It may be best for me not to begin my recollections of Ram along the standard template which recommends the phrase “The first time I met......
It may be best for me not to begin my recollections of Ram along the standard template which recommends the phrase “The first time I met...” The reason is that our first meeting was inconsequential. Apparently, we met on a college badminton court forty-five years ago, in about July 1974.
Since Ram did not go on from this badminton court to become the father of Deepika Padukone, this first encounter’s location, at least, was not an augury of the direction of Ram’s future fame. I have no idea what Ram was doing near a badminton court in the mid-1970s because his interests lay in a corner of a different field, the cricket pitch. His agenda even then was anti-Hindutva, though it took a peculiar shape because it had become mixed up with his interest in cricket.
His aim in those days was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna in this life. Failing either of those two options, he seemed to have resigned himself to a third, which was to become Gundappa Vishwanath. Since I was far from passionate about cricket, for the remainder of our college years...
