Page 8 - Vaidy

Mihir Shah: mihirbhai25@gmail.com
I have had the great privilege of knowing Dr. A. Vaidyanathan for the past 42 years
I was an M Phil student of the 1978 batch. Those were the halcyon days of CDS. As students we could not have asked for a more vibrant intellectual climate. All the founders were there, each one a giant in their very own right. We also had extraordinary students and the student-faculty interactions were something to deeply cherish
Those were days of intense debates on the big issues of the time. And the debates could become fierce and vehement. Each founder being a formidable personality, there would at times be conflict and contention. The one man who held it all together was Vaidy. Here was a guy who understood and respected his colleagues. He knew exactly where each one of them was coming from, he had the openness, humility and intellectual capacity to do so. But it was also the other way around. Among all their colleagues, the one who they completely trusted, even loved, was Vaidy. So it was natural that Dr. Vaidyanathan became the one-man conflict resolution mechanism, who would spend endless hours getting the founders to agree to resolve their differences and move the institution forward. More times than not, he succeeded brilliantly in doing so, such was his ineffable charm!
The same qualities were also deeply appreciated by all of us students. When in trouble, we knew who to go to. Vaidy would be warm, open and able to get our point and help us overcome whatever it was that was troubling us.
To quickly fast forward to a more recent engagement I had with him. In 2011, as Member, Planning Commission it was my great honour to invite Dr. Vaidyanathan to Chair the 12th Plan Working Group on Water Database Development and Management. He was already nearly 80 years old by then and was somewhat reluctant to take on the responsibility, also because of his relative skepticism about "what good would come of it". But as they say, the rest is history. I would go as far to say that this is one of the most outstanding Working Group reports produced in the entire history of the Planning Commission. Vaidy worked tirelessly with his distinguished colleagues in the Group (all of them much younger than him), challenging them at every point and bringing out the very best in them. I must also tell you that he was well pleased with what had been produced (itself a very rare thing for him to say!). As we draft the new National Water Policy today, I am happy to report that the one source which the section on "Democratisation of Data" is relying upon is the Vaidyanathan WG Report
Such a man is hard to come by, especially in the hallowed portals of academia! He will be missed but he needs to be celebrated by us all, for his impeccable integrity and for
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