An ode to RG

Heard about RG’s death in Bangalore from fellow journalist M R Venkatesh. Chennai-based Telegraph correspondent, MRV, is a rare species in the media that retains relationship with me even years after my retirement. R Gopalakrishnan of The Hindu was a common friend and colleague, known for accurate notes-taking at press conferences and getting the 'quotes' right. I know this, for I have relied on RG’s notes when I had doubts about my own speed-writing at press conferences we have attended together.

Reproduced here is the e-mail MRV sent me on RG:
Could Karma’s Taal
And ‘Rebirth’s dance
Turn a little comical
When similar mortal frames
Are seen on a Contemporary screen?
That’s how Language
Drew a picture
On the mind’s slate,
When years back
I first met ‘RG’,
As the self-effacing soul
R.Gopalakrishnan was fondly known
To friends even outside ‘The Hindu’,
Oh! He seems
Bengal’s great genial actor
Utpal Dutt
Reborn on a same Time scale!
Almost Everything about ‘RG’,
The gait and the cigarette,
Spectacle drooping and studied,
Deep Intellectual anger
Soaring like summer-time mercury,
To the rollicking laughter
That blazoned a Child-like innocence,
Looked an Utpal Dutt reprint!
But soon I discovered,
All these were only the
Bodily chariot
Reined in by a deeper Soul
That ‘RG’ came to signify,
Economics, Marxism
Sociology et all,
Were the rims of a
Rollercoaster ride
With a journalistic leg
On Each side,
His voice of Peace
That climaxed against
Pokhran-Two,
His abiding faith
That the down and under
See Secularism as Naturalism
Came as enduring light
Before his Soul flew away!

- M R Venkatesh/Chennai/ June 5, 2007 (After Hearing
of RG’s Death at Bangalore)

Cross-filed in Desicritics
- and Zine5