Remembering Dr Manesh L Shrikant, the Institution

It is Dr Shrikant's first death anniversary tomorrow. I would like to pay my respects ,to him. I have been wary, given a train of eulogies and obituaries that I have penned over the past year, a prospect that I do not enjoy. I have been uneasy about a note that Dr Shrikant had sent me a few weeks before he died, wanting to discuss it before converting it into an article. Unfortunately we never met after that. It was at first glance undecipherable  (even banal) and people close to the dean to whom it was sent were also unable to make much sense out of it (I presume, as none replied). This is an attempt to incorporate the ideas therein, to weave it into this piece that argues that Dr Shrikant imagined the ideal of Vedanta at the heart of SPJIMR. The original  note stands appended to this article at the end. Fortunately I will not receive an early morning call from him asking me for my first draft, first thing at 8.00 am, hoping bleary eyed that he minimises his edits!The presumptions and errors in this article if any, would be entirely mine.

It was Friday 16^th October 2015, and the tithi, the third of the waxing half of the lunar month Ashwin, with Vishakha as the presiding nakshatra that Dr Manesh L Shrikant, our teacher cast off his mortal coil to be at one with all that exists, liberated from earthly fetters, in the Vedantic sense of his cosmology. It is his first death anniversary and in the traditional sense of shraddh (or barsi) we pay our respects unto him. I hesitate to pen any eulogy or mournfully reminiscence dirge like, notwithstanding the dark shadows that seem to haunt me this year. We thank him for the fruits of his labour that has given us our varied returns of personal fulfilment and economic wellbeing, especially from being part of an institution that has secured us not just a career but helped us possibly think better. I pray that his work which is his flesh embodied in the SP Jain Institute in the quaintly Christian sense be blessed with the success it deserves.