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.

My Friend Sriram

A Srinivas Rao    26^th September 2016

He would have been 54 today and would have been as cheerful as always, for neither misfortune nor tempest would dampen his optimism. “A person must have a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge” remarked Nietzsche and Sriram was doubly so. Yet rather than listening to the gurgling brook of his voice over the phone, I am met with silence, four months since his untimely demise. I haven’t deleted his number though, not that he might call, but that I might wake up. I miss his infectious and disarming smile that would put even Medusa lower her guard. This is a reminiscence of a person who was close to me and was my best friend. I have wondered what if any we had in common, I believe it wasn’t much, yet we liked each other’s company and it has intrigued me as much as onlookers. I can’t describe him in eulogistic terms; though he had much that was worthy of applause. Probably what fascinated me were the contradictions which we ever so unconsciously gloss over as we make much of a false sense of consistency as a virtue.  Most of us if not all are inconsistent creatures, inconstant and shifting in our motivations, fears, desires and aspirations, it is ‘human all too human’. Consistency I think is a narrative strategy of the mind that possibly highlights, represses, and interpolates in retrospect, creating a convenient fiction of the self. At a distance from one’s own self one might see the range of protean characteristics that really animates each of us; though we crave for that indubitable, mysterious, unchanging essence which might well be a figment of imagination.

The Foundation Stone

The banyan tree noticed him from afar as he walked towards the temple in the measured pace and calm of a man in his seventies, surprisingly slim and little else but the grey of his hair would even give away his age. The old banyan in the centre of the Bhavan’s campus, standing in the corner acknowledged his familiar presence with a sway of her crown, home to several egrets, herons and water birds that fished in the Bhavan’s pond in that campus, that seemed less green with every passing year. She counted her years not by the locks of hair she let down to support her age but by the number of times women wrapped its girth with a circumambulating thread around on the day of Vata Savitri on Jyeshtha Poornima each year praying for their husband’s longevity. The young girls returning to Pallonji Sadan late evenings from college, imagined the tree to be a haunt of ghosts. The campus then was greener and the banyan hosted many more species of birds than its now manicured look and hodgepodge architecture; held many more secrets in the folds of her green shrubbery of love, learning and laughter.