If you did not know Keshav N. Desiraju but only heard him speak or read what he wrote, you would say, “What a fine mind, with words to match.” You would not know that he was the youngest grandson of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, independent India’s second President. The hugely well-read and startlingly well-spoken member of the Indian Administrative Service had neither the need nor the desire to mention his ancestry, even as a point of incidental interest. But that he was descended from that philosopher and teacher had not a little to do with the fibre of Desiraju’s mind.
For one who so effortlessly and so successfully glided past the accident of that ancestry to have died, all on a sudden, on the very morning of his grandfather’s birth anniversary — this day — last year, seemed to have something transcendental about it. Something ‘not of this earth, earthy’. The day has been marked as Teachers’ Day, in commemoration of the great example of that profession in Madras, Mysore, Calcutta, Oxford, Benares. Only the previous evening, September 4, 2021, while speaking to me over the phone (our mode of choice for communication), Keshav told me of the simple but carefully thought-out arrangements that had been made at Girija, Radhakrishnan’s home on what used to be Edward Eliots Road in Chennai.
“A very earnest group of teachers and retired teachers comes every year on Teachers’ Day. The good souls come, offer flower petals to the bust that we place in the foyer of the house, and go round the rooms… They do so with such reverence that we realise every year what he was as a teacher and what he means to that community.”
