Subhas Roy, who passed away last night, nine months short of a century, was Kolkata’s quintessential “Man for all seasons”. A contributor to the editorial pages of The Statesman on matters of the economy, his interests extended far beyond economic and corporate affairs. He was a polymath, and his enormous familiarity with science and the arts, in particular, across several genres, benefitted his friends, old and young who were amazed by his incredible authority.
Painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, cinema, theatre, photography, music – Indian and western classical – Subhasda as he was universally called, could and would hold discourses with his acolytes, the writer included, with great felicity, equally at home in English and Bengali. Nothing that he said went over one’s head.
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He was equally willing to learn about everything, from AI to food; about the new eateries and even fashion, latching on to the views of younger friends like a youngster keen to soak up knowledge. This was what he did in the second innings of his life, as it were.
The first and corporate innings saw him in leadership positions in several companies, including Shaw Wallace, where he paid the price for taking on financial delinquencies, much like the protagonist in Robert Bolt’s timeless Tudor morality play. The never-say-die entrepreneur in him then launched a multinational foreign exchange company with considerable success before he decided to hand over the reins to younger hands, as he chose to focus on scholarship and social causes and live up to his reputation of being a raconteur par excellence. Sharp-witted and ready with his recalls, his stories of corporate Calcutta and the box wallah culture were engaging to say the least, as were his many tiffs with authority, including that with his club where he played golf.
Feisty till the very end, the last years were largely spent analysing numbers around the economic mess that India was being driven into… about debts and deficits and the disharmony being injected into the system. Possibly the last of the Mohicans, nothing could wither his keenness to learn nor impart his scholarship, his zest for life, which began with his youthful dalliance with Trotskyism, several minor brushes with the law in pre-independent India, or his ability to crack just the right joke at the right time, including some wonderful ones about himself.
