Hindu columnist Shiv Vishwanathan on U R Ananthamurthy, the doyen of Kannada Literature who passed away on Friday: Often I feel angry with death and the Gods. They take away the best in a way that leaves me inconsolable. I feel helpless not just because of the pain of missing them but because my world shrinks, my map of friendship collapses into empty outlines.

This happened when my friend the philosopher Ramu Gandhi died. I felt the same way when the great chemist C V Seshadri disappeared into the sea.

I felt completely broken when U R Ananthamurthy passed away on Friday evening.

It was as if a cosmos had collapsed, a way of life had disappeared. It was not the achievements of the man as a writer and a public intellectual, but the man himself as an achievement that mattered.

U R died fighting till the end...

Read more HERE