REMEMBERING ARUN GHOSH 89 and other forms of assistance, problems of vertical and horizontal planning, the administration of corporate laws. The arid format of secretariat routine could not cramp his style. An excellent team man, he was at the same time an adorable leader of men, inspiring both admiration and devotion. The colour of regimes changes from season to season, the bureaucratic parapharnelia though remains unchanged, as do the political pretensions. A good civil servant asks questions, offers advice, but, in the final round, he falls in. Arun Ghosh's capitulation to the forces of status quo always had a saving grace: he protested even as he conformed. Perhaps his courage was not infectious, but you could not put the blame for that on him, the hidebound system tends to make mice of even decent men most of the time. Arun Ghosh stood out as an exception. The thirtyfive years he spent in government, it now seems in retrospect, were just preparatory period. Quantity shifts into quality. An extraordinary change in his persona took place the moment he accepted the slot of Vice-Chairman in the West Bengal State Planning Board. The Left Front government was not yet quite respectable. To some at least, it was a bit of a scandal that a retired secretary to the Union government would work for the communists. Arun Ghosh could not care less. He was not an ideologue, nor was he terribly conversant with Marxist praxis. But his heart was in the right place. It is important to place on record another piece of datum. Although born a Bengali, he had never in the past lived in Bengal. No matter, he visited the remotest interior of each and everyone of the eighteen districts of West Bengal. He learnt at first hand of the problems and possibilities germane in ground reality. Himself no ideologue, he nonetheless listened with respect to ideologues and scarred veterans of people's struggles. The framework of democratic decentralisation, which he, in association with Satyabrata Sen, and fired by the inspiration provided by Benoy Chaudhury, put together, has stood West Bengal in good stead all this while. If for nothing else, Arun Ghosh deserves our salute for this achievement alone. That was however only the beginning of a hugely meaningful one and a half decades of his life. Ramakrishna Hegde invited him to join as a colleague in the Planning Commission during V.P. Singh's very brief tenure as Prime Minister. Arun Gosh, with typical exuberance, was readying himself to transfer to the national sphere some of the ideas of decentralised planning he had nurtured in the ambience of West Bengal. That was not to be. So what; a warrior does not rest. The nineties were perhaps the