Poet and Friend, P Udayabhanu Passes

I WANTED to write this note yesterday itself. but I was too tired to do anything, after a day at the hospital and witnessing the last journey of a friend whose memory takes me back to a romantic and revolutionary time which seems to be completely lost to us.

P Udayabhanu's death was quite unexpected. He was the most unlikely candidate for a sudden demise. He was extremely careful about his health; he never smoked, never took drinks, never indulged in any of the vices of our generation. In fact his careful and frugal ways made him a success in a material way while most of his comrades who took up guns in the mid-seventies now live a wrecked and wretched life.

He was a poet of rare sensitivity, but beyond that he was a person who in his teens dared to dream big. When he joined the band of revolutionaries who went to attack the Kayanna police station, with the fond hope that they were very close to the Spring Thunder of revolution in the days of Emergency he was being led by this fire of idealism. He was only an undergraduate student those days. He spent a long time in the Kannur Central Jail and it was on his return, that he made a determined effort to rebuild his life. He was a success.

Many others were not. Yesterday, Madhu Master, who was part of the movement, was there in the hospital and at his home, and he was recalling the days when "we thought revolution was nearby." It wasn't. But still, there was something the movement left behind, its legacy: A sense of values, a glimmer of hope in the times of decadence, hopelessness.

I remember the long association I had with Udayabhanu who became a friend with me after he joined Akashvani. But I knew about him from earlier times, when one day P N Das, who used to edit Prasakthi, brought it to me in our college in those days of anxiety, excitement, hope and despair. I first came to know the power of poetry in this publication when I read KGS, Satchi daa and others there. That powerful impact left by Bengal of KGS still remains etched in my memory that never fades even after three and a half decades...!

I write this note just to say goodbye to a friend, a comrade and a person whose memory takes me back to a time when we had better dreams to dream of, better thoughts to think, and an immensely better world at least in our inner self...

How different it was from this insipid times we are going through in contemporary Kerala, where Swami Santhosh Madhavan and Baba Abdulla Faizi are leading our liberation struggles!

29.10.2008