DAYA DELIGHTED IN PUZZLES
Nitya Ramakrishnan
I have seldom met anyone quite as delightful as Daya. I doubt too, whether there is anyone so genuinely interested in things beyond oneself, as he.
Hardy said of Ramanujan that every positive integer was his personal friend. For Daya, every idea was a personal absorption, every just cause a personal crusade and any friend’s endeavour, a matter of personal pride.
A man capable of infinite wonder, his eyes said it all. Riveted in concentration at this moment and twinkling at the next, there was not an ounce of artifice in him. His mind raced, and its brilliance took one’s breath away. He continued to ask the most fundamental of all questions — why? And his ‘whys’ applied to a miscellany of things– burning political issues, why someone was in jail, why someone was not in jail, why someone chose a certain time to go out, why someone wore a given kind of slippers… I doubt whether his avidity to grasp the first causes ever abated. One could laugh at him and with him, a rare privilege indeed.
In the platitutinous, self righteous and generally boring world of the activist he was a breath of fresh air. In the arrogant and loquacious world of the intellectual he was simple and lucid.
Daya delighted in puzzles and was uncommon in delighting not in the solutions but in the elegance of their simplicity. The charm of his own originality was, chiefly, that he never laboured to attempt it.
A world without Daya, doesn’t bear thinking. Shree, he stood alone.
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