As Pranab Mukherjee was sworn in as the 13th President, a band of his friends in a corner of Bengal on Wednesday recalled with nostalgia the days spent with him.
“Our friendship never waned though Pranabda quit college in 1968 to join active politics as a member of Bangla Congress,” said Mahadev Sinha, principal of Bidyanagar College here in South 24 Parganas district where Mr Mukherjee had begun his career as a lecturer in political science and history on August 8, 1963. To him and a few others there like Prodyut Kumar Mondal, now a retired professor of the college, Mr Mukherjee is but a phone call away.
“We often speak to Pranabda over phone. He spoke to us even when he was contesting the presidential poll. He wants to know even small details about the college. His memory is remarkable,” they noted.
“Despite his high rank and stature he has remained the simple man that he was. He shares telebhaja (deep fried vegetables), which is among his favourite food, and muri (puffed rice) with us,” Mr Sinha said, recalling that Mr Mukherjee used to have addas with them during his visits to Kolkata. Mangoes are his other weakness, they recollected. “Pranabda as a teacher had excellent rapport with the students ... He always behaved well with them and was always punctual,” says former student Sunil Gorai, who later became the librarian of the college.
Mr Mukherjee taught Indian politics, Indian Constitution and foreign constitutions in the college. He became a member of the governing body and its vice-principal in 1965.
Mr Harendranath Maju-mdar, who was a minister in the Bangla Congress regime during the 1960s in the state, had spotted Mr Mukherjee at the Bharat Sabha Hall library and had got him the job at the college, where he was the governing body president.
It was Mr Majumdar again who helped him to join politics in 1966 and the rest, as they say, is history.
During his stay here, Mr Mukherjee used to go along a mobile library to nearby villages on weekends.
He took the cause of spreading education so seriously that he made the entries in his own hand and tried to create readership. After classes, Mr Mukherjee would train teachers of nearby Bidyanagar primary school, Mr Gorai said.
— PTI