Girish Karnad (1938–2019)

It was sometime in the early 1960s that I met Girish Karnad for the first time. I was then in my twenty-third year, an English teacher at Karnatak College, Dharwad, having joined the college in the middle of June 1959. Girish, two years younger than me, had graduated from the same college the previous year, with a first class degree in mathematics and statistics, and was pursuing his master’s in the same subjects at the University of Bombay, while awaiting the outcome of his application for a Rhodes scholarship.

I was entirely new to Dharwad, having grown up in the old princely state of Mysore, my first 17 years in Kolar—where I went to school and did my matriculation and the first two years of college—and the next six years in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), which included four memorable years at the English Honours school in Central College and two entirely forgettable years teaching in a college which even now I think of (when I have to) as a dictation factory. Needless to say, I was very unhappy as a teacher in Bangalore and wanted to get out.