We were on the bus from Shahdol to Varanasi. Suddenly, “Roko, roko!” my companion urged the driver. He leapt out of the bus, and disappeared. A few moments later he returned, beaming, clutching a leaf plate of hot jalebis! This was the quintessential Guru Das Agrawal, who knew every delicacy (and cinema hall) on any route he covered, and this one he had travelled many times in the early 1960s when he was a young engineer building the Rihand dam, one of the pioneering ‘temples’ of Nehruvian India near Renukoot.
GD who took sanyas and came to be known as Swami Sanand fasted four times to put an end to construction of dams in the upper reaches of the Ganga. The last fast, which, lasted 111 days, ended in his tragic death on 11 October.