It was late evening on a cloudy day in our village. I had seen the last patient off and I hoped that there wont be others. As an intern posted to the VGKK tribal hospital in BR Hills, I had travelled some 80-odd km south of Mysore (where I had recently completed my final year MBBS training to become a doctor). These were community medicine postings, compulsory for MBBS graduates as part of their 1 year internship. A borrowed Yamaha RXG 135, a desire to watch “new” birds from wet forests in the western ghats (some of whom but not all occur in BR Hills), and strong local friendships with people who were typically teachers at the school. These were part of the growing fascination with the hills, that eventually made me stay there for years, and resulted in what is possibly a lifelong relationship with the hills, its people, its forests and the widlife.
These were the age of friendships for me, many made then stay on….Umesh, who introduced me to the wonder of birds, before I met (Sálim) Ali (intriguingly, Umesh used to have an online handle hakimali which has its own origin story) or (David) Attenborough. In course of our friendship, lo and behold, those latin names in PU bio, which were only for quiz trivia or competitive exam material acquired a life of their own in my head as i discovered the world of natural-history through travels with him to Gopalaswamy Betta, BR Hills, Coorg, Ooty and such on our borrowed RXG and later on his RX135…..At BR Hills, I met an amazing doctor with whom i used to have reflective birding walks. Many of my classmates and juniors from MMC later used to visit me as i chose to become the medical officer at VGKK hospital thanks to the lazily fulfulling life i found here……and among these several friendships I discovered was Ganesh Subramaniam.
Lets return to that evening on a cloudy day in BR Hills, where a friend of mine who was posted to teach ITI in BR Hills, and often my companion for walks, birds and treks dropped in to check if would join him to visit “Ganesh-avaru“. This was sometime in 2003 and by then I was used to visiting his place either during lunch breaks at hospital (i would quickly zip across to his house WATAPI and he would always offer me fresh coffee from seeds grounded and roasted by him), or on cloudy evenings where I was told he may even offer a “drink”, if the conversation went well. 🙂 He was much older to me and had the air of scholarship and wisdom that life tends to give unfairly to some – he got a fair share of this. :).
It was a house which was heavily lived (he was a bachelor), set in a coffee estate which he himself made and maintained when he came to the hills in the early 90s. Conversation with him was always eclectic – on radio waves, astronomy, birds, wildlife, Africa, C V Raman, IISC, DRDO, humidifiers, radio antennas, internet culture (internet as we know it was new!), SETI, telescopes, optics, newton’s laws, quantum physics, neurobiology, notions of time and what it means for a person in BR Hills vs someone in Germany, lay ethnography and of course unkal-type jokes (tht’s what i used to call it until recently i realised i am that uncle now!)….the man was an auto-didact, a practitioner-academic (he could teach you radio waves & astronomy with the same gusto with which he could set up his own telescopes or ham radios).
For a doctor like me in what people often called “stuck in the middle of nowhere” both physically and career-wise at the time, these meetings with Ganesh were something i looked forward to. I brought patient anecdotes to him, lamentations on why our “health system” does not seem to care, we laid praise on our scientists and shared frustrations on elected representatives, aired grouses on local baddies (village gossip)….unknowingly, my inner fascination for being a generalist (instead of a specialist) got formed and triggered through those early conversations. Ganesh for me was a living and practicing generalist – he resisted the urge to become a deep expert in 1 thing but rather sought networked learning. That did not mean he was NOT an expert in anything. He was an expert of many but the expertise was of a kind that spread as wide as it sought depth.
Over those years from 2001/2 (when I first met him) to 2007 when I left for Antwerp for higher studies, I kept in close touch with him as my own public health journey unfolded as the birds and nat-history took a bit of a back-seat. Towards the later par tof this time, the (then) President Kalam visited the hills in a visit that was in total contrast with a later President who came and went (see my letter to President Kovind)…I moved on to pursuits in public health that took me to Bangalore, across Karnatakas districts strengthening primary health care and such, PhD pursuits in Tumkur, a wee bit to Arunachal Pradesh both visiting birds & wildlife friends, but also looking for public health data…..I never realised I too might(?) have left a small impact on Ganesh? Sometime in 2007 or such he started sending me photographs of birds and willdlife for ID via email, and he began his own natural-history documetnation (see his Flickr album below that is largely birds!)!
The story of Kunta the one-legged Grey Wagtail comes to mind which he even wrote up on migration watch initiative (which wound up I think so I am not finding his own wonderful note on that Grey Wagtail individual he was able to track over 3 migration seasons thanks to its one-leg)! Upon my suggestion to try out eBird, he tried that out too and even followed articles on Birdcount India., often writing to me with some of the bird ID artilces he used to read and follow.
Here was a man who was well past his “retirement” after having lived several decades career making and selling high-end radio tracking and electronic equipment to research and defence organsiations in India in a time and age when these were unknown to many, he had done his bit and moved to the hills for his “retirement”, and well into this, he was experimenting with new hobbies, was reading and learning and was up and ahead of the times! In fact, my dial-up connection in BR Hills was the 2nd one, his being the first ever BSNL dial-up connetion in the hills pre-dating mine in 2002. Imagine running programs like SETI@home (which he introduced to me too and I ran for several years) on a dial-up connection, which he did. Together we saw the advent of the leased line dial-up number(?) 172226 which replaced the longer number we had to dial earlier and internet connections became more stable, modems got better and the Internet eventually exploded and so did Ganesh’s ability to absorb this.
In 2014, when Tanya and I returned to the hills to restart work that continues to this day, i reconnected with him with great excitement. we restarted our meetings although work kept me busy. I met him much less frequently, but this time it was my turn to pick up his hobby. Ham Radio. Althoguh in my phase 1 in the hills, he did mention much about this, it had not stuck a chord. But by 2015 or such, i had a strong desire to get my own ham radio license and as the possibly only other ham operator in Chamarajangar district (not sure), and perhaps the only one for decades in the district, he responded with child-like enthusiasm. Gave me a tour and a lesson on setting up a shack, enrolled me onto a WhatsApp group for learning morse code which I was complaining about but is a pre-requisite for the license, and eventually after much drudgery, i finally applied for my own license and got my own ham radio license. His joy was unbounded. even as i struggled to set up my BitX and raise an antenna for it in my temporary accommodation, Ganesh in his 80s by then and living a good life while caring for his medical conditions (which he dismisse as minor) would drive up to my place and spend hours helping me plan my shack. And when I recently had to mvoe to Mysore, he offered to connect me with Mysore hams who could help me with the antenna jobs.
Listen to Ganesh outline the early days of Ham Radio in India in 1950s to present day in this webinar, hosted by the Bangalore Amateur Radio Club (BARC). Until recently he used to do a daily CW net from his station in BR Hills, and goes on to share about the 1950s & 60s when he and others used to home-brew ham radios with vacuum tubes and transmit almost always using CW (morse code), often scavenging for old electronics in junk shops, grinding quartz crystals with Colgate toothpaste to reach specific frequencies and the transition to WW 2 military surplus equipments which transformed the scene later….and over to the present days. His ham radio career spanned these many decades – his license from 1962(?)!
Listen to his interview to QSO today from 2019 detailing his ham radio journey starting in 1959, and his tenure as editor of the Amateur Radio Society of India’s Ham Radio News.
Such was his joie-de-vivre, his child-like enthusiasm for learning and listening that he carried right through his life, living a quiet but fulfilling life in the hills (he called it B R Hillsu and often signed off his emails earlier as: If got made earth in 7 days, BR Hills took a while longer), a man deeply in love with solitude left us to find our own solitude on December 2, 2025. (He shared his birthday on Aug 2 co-incidentally with a very dear friend of mine which further created some kind of a bond for me with him).
Will always remember Ganesh and I’d like to think that a small bit of his joy lives in me. And I hope I can pass it on other others….
Ganesh Subramaniam (Aug 2, 1935 – Dec 2, 2025)
* Silent key – ham speak for a ham radio user who has passed on and hence is a silent key
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