Janardan Thakur dead

We regret to inform readers about the sad death of Janardan Thakur, the veteran editor and columnist.

Mr Thakur, 63, died of a heart attack in Bombay early on Monday morning.

A contributor to Rediff On The NeT since May 1996, Mr Thakur often visited our office when he lived in Bombay, to hand in a piece, if he was in the vicinity, or just to have a cuppa and chat. A few weeks ago, he dropped in with a copy of Prime Ministers, his book on the men who ruled India since Independence. He was pleased with the effort -- most of which he wrote at the Cumballa Hill hospital when his wife Purnima underwent surgery -- but typically diffident about its success.

A journalist of the old school, Mr Thakur was a fine political reporter with access to the most powerful figures in the land. Last week, he dropped in to deliver a column we had assigned him on the return of Arun Singh. We had surmised -- correctly as it turned out -- that he would have interviewed the notoriously reclusive manager-politician after Singh quit politics in those heady days of 1987.

That article was published on Saturday. A few hours later its author had passed into the Great Press Club in the sky, his promise to keep Rediff readers abreast of political developments at election time unfulfilled.

Mr Thakur is survived by his wife, daughters Chitra, Pooja and Richa, and son Sankarshan, national editor at The Telegraph, whose dispatches from Kargil would have made his father proud.

We will miss his insight and wisdom.