This Article First Appeared In The Scroll On Oct 08, 2023
My first editor, Rukun Advani, once described himself as “a composite hybrid of the Indian and the Anglo-European,” who sought to reconcile “within himself those varying cultural influences which chauvinistic nationalists could only see as contradictions”. This self-characterisation I might avow as my own. One mark of the Anglo-European in me is that unlike members of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, I had not just uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents, but also a godfather. It is this person I wish to write about here because the centenary of his birth falls this week and because being my godfather was the very least of his distinctions.