly wouldn’t have
happened at least for a while without his contribution. Nobody, least of all
Steve, claimed that anything significant in the business world is achieved by
a single person.

In that list, #2 and #4 hit my life hardest, but then I’m a geek and proud
of it. We won’t know which items loom largest in history’s rear-view for a while
yet.

I’m sad, and touched by the open-hearted sorrow flowing around my tribe.

"I think what holds us back from letting go of anger is that we don't forgive as long as we need to blame.  And we need to blame as long as we are unable to admit and feel the hurt from being injured by someone else.  And we are unable to feel the hurt underneath, because doing so makes us feel vulnerable and fearful of a second attack that we are convinced would be too much to bear."

Easier said than done but it is a start.

"That then is the dilemma the natural sciences find themselves in in my opinion, a dilemma that the social sciences have faced for centuries. In fact one can argue that the dilemma has been caused by the social sciences finally intersecting with the natural science as their integrated whole has become more and more complex and is now tackling extremely convoluted territory like the brain, the climate, the universe, human behavior, the economy, evolution and the mechanisms of drug action and disease. With this kind of complexity, scientists have been resigned to pick between two quite unsastisfactory choices; either no explanation at all, or an "explanation" based on models, internal logical consistency, "aesthetics" and elegance (case in point- string theory) and ingenious sounding armchair explanations"

Then and Now

An arresting series of 50 or so portraits of the incoming Obama administration.

Not everything is as rosy as it seems at Google

Guess which couple was covered in 1996 as part of a photography project.

From '68 agitator to staunch supporter of George W Bush's Iraq war—what explains Hitchens's political journey?

A survey of 840 miles of roads in Loudoun found that [only] 14 percent had sidewalks.

Less is more, eh?