Quintessential NEWS

Sir, - Columnist after columnist tells us how Rangarajan Kumaramangalam endeared himself to the print and visual media. This is not surprising. Rangarajan was the quintessential NEWS. His wife is a Punjabi from the North, mother a Bengali from the East, grandmother a Kannadiga from the West and grandfather a Tamil from the South. No wonder he was comfortable in the ambience of the Punjabis, the Bengalis, the Kannadigas, and the Tamils. His fluency encompassed all these four languages and of course English/Hindi also.

He epitomised the multicultural and multilingual unity of India. He combined in himself the two major sects in Hinduism, polarised by self- serving politicians, viz. the Brahmin and the non- Brahmin communities. His family had represented the entire spectrum of politics from the extreme left (his aunt and uncle the Krishnans, the communists), to the left of centre (his grandfather, his father and even himself as Congressmen) and the extreme right (the BJP to which he recently moved).

He was beyond the attempts of the rabble-rousers of the communal, casteist, regional and linguistic bent to distil and segregate in discrete proportions the blood that was coursing in his veins to identify how much came down from the Brahmin and how much of the non-Brahmin strain and how much from the Punjabi, the Bengali, the Kannadiga and the Tamil pedigree. Did he owe his pragmatism and success to the cross pollination that was a welcome feature in his family for three generations?

Can you imagine this happening in the U.S. flaunted as the most progressive democracy in the world? In its three hundred and odd years of existence a Catholic contested and won the Presidency in 1960 and after a lapse of four decades a Jew is contesting for Vice-President this year, both for the first time. Would you come across a Jew, a Catholic, a Methodist, a Yankee, a Southerner, a black and a Hispanic in the same family tree? Not likely.

R. Rajaraman,

Chennai

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