[This submission is a tribute piece (a prose poem in Bengali) for a close friend from college, who was an uncompromising progressive who stood for, and sometimes wrote about human rights. I first post a commentary I wrote regarding his recent passing on Facebook, followed by the tribute poem in Bengali]
One of my close friends, a fellow-graduate from IIT-Kharagpur (1979)- a passionate idealist with intense pro-justice, pro-human rights views- Tapas Ray, just left our living world this past week.
It was Tapas who discovered me, exactly 25 years after our KGP years, via email, in 2004. From thence, it became a steady intellectual relationship- mainly about humanitarian matters- from India to the US, from Latin America to Palestine. I learned he had left Engineering to pursue Journalism. I understood he wrote columns for the Statesman, and had also studied (or it may have been his daughter) at Ohio University, Athens- not far from my own city of residence, Dayton.
There were many ideas of political thought whereupon we were convergent. On rare occasions where our views diverged, I was always deeply touched how eagerly he always came back in a rush to restore our exchanges, with friendship being the bottom line.
Post-2004, I met Tapas only maybe twice- in Kolkata. The credit for our meetings goes 100% to my near-lifetime friend, Indrajit, who brought several of us together (around 2019 or thereabouts). One time, we met in Tapas' Salt Lake home, with several KGP batchmates in attendance (Alakananda Rao, Kallol Palit, Tarun Debnath - among others).
But our wavelengths interacted mostly in the arena of ideas. He was a true rebel; I never would know any of this from our technology-intense KGP years. But I have been consistently enriched by his original, uncompromising viewpoints. I deeply empathized with the loneliness in his personal life- this is often the fate of a thinker, tragic as it is (Britta Ohm- I am taking the liberty of including your name here, noting the convergent exchanges between Tapas and you, including even his travels around the Ganges).
I have just written a Bengali narrative poem remembering Tapas; I will likely read this at his online memorial on Feb 21st.
Posted below is the narrative poem in Bengali written in remembrance for Tapas.
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