As I put away my tears on hearing of the demise of one good friend from Oulu, the tears flowed yet again as I just received news of the demise of the man I most admired in the world.
K. R. Raghavan, blacksmith from Kottayam, Kerala.
Raghavan had been my friend for the last 58 years. He was the blacksmith at the Malayala Manorama newspaper when it restarted publication in 1947. He was a young man of around 22 years and I was just 6. He worked as the blacksmith in a small room just above the main house kitchen window.
I was fascinated by the bellows and the red hot blacksmith furnace where he melted lead and poured the new types for use by the newspaper.
As I stood by the doorway, he called me in. Within a few minutes he had me pumping the bellows, followed by pouring the molten lead. Soon I poured the lead for the letters that made up my name.
He then took me to the type-setting room and with friends I set the type for my own letter head. From there we went to the treadle press and he taught me to print the letter heads.
I ran excitedly to my grandfather to show him my handiwork.
Valliappachen asked that Raghavan be called. He told the young man that whatever I did, my safety was in his hands. From that day, Raghavan was my guardian angel, teaching me everything he knew, but never letting me wander out of his sight. He loved my grandfather so much that he could never violate the trust placed in him.
A couple of years later, Valliappachen called Raghavan, who hardly knew how to read or write. He asked this young man whether he could get together a few people to erect a rotary printing press.
Raghavan had never seen a rotary printing press. But the confidence he oozed was infectious. Together with four other workers, they unpacked a series of boxes received from Bombay. I watched this group of "illiterates" erect a printing press.
The way they did it was based on logic, common sense and a tremendous three dimensional vision where they looked at each part and put them aside to be linked to the next one they found which linked to it - without a single engineering drawing to refer to!
The press was set up and running in record time, and as the first pages rolled off the press, no one was more surprised than Raghavan himself.
During the next 57 years Raghavan has erected and commissioned innumerable state of the art machines, and did trouble shooting on the round-the-clock basis on any machine he was called upon to attend to.
Raghavan told me in one instance he was called by the biggest English newspaper in Bombay, put in a 5-star hotel and given full powers to erect a printing machine he had only a photograph of! And he did it in record time, although, he told me, he had never felt so much luxury in his life at the hotel, he was tempted to make the experience last as long as possible. But he was so worried about what was happening with "his" equipment at home base, he could not stay for a minute longer than it took him to put it together.
What I know about printing equipment, paper, inks, and anything else in printing was driven by the interest created in me by my friend. However, the amount I know would be about what would fit on a pinhead compared to the whole world of knowledge of this "blacksmith".
As I received a message from my cousin today, telling me about the passing of Raghavan, I wrote to his son, K. R. Ravi, sharing the grief with him.
I will miss you, my dear friend.
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