Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A Benevolent Patriarch (some reminiscences of a son) by Prof. S. Naganath

Prof S.Naganath
He was a good teacher, a great scholar and a loving father combined into one. When I was seven years old he suffered a paralytic stroke and became bedridden. After a few months he recovered his health and resumed teaching in Maharaja's college, Mysore. Though all the post-graduate departments had been shifted to the new Manasa Gangotri campus (Jayalakshmi Vilas Palace), he was given special permission to engage M.A. classes in Maharaja's college by the then Vice-Chancellor I often escorted my father in the Tonga to the college and was in the habit of peeping into his classroom to see what was going on there. I usually saw him seated in a chair ether delivering a lecture or dictating some notes in a staid manner. After thirty-six years of successful teaching career the first D. Litt scholar of the Mysore University had been made a full fledged professor of History during the last six months of his tenure. He had accomplished this despite his physical infirmities like poor eye-sight, deafness and paralysis, which had affected the left leg, hand and to some extent speech in the initial stages.

He had grown bitter in life and disillusioned with the quagmire politics of the university. There was already a perceptible decline in academic standards. The university had assiduously denied him with the professorship almost till the end of his service.

At one point of time the university authorities had serious doubts about his physical fitness. So they referred him to the chief physician of the K.R. hospital.....

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