Now that I have passed on the baton of management of Academy Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., Publishers of Star of Mysore and Mysooru Mithra, to honour the immortal words of Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The old order changeth yielding place to new, And God fulfills himself in many ways…”, besides the fact that I have to kill a lot of time being unemployed, I decided to walk down the memory lane from 1977 when I came to this wonderful city. — KBG
I begin this series with Dr. K.B. Subbaiah not because he is my elder brother but because of the fact that he was the only reason why I am here. After about 10 years in England, he came to Mysore and joined the Holdsworth Memorial Hospital (Mission Hospital). I would not have moved to Mysore from Pune where I was a small entrepreneur but for him being in Mysore and his support.
He was working in the Mission Hospital, Mandi Mohalla, Mysore, living in the Hospital bungalow nearby. For those days, he was one of three or four city residents (apart from the Maharaja, of course, who had a fleet of imported cars including Rolls Royce), to own an imported car — Red two-door Ford Escort which he brought along with him when he left England.
He was also constructing a residential house near Kamakshi Hospital. It was then a friend of mine asked if I could find a place for him to start a Printing Press in Mysore. Naturally, Dr. Subbaiah was my only contact and when I asked if he could help, he said, ‘take my house if suitable.’ Loyola! Academy Press was born, with me also as a sleeping partner. It was 1975. But in 1977, I shifted to this city for two more reasons. The working partner urged me to join him to manage the Printing Press and my wife was selected as a Government College lecturer posted in Kodagu. We were thinking of bolstering our job-printing business which was just picking up rather slowly and so decided to use the Printing Press for publishing a newspaper. So it was. On February 16, 1978 Star of Mysore was born on the strength of my experience as a journalist in Mumbai.
He was a Godfather to me and a patron of Star of Mysore, supporting it in raising loans, getting official contacts and in many other ways. He was a Rotarian and a leading doctor of those days with many celebrities of the city holding him in high esteem. A very soft-spoken person, gentle in his manners and when he got angry, which was very rare, he would express it more by gritting his teeth than by words.
A great newspaper-savvy, he would want his newspaper Indian Express to be first picked up by him alone, not wanting other persons in the house to read it first or pass pages of the paper to him. It was he who telephoned me at around 10 am to inform the death of Sanjay Gandhi in a plane accident in 1980 at Delhi.
Later, he quit Mission Hospital, after serving there for 10 years, in 1980 to set up private practice and also built his huge house in Yadavagiri where he was living with his wife Swajie and son Gautham. Through Rotary, of which he was its President for a term, he rendered yeomen service to the poor and the physically challenged. He would let go consultation fee to the poor and never charged to the religious persons and priests.
While in Mission Hospital, I had seen him obliging the people pleading helplessness, requesting him to visit the patient at home and even at night.
However, when all seemed well for him, tragedy struck on Oct.4, 1988. I was informed on telephone by his good neighbour in Yadavagiri of his passing away just a few minutes ago early morning — of mio-cardiac arrest. Those years, he was a leading cardiologist also. That was the irony of fate. He was just 51 years old. It was the only time I felt orphaned.
[To be continued]
e-mail: kbg@starofmysore.com
This post was published on July 19, 2020 6:05 pm