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| Gitindra Saran Sanyal |
At 4.30pm on July 7, as the shadows lengthened on the freedom memorial, Hijli jail, in Kharagpur, Yama took away a campus favourite. Living alone and quietly in a small apartment outside the IIT campus was a bespectacled, diminutive, 89-year-old professor. He was “The IIT Adivasi”, the only surviving original. His name, Gitindra Saran Sanyal, meant “the path of music and poetry”. His was a path of teaching and leading technology education. “Professor Sir” to today’s IIT directors and the 25,000 Kharagpur graduates over the last half a century, Sanyal was among the few able to recall first-hand how a modern and premier technical institution was created in a newly independent India. In the late 1940s, the N.R. Sarkar committee reported to the government, recommending the creation of the four institutions of higher technological learning. Bengal chief minister B.C. Roy provided land in Kharagpur. A committee member, Gyan Ghosh, became the first director in 1951 when the first batch was admitted. Jawaharlal Nehru called it a temple of learning. Sanyal was born in Assam on a historic day — February 1, 1922. It was the day Mahatma Gandhi wrote his famous letter to the Viceroy of India on the Non-co-operation Movement. Within five days, at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, a group of protesters was fired upon by the police who soon ran out of ammunition. The excited mob hacked the 22 policemen and set fire to them. Gandhi was distressed and had to suspend the movement. Through the complex years of the fight for Independence, Sanyal grew up and graduated. When he was 22, he left to study radio engineering and radar systems in England. He was determined to return to India. He joined the fledgling IIT in 1954 and has lived in and with IIT for 57 years without a break. This must be an all-India record. He did many wonderful things during this half century. He has been the recipient of awards and honours for original research on electromagnetism, microwave antennas, phased arrays and optical fibres. He was the director of IIT Kharagpur from 1983 to 1987. But his most endearing quality was his child-like warmth for the students. What he achieved through his connections with generations of former students is stupendous. That was why he was appointed the first managing director of the Technology Foundation to link up with the alumni of the institute. Arjun Malhotra of HCL and TechSpan fame wished to donate money to set up a school of telecommunications. It is a tribute to Arjun’s generosity and Sanyal’s influence that the institute was named by Arjun after Sanyal. B.K. Syngal (former CMD, VSNL), Suhas Patil (ex-Cirrus Logic) and Arun Sarin (ex-Vodafone) have earned professional laurels but they would doff their cap to honour their wonderful teacher. So too would several others like Srikumar Banerjee, director of Barc, Purnendu Chatterjee of The Chatterjee Group and Parvati Dev of Stanford. A few years ago, Sanyal requested me to teach at Kharagpur’s Vinod Gupta School of Management. I agreed. “Do not merely say ‘yes’ and forget about it. In our tradition, a promise given to a teacher must be fulfilled — and remember, I am into my late 70s!” he reminded me. As a diligent former student of his, I took a few days’ leave to discharge my promise. Sanyal amazed me by sitting on the front bench and attending all my lectures. “Just reciprocating what you did 40 years earlier,” he said with a twinkle. Love in the form of accolades is pouring in from all over the world. From LA writes Devendra Mishra: “I was fortunate to be his student and grew up next door as my father was also a professor.” From Washington DC, B.K. Narayan rues that “it is the end of an epoch”. Pericles’ oration of 2,500 years ago is of relevance: “For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands, there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not in stone but in the hearts of men.” Professor Gitindra Saran Sanyal has every reason to be proud of the fruits of his karma on this planet. The author was Gitindra Saran Sanyal’s student in the early 1960s | 
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