A Love-Story with Reflections on Life and Death

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This is not a story of a cooing and cuddling couple. It is a story of love as well as of death. R.G.K. tells it with great intensity of feeling and in his reflections on life and death he draws upon Indian and European thought. At the same time he makes a brief inquiry into the subject of love and suffering. Though A Love-Story centres on the life of two individuals it is not without significance to the human condition in general and is thus of universal interest.

This is a love story out of the ordinary mould. This is also a story of death.

I have had the privilege of intimately knowing the author, Shri R.G.K., for the past 50 years and more. I have also had the good fortune of knowing his partner-in-life, Saubhagyavati Lakshmibai from her infancy itself, much before I happened to know R.G.K.

Smt Lakshmibai's father, the gifted, irrepressible, self-confident and dynamic Shri Devaraja Iyer a.k.a. Doraiswami Anna, was a legendary youth from our village of Pushpagiri. He was the highly valued, very able, Personal Secretary to Mr Pearson, Managing Director of Messrs Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd., publishers of the high-profile daily, The Times of India, and its sister publications, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Evening News of India, etc; a well- planned and well-managed corporate organization, in which merit, character, integrity and efficiency alone counted in recruitment and promotion.

At the instance of the visionary Mr Pearson, Shri Devaraja Iyer recruited to the growing Times Group young men known to him for their character, integrity and ability. Shri Iyer in fact helped many fine young men of the agraharam of our village Pushpagiri to join the Times Group. In the 1930s, when there was an economic depression with rampant unemployment in India and the world over, Shri Devaraja Iyer was looked upon as an angelic person. Whenever he came to our village on annual leave, half the youngsters there, on the look-out for employment, would assemble at the entrance of the village to greet him. At that time, almost all the senior Indian executives of the Times organization-the circulation manager, the press superintendent of The Illustrated Weekly, the chief of the press, several seniors of the editorial departments of the Group's publications, were from our village! And they discharged their duties with devotion and efficiency.

Smt Subbulakshmi, Lakshmibai's mother, was endowed with a pleasing personality and was looked upon as an ideal, noble, egoless and well-behaved daughter-in-law of our village, ever-helpful and very humble, endowed with pleasing manners, even though the spouse of a highly-placed officer of the Times Group.