Romesh Thapar, partly perhaps goaded by accident, ended up as the social conscience of the superstructure. Honest, ebullient, assertive,. the eternal eager beaver, he discovered themes for himself. Whatever the issue, he would bring to it an instant dedication. If, in the late forties, it was Crossroads in the cause of the party and the famous fight against the newly-entrenched Congress censors, in the later years other battles centring on peripheral concerns which occupied the nation's capital. But he too came to his private grief because, at some point, he took the tenets of the Indian Constitution at their face value. Here was a man full of Punjabi passion, opening out, all the while, all his windows, and always believing in the next door neighbour. It was only natural that, on numberless occasions, he would be disappointed. But there was no relenting of his vigour. He had moved far away from his once and future Marxism, and took a liking to the imagery of a world amenable to non-structural engineering. He would shuffle, back and forth, back and forth, from the new international order to Kashmir, from global food problems to Akali politics, from perceptions of subcontinental stirrings to Japan's technological leaps, from the naissance of trans-Jamuna fascism to ecological issues. His Seminar reflected this congenital restlessness, marked by an incorrigible romantic spirit. But this was romanticism of the Lahore Government College species, it always had an empirical content. Romesh would be in scampering hurry to derive lessons, to draw paradigms and put the paradigms to use: what is the point of being up and about if you are unable to change the nation
