Witerati | Principal Bhupinder: The rainbow on litscape
“Can you imagine ji, I spent the whole morning scouting all over Sector 17 for this red shirt for our Lit event today!
The man in the Red Shirt.
This is not about the red shirt. It is about the joie de vivre that coloured the twine and threadwork of the man.
Principal Bhupinder.
The teacher who gave not lectures but lessons in living life.
The Principal who taught how to live a principled and spirited life. How to be a rainbow on the greyest and gloomiest of days. The life and soul of tricity’s litscape, first and foremost. A former Principal of Government College, man of letters, self-trained shutterbug and all that, later.
This is not an attempt to sum up the man, who was more than the sum of many parts. That’s best done by those who knew him longer or better.
This is about those who knew him briefly, as brief as his numbered bursts of breaths when corona knocked on the door.
He burst upon our literary circle and the tricity’s litscape in signature style.
When yours truly had to field Q&A from a veteran with swag, peering from behind a tripod parked in the wings of the Press Club Hall staging my book launch, little did one know then that a bright ‘n’ bold breed had arrived on the tricity’s literary scene.
A pair of black goggles, a vibrant wardrobe, a vocabulary that could give the likes of Shashi Tharoor a run for their money, and a photography paraphernalia with its piece de resistance – a mic that was a thundering match for the mouth pieces of any Aaj Tak or Republic – is what announced him.
Vlogger Principal Bhupinder had arrived.
The teacher who was more a student. Self taught. Self motivated.
The Man in the Red Shirt.
It was not about bold and bright sartorial styles. It was about a lone ranger trying to colour his life.
It was about a littérateur looking for a Lit family outside of family, in a universe where blood bonds apparently loved his bank balance or bungalow rather than him.
It was about a bachelor’s lonely heart looking for the colours of love ‘n’ life in the lyrics of Dev Anand’s “Abhi naa jao chhod ke” when he tagged us in his version of Binaca Geetmala -- ‘Bhupinder Geetmala’.
“I’ll try not to tag you all so much on Facebook. Your Timeline has more my posts than yours,” he once gregariously remarked. I reassured him that I didn’t mind him tagging me. (Incidentally, he was the first to bestow upon me the ‘Humour Express’ tag). I truly didn’t mind, for the tags were throbbing signals he was up and about.
The tags. The blips, on the social media’s pulse that told us that ‘chief cheer-leading officer’ (CCO) Principal Bhupinder was in action. The Facebook ‘blips’ that bespoke of his pulse rate.
Then these blips began petering out at the peak of the pandemic.
A sense of unease gripped.
An unease that spurred one to frantically call him and fellow authors for organising any help that was needed.
An unease born of life’s lessons from many summers ago.
An unease born of knowing that sometimes when life is about to give with one hand, it takes away with the other.
Seasons ago, just before life was about to gift me my baby, it was my father whom it had snatched. That same sense of unease now returned. My every particle, every pore became a prayer. A prayer that all those who are a part and parcel of my writerly journey should be there.
This time, a literary ‘baby’, my new book, on the way to being born. This time, the tricity lit circle’s father figure snatched.
Those ‘blips’ of his tags on the litscape’s pulse metre never to return.
chetnakeer@yahoo.com
Witerati | Principal Bhupinder: The rainbow on litscape - Hindustan Times
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