
To die is tragic. To live till 98 is not. Baba (my grandfather) left us on the morning of 20th November. Just 20 days ago, he turned 98. He was never into birthday celebrations but lately he started enjoying them. Maybe he valued them more with time. Even on the last birthday he sounded happy that people came to wish him and gave him gifts. It'll take some time for us to get into the habit of the world without him. Because the last time the world without him was on 31st October 1927. Their great grandkids called him "Super Nana" because "Bade Nana" or even "Par-nana" didn't justify how ancient he was for them. Today when a lot of us call ourselves book lovers or book nerds, I don't think I'll ever find someone as big of a book nerd as he was. He never read to show off. He never read to be clicked or be a part of a club. He never read to pass an exam or so that he can win political arguments. He read simply because he loved it. Over the years he started shredding his book collection because he would wonder who'll read them after him? He read Literature, History, Politics, Philosophy Mathematics, Chemistry, what the heck you could even find a book on Healthy Cooking and he was neither into health nor into food. But if there's a book around that, trust him to read it. And that is why over the years of reading so much, he could produce wonderful articles and essays at the whim. You know, like how AI works. The more data you feed him, the better result it'll produce. Well, he worked like that without being medicore. In fact, he ended up writing a lot of non-fiction and fiction books, news articles, essays and even translated my Philosophy class lectures from shuddh Hindi to wonderful English. He was not Artificial though. He read, he wrote but he also lived. He was Natural Intelligence. He believed in a secular society, he believed in a formless shapeless power, he believed in his family and the huge community that he had built over the years. But what he believed the most was written words. He wrote his last book at 95. In the post Covid world, when his health kept on deteriorating, he took refuge in the world of internet. Continued in the comment
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