AnthoBLOGy

Subscribe to Site Feed
RSS Feed for AnthoBLOGy

 

Vikas Kamat
 Vikas Kamat is a programmer- entrepreneur living in Atlanta. This blog is a complex mix of Indian culture, life in southern USA, computer sciences, and sports. Opinions are his own.
 About - Bio - Contact


Friend Me on Facebook

 

Best of AnthoBLOGy

Unripe Revolution
Rooster's Dharma
Don't Know Jack
No Love for Condi
Blogger's Block
Father of the Bride
TinTin's Diary - I
TinTin's Diary II
Hate Bollywood
Child Labor
M.F.Husain Guilty
Marathi & Konkani
Artist's Daughter
India's First IT Guru

 

Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat

Mourning the Passing of Baba Durable Link to this BLOG
Obituary

My maternal grandfather, Ganesh V. Burde passed away today in Bangalore. He was 97.

Portrait of Ganesh V. Burde
Ganesh V. Burde
1906 - 2002
Baba, as we affectionately called him, was a great influence on me as he was on my mother. He taught me English and tried very hard to cultivate reading habit in me. I attribute my grammar and sentence construction skills only to him, and only due to his efforts that I was able to compete with city bred, English-medium-educated students although I studied in an Indian language school till I was 15.

Baba had many other great qualities, one of which was his health. He didn't have any ailments (no arthritis, no blood pressure, no cancer, no heart ailment), and died purely due to old age. He was the most extraordinary scholar of Hindu scriptures I know and was a keen student of the Bhagawad-Gita, the Upanishads, the Sanskrit language, and of learning in general. At the age of 75 he took up learning a new language, Bengali -- He knew a total of nine languages including Urdu.

Baba is the only Hindu man I know who has read the Koran. He was well versed with the Bible as well, but led a very rational life sans rituals. During the India Freedom Movement, he sheltered the freedom fighters, although he himself was employed by the British Government. Since he could not get involved with the Indian National Congress, he had started a branch of the Arya Samaj to banish evil practices from the Hindu society. He'd attended Ambedkar's convention in Nasik to reform Indian society of the caste discrimination. He remained an agnostic till his death.

In Baba's death, we've lost a century's worth of history and knowledge.

See Also:
• The Call of Yama

(Comments Disabled for Now. Sorry!)First Written: Saturday, July 20, 2002
Last Modified: 1/24/2003
Tags: obituary

Browse More Entries

 

About Me:

SimplyBlog

Powered  NOT by Blogger or MovabaleType or WordPress, but by SimplyBlog, a software I wrote to create blogs.
See details of implementation or download SimplyBlog.

 

 

Dictionary Look up

Kamat PICTURESearch

Kamat Glossary Search

Kamat BLOGSearch

Amazon Search

News
BBC News
Google News
Kamat News
NewsLogic
Blogs 
Amma
Indian Blogs
AutoBlog
Blog Network
@Kamat.com
What's New
What's Old
Frequent Visits
Dave Winer
Birmingham Local
Facebook
Atlanta Tennis

 

This is how I surf the web. Turns out creating your own start page beats all portals, back-flipping, personalized corporate pages, and book-marking tools.
Kamat's Potpourri Vikas KamatBlog

© 1996-2022 Kamat's Potpourri. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without prior permission. Standard disclaimers apply

Merchandise and Link Suggestions

Top of Page