Profound philosopher in all travails and joys of life
Iknew little of the Deepak the world knew: renowned right-wing economist; eccentric defender of Empire; impassioned advocate of The Hindu Equilibrium; author of 16 best-selling academic works, many that were as easy reading as novels.
We disagreed about almost everything and many arguments would end as shouting matches. But, despite our differences, he remained through at least 65 of his 80 years one of my closest friends, a deeply empathetic confidant, a mentor on everything “civilised”, something of a bon vivant, and a wise guide and profound philosopher in all the travails and joys of life and living. Above all, a person who laughed at all my jokes, and could converse with verve, good humour, and knowledge on everything from politics to literature to art, poetry, aesthetics and Wittgenstein’s “logical positivism”.
He was perhaps the most generous person I have known, not just in money (to which I hardly had any recourse), but in sharing his vast store of knowledge, picked up from an uncanny speed and spread in reading.
His floor was always littered with books ranging from technical economic treatises to the latest in fiction. I asked him once whether he had actually read everything on his bulging shelves and, in a quite off-hand and casual way, he nodded his head in affirmation. More even than his friends, surely his brimming library will miss him.
We first crossed swords on the debating floor at school. Partly because he was older than me, but mainly because he was so much better informed. I almost always lost and it became something of an obsession for me to get the better of him at least once.
I tried then to get closer to him but did not succeed because, deep down, he was essentially a very shy person quite at odds with the privilege of brawn that dominated the school ethos. He, like me, was hopeless at sports and games but shone, unlike me, in the classroom effortlessly, standing first in every exam he took.
Our friendship took root when we found ourselves in the same wing of the Allnutt South residence at St. Stephen’s.
I neglected my class-work since I found I learned so much more from friends and slightly elder peers, Deepak foremost among them. I particularly remember arguing with him the difference between “culture” and “civilisation” all through the night until dawn broke over the “dreaming spires”. His sophistication in both culture and civilisation is what I most admired in him. Like the villagers in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem of The Village Schoolmaster, I too in “wonder grew/that one small head could carry all he knew”.
Astonishingly, he came up with only a modest second class in his BA Hons, but still did well enough to be admitted to Jesus College, Oxford. I went up a year later and continued my education under him — not academic, but in culture and civilisation.
In London, we went together to the theatre — notably Albert Finney in Luther — and to the cinema — La Dolce Vita and L’avventura — neither of which I fully understood and left it to Deepak to acquaint me through long letters to fill me out on the minutiae of what we had seen.
The following year, we appeared together for the civil services exam at India House. We both made it to the Foreign Service and after many a joust with the Intelligence Bureau, who had labelled me a “security risk” (largely because I did not subscribe to Deepak’s economics or politics!), I got to share a room with him at the Academy.
Deepak left the Foreign Service to pursue a brilliant alternative career in academia. Our meetings became less frequent as we usually found ourselves in different continents. He married a wonderful girl from Brooklyn called Barbara, whose extrovert zest for life complemented and completed Deepak’s more reserved demeanour that many quite wrongly took for arrogance.
He became a cancer victim a few years ago but, coldly rational to the end, refused to subject himself to the hazards of invasive treatment. Then, tragically, he was caught in London just as the coronavirus pandemic broke. It got to him, and he breathed his last on April 30. The light has gone out of my life.