Manas Ranjan Mahapatra, Puri, 12th February 2023
Gradually a time is approaching where I will find all unknown faces in the crowd. How ordinary life is becoming!
So powerful are the dreams! With so many friends and well wishers worldwide, I am sure, I will not die alone. Hoping for the best.
In the last five decades, I met many great artists (creative, performing and visual) in India and abroad. Much of that period was before the digital camera came into use. The list is so long that it may take a few pages to record.
Now my cellphone has a camera, but I don’t get a single worthy person with whom I can take a photograph.
I meet those great people whom I once met, in my dreams these days. Nowadays, I record my memories and views in Facebook for the posterity to know. A worthy person can read and understand or respond, but for others it’s just garbage!
I cannot believe that Nachiketa Bhai is no more. We had an association of over four decades when he was with the Indian Express as Bureau Chief and posted at Bhubaneswar. Incidentally, my father was a jail mate of his maternal grandfather, the great Nabakrushna Choudhury, during the Quit India Movement, 1942. Nachiketa Bhai’s early education was in Odisha.
Our last meeting was at Ahmedabad ten years ago when I was organising the Ahmedabad Book Fair with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. We constantly interacted about his new book on his paternal grandfather, the great Mahadev Desai, titled “Gandhiji’s Frontline Journalist”. We spoke over the phone as recently as a week before his untimely death on 5th February due to a fall in his house.
Nachiketa Desai was a great soul, a relentless fighter against injustice and corruption. I miss him immensely…..
