Some people never hang up their boots and some, like Kuldip Nayar, never put down their pens. The veteran journalist died today at age 95, working till the end -- his last column appearing in the Lokmat Times this morning, hours after he breathed his last around 12.30 am in a Delhi hospital.
The prolific journalist, columnist and author, known not just as one of India's most respected mediapersons but also as a passionate advocate for peace and press freedom, discussed the immigrants as vote banks in his last article, focussing on the northeast.
He ended with advice to the BJP to not ignore the problems of the region, pointing out that Assam has 14 of 25 seats in the northeast.
It was a fitting end for the journalist, who was born in 1923 in Sialkot, Pakistan, and began his career in journalism in the Urdu language press before going on to serve as editor of several newspapers, including Indian Express and The Statesman.
It was a career with many highs for the mostly journalist, who also served a stint as India's high commissioner to United Kingdom and was appointed to the Rajya Sabha.
An oft quoted Nayar anecdote is about how he broke the news of Lal Bahadur Shastri's death in Tashkent.
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Nayar was in Tashkent when Shastri died after signing the historic Tashkent Declaration.
Soon after midnight on January 11, 1966 when most newspapers in India had gone to bed with front page headlines on the Tashkent Declaration, Nayar, who had accompanied Shastri on the trip, phoned in the flash to the United News of India.
But the shock value was such that many back in India, at first, refused to accept it, Nayar recounts in his 2012 autobiography "Beyond the Lines".
"Surinder Dhingra on late night duty received the call. I told him to send the flash 'Shastri dead'. Dhingra began laughing and told me that I must be joking because he had just cleared Shastri's speech at the evening function," the book reads.
"I told him not to waste time and send the flash immediately. He still did not believe me and I was obliged to resort to some harsh words in Punjabi to get him to action," he goes on to say.
Nayar also narrates how he learnt about Shastri's demise.
"I got up abruptly to a knock on my door. A lady in the corridor told me:'Your prime minister is dying'. I hurriedly dressed and and drove with an Indian official to Shastri's dacha which was some distance away."