S Subramanian A LITTLE over three years ago, shortly after the passing of Malcolm Adiseshiah, Guhan and I found ourselves recalling him and trying to give expression to what he had meant to us and our institute. This was in the aftermath of a whole deluge of fulsome oratorical tributes that had been paid to him by numerous relatives, friends, colleagues and public luminaries. The cumulative effect was both exhausting and cloying; and the sheer unbelievableness of the picture of perfect and unblemished greatness we had been exposed to was also beginning to desensitise us to our loss. Guhan was both fond and admiring of Malcolm Adiseshiah, For this reason, he found the panegyrics which all of us had been subjected to annoying, distasteful and also constitutive of what he saw as a gross injustice to the man and his humanness. When he was vexed (as also, of course, at all other times), Guhan was given to being wicked; and in line with a common practice of his, he had a quote to hand in order to deal with the situation. On this occasion, he recalled what Harold Laski (if I have got it right) once said: namely, that the injunction nil nisi bonum was all too often interpreted to imply nil nisi bunkum.
