One recent evening, I drove under a pedestrian bridge that arcs over the highway in Juinagar, New Bombay. That word “arc” is deliberate. Because this bridge, it really is one, as if sliced from a circle. And as I drove under it, I had a sudden lump in my throat.
For that Juinagar bridge was designed and built by a man I knew was then in the ICU, close to death. As I said to his son when I got home, “I both felt incredibly proud that I know him, and had inadvertent tears in my eyes as the bridge passed overhead.”
That man was Shirish Patel, who died on December 20.
Shirish’s accomplishments would fill books. The Juinagar bridge. The Kemp’s Corner flyover. A hangar at Bombay’s airport. A software package to calculate airline fares. A thoughtfully and rigorously designed solar cooking pot. An alternate plan for the proposed redevelopment of Worli’s BDD Chawl, that allowed for more light and play areas. He would already, I know well, be mildly annoyed by a list this long, and likely even more annoyed if I listed even more. But for me, two of those six epitomised the man. Bear with me, Shirish, as I explain.
The Juinagar bridge, again. While most such bridges in this city are staid, stolid, nondescript structures, this one is spare and elegant. It soars over the traffic. There’s more to it too – the inlaid tiles on the steps, the triangular facets under its arch, the way it seems to almost uncoil on the sides, down to the ground. I don’t know if passing motorists give it more than a glance. But if they do, I suspect they gasp, just as I do. For it really is a gentle, beautifully imagined arc.
That was Shirish. Utility and necessity for the users of whatever he produced were themes that drove his thinking, his work. But these were themes not divorced, in his mind, from aesthetics. So it’s a gentle staircase up the Juinagar bridge – thus the slow uncoiling – recognising that climbing stairs tires out people. But the bridge is also nearly a work of art, and there was a purpose there too. Instead of taking their chances with the highway traffic below, people should actually want to climb and use the bridge. Shirish believed that would happen, if it was also a thing of beauty.
And the software. I returned to India in 1992 with a degree in computer science and several years of programming in the United States. Soon after, I met Shirish and he suggested I join his small software firm that (I thought) largely supported his civil engineering practice.
He actually introduced me to the staff as a “software whiz”. After all, I had the degree and the experience. My first assignment was to expand a programme produced for travel agents. Given a route – say Bombay-Abu Dhabi-London-New York and back – the programme would apply one or more of various arcane airline ticketing rules (the “Higher Intermediate Point” comes to mind) and produce a fare. The package already did pretty much everything it needed to; Shirish wanted me to check how it coped with more obscure routes, add some code which would explain which rules it had applied and why, etc. Tweaks, really.
Shirish wrote the programme, using C. This is a programming language I had learned at university a decade earlier and been using regularly. In contrast, Shirish had taught himself C over the previous year or so. When I sifted through his code to understand it so I could make the tweaks, I realised that the real software whiz here was someone else. His code was kind of like his Juinagar flyover: efficient, but also spare and elegant. Entirely on his own, at nearly three times my age when I started, this man Shirish had learned programming and was now streets ahead of me in the practice.
That was Shirish, again. Faced with a task for which he didn’t have the tools, he simply went out and learned them. Yet of course, he did have the greatest tool of all: the humility and willingness to learn.
I got to know Shirish in the early 1970s, when my father headed CIDCO, the Maharashtra government agency charged with planning New Bombay. Knowing of Shirish’s work, he asked him to set aside his private practice temporarily and join the team. It was a moment both men always remembered with respect and affection, the start of a close lifelong friendship that has spread through our families. Shirish put it this way at a memorial for my father in 2007: “Looking back, the one thing that stands out is what he said when I joined CIDCO. He shook my hand and said ‘Welcome to public service’. It doesn’t sound like anything much, but [I understood] that being a government servant was almost incidental. What mattered was public service.”
That was Shirish, yet again. He had so many interests and talents that our colleague KS Sridhar – who was on that small software team too – always liked calling him a renaissance man. But maybe above all those was this remarkable talent: Shirish was a man who thought constantly, through all he did, about the public good. So when I say of you, Shirish, that you were a “good man”, there's more to that expression than meets the eye.
John Donne wrote: “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ... our best men with thee do go ... One short sleep past, we wake eternally/And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Shirish Patel was one of those, the very best of men. Death for him? Be not proud. Because many of us know: he wakes eternally.
Dilip D’Souza is a writer based in Mumbai. His latest book is Roadwalker: A Few Miles on the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
Shrish B Patel wrote frequently for Scroll. Read his work here.
