When, on the evening of May 14, a friend telephoned and informed me about the sad demise of Dr Subrahmanyam Chandrasekharan (Chandru to most of his intimate friends), I thought he had also fallen victim to the dreaded Covid, which had been claiming hundreds of lives every day. When I established contact with family members they told me he died of cardiac arrest. The only consolation being, instead of the authorities cremating the dead body, the family members could perform all religious rites according to family traditions.
As I was reflecting on the irreparable loss caused by Chandru’s death, the famous lines of John Donne came to my mind: “Death, be not proud, though some called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so … one short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more, Death, thou shall die”.