OBITUARY
By SANJEEV CHOPRA
Last month I sent a what’s app message to Bibek Debroy inviting him to deliver the keynote address at the Chennai edition of VoW on 13/14 December, and I was a bit concerned for his reply was not as prompt as usual. A few days later, he wrote to me saying that he may not be able to travel outside of Delhi for medical reasons. So one knew that he was unwell, but the hope and expectation was that he will overcome. And therefore it was with a sense of great shock that I received the (now viral) forward of his own obituary that he penned for the Indian Express, where he published his columns regularly. Even as it was reflective of life and death and the ‘in-between’, it was both realistic and platonic. This was also the first instance of having read an online version of an obituary, before it appeared in print. Is this a reflection of the times to come?
I first met Bibek Debroy professionally when he was at the PHDCCI, and later at the National Commission for Manufacturing Competitiveness. I was then Secretary Industries in the newly carved out state of Uttarakhand (then Uttaranchal), and my team at SIDCUL was in an overdrive to attract industry to the state on the strength of the Concessional Industrial Package (CIP) which gave incentives to new units being established in the hill states. He drew my attention to the fact that this strategy was good in the short run – but not good enough for the long term. Debroy said that only sustainable way to promote industry was by creating an entire ecosystem – not just for manufacturing, but also research, infrastructure, training, apprenticeship and educational institutions. What started out as conversations on industry would often veer to his translations of the epics, and I was totally mesmerized by his grasp – not just of the Sanskrit Slokas of our epics, but also about the here and now issues – whether these related to writing instruments, or weights and measures or, what he referred to as the terminal decline of the educational institutions and industrial establishments of West Bengal.
Our chance meetings at airport lounges and the Kolkata New Delhi flights (when I was back in my cadre) at the time when he was writing the Manmatha Nath Dutt book gave me a chance to engage with him. He asked me if I had come across any references to Dutt in the Asiatic Society/National Library, institutions I would often visit during my relaxed term as the Director General of the ATI (now Netaji Subhas Bose Administrative Training Institute). It was on one of these flights that I requested him to deliver the keynote address at the second edition of Valley of Words (2018) on ‘Eternal Learnings from our Scriptures’. This was indeed one of the most erudite lectures at VoW. He touched upon the Shanti Parva of Mahabharat as well as the exposition of Ashtavakra in his keynote address. He spoke for a few minutes in Sanskrit: the point he made was that while he was glad that Uttarakhand was the first state in the country to make it the ‘second language of the state’, he lamented the fact that not much effort had been made by the successive governments (of both Congress and the BJP) to issue simultaneous gazette notifications in the language. He pointed out that just about a fraction of the total corpus available in Sanskrit (as also Pali and Prakrit) had been retrieved and awaiting translation. Much more was still locked up in manuscripts, and a substantial amount had been destroyed in the medieval period. But much more needed to be written, and that was possible only if people read and critiqued in Sanskrit. Latin was dead, because it was no longer in use. Sanskrit had an advantage for it was still being used in scripture and in prayer (unlike Latin).
I must also mention that our better halves (Rashmi and Suparna Debroy) knew each other well, and they would often rag us that one keynote at VoW was not enough. So we were looking forward to meeting them both at Chennai, but destiny had other plans. As he wrote in his Requiem , like many others, we too will observe a minute’s silence for him at the signature event of VoW at Dehradun and at the Chennai edition and almost every newspaper and magazine will carry out his obits and republish some of his seminal texts, but how long will this remembrance last? All I can say is that unlike monuments, manuscripts and texts have a longer shelf life, and so whenever there will be a discussion on the resurrection of Sanskrit texts, he will be remembered. Before closing here is an appeal – his last wish of being awarded a Padma Vibhushan – albeit posthumously, maybe accepted by the government. This will, indeed, be a fitting tribute to a towering public intellectual of our times.
Sanjeev Chopra (born 3 March, 1961) is a retired IAS officer of the 1985 batch, from Kapurthala, Punjab. He is a resident of Dehradun. He is a former Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and has written a book, “We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries”, published in 2022. He is now the patron and honorary consultant to a literary festival, the Valley of Words International Literary Festival, held annually in Dehradun. Chopra has held the Hubert H Humphrey Fellowship (Cornell), the Robert S McNamara Fellowship (World Bank) and positions at Royal Asiatic Society, London, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (Harvard).
