IT is difficult to reconcile to the fact that Shaily is no more. That rich resonating voice which propagated class struggle with a literary fragrance peppered with wit and sarcasm will not be heard any more.

Shaily and I literally grew up together in the student politics of North India in the heady post-Emergency period. The SFI emerged for the first time as a major political force in the student politics in north India. Brilliant students like Shaily embraced Marxism as a weapon of struggle for social change. The SFI had won elections to the students unions of Allahabad University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Himachal Pradesh University, Haryana Agricultural University, Gurunanak Dev University, Amritsar and others including even a post in the Delhi University Students Union. Shaily, alongwith many other SFI leaders of that time grew to become a CPI(M) leader. Shaily, however, was the most brilliant and effective speaker in Hindi we had.

We were both elected to the all-India leadership of the SFI at the Patna conference in 1978. Since then, through all these years, there has been a very close bond of camaraderie. Whenever any new campaign had to be launched, Shaily used to be the first to be consulted for appropriate slogans. The ease with which he would conjure slogans was amazing. It was he who coined the by now inseparable slogan of the SFI: "sab ko siksha, sab ko kam". Shaily had come from Gwalior to design the poster and other publicity material for the first of the 15th September Delhi Chalo rally on this slogan in 1981. He was the most sought after speaker in north India. And, for nearly 20 years, the final election meeting in JNU which would go into the early hours of the morning would have both of us speaking -- Shaily in Hindi and me in English. I had always confessed that I found it very difficult to speak after Shaily. There was not much left to be said, and whatever had to be said had been said so effectively.

He had a literary passion and the starting of the party paper 'Lok Jatan' in Madhya Pradesh was a personal achievement -- a long-cherished dream come true. There used to be a gleam in his eye whenever any praise of `Lok Jatan' was made.

I can go on recounting many incidents of joint work that we had done together -- the conferences we attended, the campaigns we undertook etc. These are memories that I shall always cherish. There are many attributes of Shaily's life that one must emulate. His simplicity, creativity, compassion, the deep urge for social change, anger against exploitation of all sorts are features difficult to find in a single individual. Alas! It was his passion to be the ultimate perfectionist that ended his life. Lesser mortals can derive satisfaction from their work. But not Shaily. His brilliance and competence was so complete that he could successfully conceal his mental worries, even from his closest comrades. To the outsider, he appeared as the usual bright personality that he was, but he was obviously an intensely private person.

His contributions to party building extend beyond the borders of Madhya Pradesh. The years of maturing from a student activist to the State secretary of a revolutionary party and earning his membership to the highest decision-making body -- the central committee -- should have been put to better use in facing the grim battles ahead. But, unfortunately, this is not to be.

This loss is a void that will be hard to fill. But as Shaily himself would have said, life goes on, and our struggles will intensify. Battles will have to be fought and won.