Birthday & Requiem are definitionally dichotomous . But then so are so many of our thoughts & emotions : hence I excercise the Blogger’s privilege to stick with the title .

This photo is of some six decade vintage : others in the photo have been suitably cropped out . Needless to say , the one on the left is the Blogger & the one on right to-day’s birthday boy & my late Dad : Dada as I called & remember him.

It is perhaps incredible & at the same time believable ( there I go again with my penchant for dichotomous statements ) that Dada lives on :

• in the pulsating world of www . Google search his name & one finds him in Volume 17 page 11 of the Crosfield Papers at the University of Cambridge  Centre of South Asian Studies .
• Scroll down a bit & you find him in the scroll of honours in the History of Dist 322-D of Lions International .

In my two consecutive visits to Duliajan  Assam  in the past six months , after a hiatus of 4 decades plus , the most overwhelming sentiment that I came across was that the beautiful people of Duliajan remember Dada with a lot of love & reverence , for all the good work he did out there in the fifties & the sixties of the last century. Interstingly , most ,  almost all , of these good people had never actually met Dada & yet they spoke of him as though they knew him well , through his yeoman service in the creation & early nurturing of the multi-faceted & deeply rich socio-cultural ethos of the place called Duliajan.

What better way to remember you , Dada , on your birthday than to share with you this oven-fresh feedback , so to speak , from the place you loved so much.

Cheers & ATB