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Laconic musings on Vayalar

on December 05, 2011

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The Nanavati case

1959. Bombay. 37-year-old Kamas Maneckshaw Nanavati was a Commander in the Indian Navy. He had a beautiful English wife named Sylvia and two children. A rosy picture....from the outside. Nanavati's long absences for duty led Sylvia to an affair with a playboy called Prem Ahuja who was a family friend as well. She even told her husband about it. On April 27th afternoon Nanavati dropped Slyvia and the kids at a cinema theatre and went to Ahuja's flat with a loaded pistol. Ahuja came out in a bath towel. Nanavati asked him if he would marry Slyvia. Ahuja replied, 'How can I marry all the women I sleep with?' Nanavati took out his pistol and fired three shots point blank and killed Ahuja. Then he proceeded to the Provost Marshal of the Western Naval Command and surrendered himself. The murder became a sensation in the country. A jury heard the trial and declared Nanavati 'not guilty' by 8 to 1. Ram Jethmalani was a young lawyer then. At the request of ...

Prof. M. Krishnan Nair

An enduring Thiruvananthapuram memory for me is Professor M. Krishnan Nair (1923 - 2006) walking down Statue Road, crisp khader shirt-dothi, gold frame glasses and 'kaalankuda' umbrella shielding him against the sun. He smoked heavily, ransacked bookshops, collected books worth several lakhs rupees, tore asunder lame writing and shook our sahridaya sensibilities through his Sahitya Varaphalam column for 36 years. In fact, after he shifted his column from Kalakaumudi to Malayalam Vaarika, I too switched weekly loyalty likewise. He was forthright in his comments about writers new and old and gathered many enemies in the process. In literature, he simply did not have any holy cow, except perhaps poet Changampuzha. He was the only critic who could call Thakazhi a chronicler and Pottekkatt a glorified journalist and state that VKN's humor was forced. It is due to him that several people including me learned about the greats of contemporary world literature like Gabriel Gar...

A badminton legend silenced

28 July 1988. A 26-year-old man comes out after badminton practice from Lucknow's KD Singh Babu stadium. Two men shoot him dead. The slain young man was no ordinary shuttler but one of the best players of the sport that India had seen, second in greatness to only Prakash Padukone, National champion throughout the 70s and the first Indian winner of the All-England Championship. Right from the age of eighteen when he qualified, Syed Modi won eight successive national championships and had lost the crown for the first time only that year. And he was married to another talented badminton player, Amita. She had given birth to a baby girl just two months earlier. So who killed him and why? Born in 1962 in Uttar Pradesh to a sugar mill worker and his homemaker wife as the youngest of eight children, Modi first became junior National champion at 14. He won the senior championships from 1980 through 87. He bagged the bronze at the Asiad and a gold at the Commonwealth Games, in 198...

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Laconic musings on Vayalar

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