Someone, Somewhere, Remembers

Ok, I will be upfront about this post - it is written to honor my dad to who turns 97 tomorrow.

Memories are short. No one really remembers the names of our forestry officers, or those built the great railway network or helped established indigenous capabilities to design ships, aircrafts, and missiles. Even if we do remember we hardly speak about these people, celebrate their lives and achievements, or memorialize them in a modern-day encyclopedia, like Wikipedia.

This article is a small measure to remember a man, who with many entirely forgotten colleagues, built a large part of the defense infrastructure to make aircrafts that have protected India for over 75 years.

You will see a Wiki article on Dr Kurt Tank, aircraft designer of the Focke-wulf Condor and the Ta 152, but nothing on Raj Mahindra, Varghese Vareed or Subramanyam Chennakeshu more commonly known as Keshu. Raj designed the aircraft, Vareed created the engines and Keshu produced the flying machine.

Mercifully, you will see a Wiki stub on Suranjan Das, the great pioneering test pilot of India. A 4-km road in Bangalore, leading from Old Madras Road to the HAL factory, is named after him. Das died 10th Jan 1970 when his HF24, India’s first indigenously built aircraft, crashed. I was eight years old at the time and I remember the day vividly. My father drove home in his Fiat to tell my mother the news. Das, and his wife, lived diagonally behind our residence. Das made wooden swords for me and my brother (our ambition to become gladiators was quite epic back in the day!). More than fifty years have passed, and I still remember Das’s smile.

With no Wiki page or Wiki stub, I hope my dad, Keshu Senior, is remembered by people for what he did, stood for and how he lived his life. At 97 and going strong, his karma, fueled by the love of so many admirers, is clearly rock solid.

I am always amazed when I think about how far he rose in corporate life considering where he began – the second youngest, poor-as-a-church-mouse kid, one amongst 13. A gentle soul with a powerful brain, a fair and equal mind unburdened by bias of any kind, he was always thoughtful, immensely considerate and magnificently eloquent when he wrote or spoke. His “admonishments” were delivered in the calm tone of how one would provide advice and counsel. He never raised a hand on anyone, or his voice, abhorred violence of all kinds and loved his chota peg on some evenings when he would have us sit around him for a family chat. He went from smoking 20 cigarettes a day to none and stopped drinking any alcohol but never gave up on his one true love – his wife, my mom, who he married on the eight-anniversary date of his joining the Indian Air Force in 1947.?

He would call my mother Estelita, the rose of his dreams. I have no idea why he chose to call her that, but I used this as an inspiration to name the mascots of BORN after such monikers. The first was Esmeralda (a silverback) and the current one (a tiger) is Estelita!

Since this note is in his honor, I will do the customary “boring bit” – tell you about his life in a flash.

Born to a Health Officer (doctor and captain in the Indian Army) and a home maker, in Coimbatore,?in 1925, my dad attended Ganapathy High School in Mangalore. He then attended Saint Joseph’s Indian High School, Bangalore. He then went on to study at Saint Joseph’s College, Bangalore before graduating from Banaras Hindu University, College of Metallurgy in 1946. He then joined the Indian Airforce (IAF) as Engineer Officer on 16th Sept 1947.

He was deputed to study at the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield, UK, between 1952 to 1954 where he graduated with a Master of Science in Aeronautics.

During his service with the IAF, he was deputed to serve in the Defense Research and Development Organization and HAL. He retired from the IAF on in 1969 and joined HAL as a Production Engineer (Prototypes).

As a Flight Test Engineer for several transport aircraft his job was to assess suitability of these planes for a possible induction into IAF.?The aircraft offered for testing by foreign manufacturers were to be flown by test pilots in the Himalayas, Assam and across all manner of terrain under typical operating conditions. He was to assist the pilots in this task, while recording instrument readings. He had also to check the claims by manufacturers against the IAF’s requirements. He had to record, by observation, flight performance on distances for takeoff and landing, for different loads and airfield conditions and validate brochure performance claims through independent calculations. He tested the AVRO 748, Friendship, Noratlas and Caribou. Years later he would do similar checks on the Dornier and Twin Otter.

At HAL he was busy. The company manufactured the Marut, Kiran, Gnat (Ajith), Mikoyan-Gurevich Mig 21(FL, MF, BIS), SEPECAT Jaguar, Kiran, Pushpak, HT32, Alouette (Chetak) and the Lama.

The Marut, which meant "Spirit of the Tempest”, was first fighter jet indigenously designed by India. It took many models to perfect it. It was called the Hindustan Fighter and at model number 24 they had a working prototype.

The aircraft’s first flight was on 17th June 1961 with Das in the cockpit. HAL made 147 of these fighter jets. It protected India for 30 years till its retirement in 1990.?The plane made history when it helped the Indian army, outnumbered 20 to 1, win the epic Battle of Longewala. My dad retired from HAL as its Managing Director HAL Bangalore Complex on the 28th of February 1984. Never one to stay idle, he served as a consultant to the Planning Commission, DRDO and PSG Colleges and Industrial Institute for many years. With several experts in the field of aeronautics he wrote a book called Aircraft Production, Technology and Management. Somewhere along the way he also won the Vishist Seva Medal.

Some fifty years ago, on a starry night he took my mom, brother, sister, and I for an ice cream treat. We parked the car next to Ulsoor lake and while we were enjoying this quiet moment, I dropped my ice cream cone and was quite shattered. My dad quietly gave me his and asked me to look up at the stars in the sky and distracted me by saying, “Look down and you will see the present. Look up and you will see the past.” He won’t remember any of this, but I do. Kids remember weird things. He tried to explain to me that what was up there was a “maya” a freeze-frame from the light of the stars that had arrived to hit our eyes light-years after they left their original positions. I played that conversation over my mind many times and years later morphed it into an idea that became the basis of a book I wrote (The Race).

Look down and you will see the present

(even though we are hurtling across space at 67,000 mph)

Look up and you will see the past

(meaning what you see up there is really not there but has moved on)

Look inside your heart and you will see the future.

(The heart thinks of the future even as our minds remember the past)

Goopy, weird, but somewhere, somehow, your parents shape your thinking. Tomorrow, he turns 97. Last year, he was felicitated by the Income Tax Department for his contributions towards nation building.

Somewhere, someone remembered my old man, just as I do today. ?You have honored my dad for reading this to the end. Thank you.

Onwards. Upwards.?

Your fearless follower.