It was a good death

Life becomes difficult for old workers in India's gigantic unorganised sector

Someone else I knew died on the same day as Stephen Hawking. It was Babulal, the old gardener who’d tended several gardens in our neighbourhood for the last few decades. I’d written about him in an earlier column, on hindsight rather inappropriately titled, “Too old to rock ‘n’ roll, too young to die”. Because die he did, as quietly and unobtrusively as he had come into this world. Since everyone has been going to town talking about how Hawking inspired them, I thought that today I would write an obituary of the cantankerous old Babulal, and the lessons he had