I never thought I would write about my friend Saddy, Professor Sunil Kumar of Delhi University, in the past tense.
A big, loose-limbed athlete, who played basketball not only for his college, but for years afterwards with kids much younger than him in the playgrounds of Saket in South Delhi, I always thought he would outlive me and most of our contemporaries by many years. But now we get the shocking news that he has passed away in the early morning of January 17 in New Delhi, just a few months short of retiring from his position as Professor of History at the University of Delhi at the age of 65.
In the past months, he had been complaining periodically of feeling unwell, a situation compounded by his having to take on the incredibly stressful and thankless job of chairing the Department of History in the last some years. That was always going to be a hard task, but it was made far worse by a combination of the ambient political circumstances, and the very difficult…