Dilip Veeraraghavan, receptacle of adolescent socio-political angst, commentator extraordinaire on all aspects of Indian philosophy and culture, ardent Gandhian and inspirational teacher, is
no more.
Where his eyes lacked light, his intellect scintillated. The scarce occasions when we would speak of economics, I, in my youthful brashness, would keep trying to prove the infeasibility of Gandhian libertarianism. One day, I told him Gandhian living would turn me into him. He said, `And that thought scares you?' I was cruel; I said, `Yes, it scares me.' He smiled, but I knew it hurt him. Three years on, when now I understand the wisdom of his ways, he has passed into silence.
There was erudition, there was grace, there was simplicity in his demeanor; humor twinkled ceaselessly in eyes fixed always upon infinity. His living example inspired lifestyles of voluntary simplicity in so many who knew him.
As with all lives well-lived, this is an occasion not for sadness, but for silence and remembrance. In memory of one of the gentlest and kindest of men, I embrace both tonight.
Rest in peace, Dilip.
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UPDATE: 10 Feb 2009
The aforegoing eulogy for Dilip was formulaic, impersonal and brief for a reason. It was written not so much as a personal assertion of loss as a message of solidarity with the many who I knew would have been deeply saddened by his passing. It was difficult for me, when I heard the news, to comprehend and process it in an authentic manner instantaneously (I am excruciatingly slow at processing emotion). Now that I have had time to think, I feel that it could be of some value for me to place on record my understanding and appreciation of a true saint among men.
To begin with, I must confess that since I have a very detached perspective towards mortality, Dilip's passing did not occasion much grief for me. If anything, it merely served as a reminder to me of the errant days of my youth when I knew him. It seems hard to believe it was a scarce three years ago that I was frequently in his office, talking Carnatic and western classical music with him. At the risk of sounding cold and heartless, I must further confess that Dilip was interesting to me at the time primarily as a fascinating cognitive science case study. While he was indeed a storehouse of knowledge about Indian history and culture, and was to a large degree instrumental in shaping my appreciation of Tamil Brahmin society, I did not set exceptional store by his erudition.
No, what fascinated me was the quality of his opinions, fluid and unconventional narratives that melted into each other with a strange absence of causal connections. I formulated, in those days, the naive hypothesis that his brain, blessed with exceptional memory and curiosity, was not infected by the need to make the sharp distinctions and categorizations that those with normal eyesight are doomed to make. The darkness that shrouded his existence perpetually had the effect of rendering his inferential mechanism about the world he knew strangely singular and untouched by teleological/theological thinking. The reluctance to ascribe causality to correlative events has become to me, over the years, one of the greatest marks of a deep intellect. Looking back, I find that Dilip possessed this quality to a degree unmatched by almost every other contemporary thinker I have come across (save perhaps Stephen Jay Gould). At the time, I attributed this quality of his to his blindness and did not appreciate its rarity as I do now. (
En passant, the careful observer will note in my immature hypothesizing that precise element of teleological thinking that I now have sensitized myself against, and that Dilip was careful to always qualify.) He would mention correlations, and his vast store of knowledge would allow him to find not one but many correlates for almost any socio-cultural datum. He would leave the process of hypothesis formation and likelihood generation to eager theorists like me. I would say something like, `Ah! So you're saying X caused Y caused Z, and resulted in a counter-move A, which in turn led to B'. He would smile and say, `Perhaps'.
At the same time, I conjectured that his love of classical music was an epi-phenomenal proxy for his logical and inferential mechanisms. Since he was consigned to having students read letters and books out to him, the task of perceiving the written word could not be attended with the solitude for cogitation so dear to most intellectuals. I felt that his mind would naturally find deeper satisfaction in the mental stimulation in solitude that music could provide him. At times, I would visit him to find him listening to some Carnatic performance or the other, and would feel envious of his ability to not have to worry about visual stimulation, to perpetually inhabit a world of harmony, rhythm and localized meaning.
At other times, I would pity his dependence on others for the fulfillment of basic daily activities. I would pity not only this dependence, but also his knowledge of the sympathetic figure he must have known he was in the eyes of all who beheld him. It is only now, with distance in time and space allowing less judgmental understanding, that the grace and humor with which he embraced his condition and attempted to set all who interacted with him at ease stand out as marks of a phenomenally self-aware and sensitive intellect.
By rights, Dilip should not really have been on my mind any longer, since my association with him was never really emotional or inspirational, as it has been for others. I find, however, that in the years since I knew him, my appreciation for his character, wisdom and humanity has grown tremendously. As the ultimate futility of reductionist theorizing has impressed itself upon me in recent times, I have often found myself listing people I have known or know of whose intellects have managed to elude this treacherous intellectual trap of conflating representations with understanding and correlation with causality. Einstein and Schrodinger are on that list, as are Gauss and Grothendieck. Tagore is there (though he was hopelessly muddled most of the time, his moments of clarity were blinding and momentous) , and Aurobindo and the unknown authors of the more reasonable of the Upanishads. Dilip is on that list too - my strongest personal influence in favor of avoiding the convenience of causal narratives lest they cloud one's understanding. Thus, unconsciously, Dilip has had much to do with my intellectual evolution from passionate advocacy of possible hypotheses to silent contemplation of the representational structures that convey evidence for or against various hypotheses to my awareness.
And to me, this points to his greatest quality. Above all, he was an honest man. Honest with others, and with himself. His simplicity was the simplicity of a man who had nothing to hide. His originality and wisdom were the consequences of a sharp intellect that owed no epistemological fealty to any but itself. Where others might have chafed at the lack of privacy that blindness enforces, his radiant acceptance of his condition transformed it into a source of spiritual enrichment and intellectual clarity for both himself and those he knew. His humility and compassion arose through a fearlessness that, in turn, arises from a mind at peace with itself and the world.
In a cloud of ego-centric curiosity, I would sit and spin chains of reductionist thought while the Socrates of IIT Madras would sit across from me nodding his head to the faint sound of the veena and to the melody of the synthesis of his own thought with what I would just have told him. I do not regret my past intellectual prejudice, one has to crawl before one learns to walk. Even in his passing then, Dilip has left me a priceless gift, the gift of perspective into my own weaknesses - both past and present.
He has passed into the greater silence - he who could see more than those with eyes, he who could convey more through silence than many with high-flown words, he who was at the same time child-like in innocence and ageless in wisdom, he who changed the lives of all he knew simply by virtue of being a human being.
Dilip Veeraraghavan, I am glad I knew you.
