His uniqueness lay in his affable personality: Bikash D Niyogi

Popularly and lovingly known as Chennai’s own Book Man, Padmanabhan had a wide range of interests and his multi-faceted career graph, gentle demeanour and genteel behaviour attracted me most. His career can be called ‘action-packed’, to say the least. He had worked with an automobile company in Kolkata for a while, employed at a bookshop; run a bookshop; owned a publishing house; been a distributor for other publishers; started the prestigious Madras Book Club; and brought out the Indian Review of Books, a highly respected journal. He had lived and worked in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai – a fact which reveals the extent of his capability to adapt to change.

For me, it is a personal loss as well, as I have lost an old associate. I have had a fairly long association with Padmanabhan and knew him closely for almost the last seven years. I knew him to be a person of great knowledge and was always attracted by his depth of thought and engaging personality.

A passionate lover of the written word - books in particular - his uniqueness according to me, lay in his gracious, affable personality. He was someone who I strongly believe, had not a single negative trait in him. I remember him as a gentleman of all good qualities, an extremely reasonable and practical person in all walks of life, a warm, genial personality and also a ‘family man’ in the truest sense of the term. At the time of his retirement from Westland exactly two years ago – his brainchild – he had said that he would be reading more books and playing with his grandchild.