This column stays away from mentioning my family, but I must now make an exception. This is because my mother died last week, 12 years after my father. Never remotely famous, they were both exemplary parents. And there may be some other things to remember them by.

My parents belonged to a generation when one expressed one’s patriotism through quiet service rather than crude boastfulness. In what I write about them here, readers will recognise affinities with people they themselves knew, whether as parents, uncles, aunts, teachers or doctors, who likewise embodied the sort of decency and moral rectitude that run so thinly on the ground today.

My father, Subramaniam Rama Das Guha, was born in 1924, in a hill town once known as Ootacamund. Twenty-three years later, visiting the place of his

See Full Page