Tan Sri B. C. Shekhar (Unni) was one of the most influential people in my life, as we shared the same professional interests - Polymers.
His path crossed mine in 1968 when I was working as a researcher at the Rubber and Plastics Research Association of Great Britain (RAPRA). He visited the institute to meet with his colleague, Dr. Bill Watson who was the Director.
Dr. Watson was the guardian of Unni’s son who had been admitted to a school in the UK. I was invited to an exclusive lunch with my Director and Unni.
We hit it off from the very first minute as we had many common interests, besides polymers. I had no idea how famous he was when we discussed his family roots in Trichur in Kerala and mine.
The next year he made another visit and after the official engagements we dined together. He took a liking to Annikki and treated her like his daughter.
I returned to Chennai and started a consulting company, Polymer Consultancy Services with my brother who was also a rubber technologist. He was the introvert while I was the extrovert and the front face of our consulting company.
Unni came to Chennai and my brother organised a meeting of the local rubber institute to meet Unni.
Unni was travelling with his family so he asked my brother to organise an evening with me. I took them to the beautiful Madras beach and organised a delicious spread from the local Buhari restaurant.
There was a purpose in his asking for the meeting as he made me a proposal as he wanted our consulting company to act as the representatives of the Malaysian Rubber Research Board in India to promote the work of the Malaysian Rubber Industry in India and finally ensure that India imported natural rubber from Malaysia. He had a small office in Bombay from where they would feed information to the Indian rubber industry. He had an information officer who did all the work and he wanted me to take over managing that work.
I told Unni that I was concentrating on plastics and my brother was handling all matters with rubber. He told me Dr. Watson had spoken so highly of my work in England and that was why he was approaching me. Also he knew of our close family association with MRF Ltd. which was doing well as a tyre producer in India, giving a tough fight to the foreign companies Dunlop, Firestone snd Goodyear, who were producing tyres in India.
My brother is a pessimist, but as I had programmed our consulting company as the source of information on polymers in India, as I had obtained the rights to produce the world’s largest information source, RAPRA Abstracts, to be published and distributed in India, this was a logical extension of our work.
We moved the operation from Bombay to Madras and C. R. Das, the information officer, became a good addition to my local consulting team. His wife was a library scientist and she helped to organise our great library of Polymer books and information which I had transported back from England.
My brother also became more active as he had something constructive to do with the India rubber industry in India.
Unni interacted with both of us and he wanted to do more.
When his elder brother, B. C. Chandran, retired from the Shell Borneo Club and settled in Coimbatore, Unni asked my brother to set up a company to do soil and leaf testing for the rubber plantations to give vital fertiliser input information to the Indian planters. He wanted his brother to be the Managing Director of the new company. They started the new company but there was no motivator and it was just limping along.
(Chandran's two daughter married two brothers, sons of he Menon family who owned the Leela Lace Group.)
On one visit to India, Unni held a Board Meeting and he called me in as an observer. There he proposed that I eould be brought in as the Business Development Director of the company. The other Board members acceded to this demand, so I took over the job.
I revamped the company and not only did I expand the soil and leaf testing activities but having the best agronomists available to me I started a business of looking after farms. The first of those was the one belonging to the Raman Research Institute which had been created by the Nobel Laureate late Sir C. V. Raman out of some of the money he won when he got for his Nobel Prize. That work was a huge success and I got other local farms to manage.
However, I had to get back to my primary job, so I asked to be relieved of this responsibility of Agropolymers and it reverted to the original path of setting up standardised rubber production plants in Kerala.
The work of the information Centre of MRRDB had progressed well and India started to import rubber from Malaysia. The job was done and I withdrew into the background and let my brother let the friendship flourish.
Unni was a great scientist and an ever better politician. He developed the technique of doubling and trebling the flow of rubber latex from the rubber tree by applying ammonia to the tree trunk which stopped the clotting mechanism. He however held back this information as he knew it would have a dramatic effect on the plantation labour who would be retrenched. He ensured the plantation labour was gradually reduced so that when he released his research findings there was no panic.
It came as a shock to the international rubber industry, as a few years earlier he had made a speech in the US saying that natural rubber would become substantially cheaper than synthetic rubber. All had laughed at him but they later held their tongues.
He was awarded the Raman Magsaysay Award and the given many titles in Malaysia and finally the title of Tan Sri.
After heading the Rubber Research Institute, he then formed the Malaysian Rubber Research Board and the International Rubber Research Crntre in the UK. He then headed the International Rubber Industry and produced patent after patent. He later also headed the Palm Oil Research Institute in Malaysia.
He developed the DELINK process for chemical reclamation of used rubber. It was then he wrote to me and expressed how much he would have wanted my input in launching this novel technique.
It was the ultimate honour to be remembered by this great man.
When I moved to Finland, both Unni and his wife kept in touch occasionally. Unni was greatly impressed that I had mastered yet another field, Microelectronics.
It was a sad day when I heard of his passing in Chennai in 2006. As a friend he trusted me implicitly. My brother is what he is today because of the lifelong friendship of Unni and myself.
May my mentor rest in peace.
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