One of the great Raja Rao’s slighter works is called Comrade Kirillov: it is what Graham Greene would have called an ‘entertainment’, as opposed to the ‘novels’ he wrote on themes of some gravity. I was reminded of the title in an altogether inappropriate way when I read of the assassination of General Kirillov in Moscow, allegedly by Ukrainian secret agents.
Then I read of the tragic suicide of Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower and former employee at OpenAI, surely the most glamorous company in Silicon Valley these days.
There is a thread here: it is not good for your health if you expose certain people or certain companies. You will pay a price.
You may just be minding your own business, but you happen to be in the way. This is what happened to Indian nuclear and space scientists over the last few decades. Homi Bhabha’s plane crashed in the Swiss Alps. Vikram Sarabhai died mysteriously at Halcyon Castle, Trivandrum, close to the space center that now bears his name.
Dozens of lesser-known Indian space and nuclear scientists and engineers died too, inexplicably. The same thing happened to Iranian nuclear scientists. Nambi Narayanan was lucky to escape with his life (“Who killed the ISRO’s cryogenic engine?”), though his career and reputation were ruined.
My friend Dewang Mehta of NASSCOM died quite suddenly too. I wrote a tribute to him years ago, “The man who knew marketing”. In hindsight, I think he was a friend, not just an acquaintance. I remember some very human details about him: eg. he asked a mutual friend to introduce eligible women to him, just as I did. But I digress: I believe Dewang was as important to the Indian IT story as Bhabha and Sarabhai to nuclear and space: they made us believe, and we rose to the occasion.
