Obituary to Gautam Goswami

Gautam Goswami, a 1991 batch IAS officer and winner of the prestigious Time Magazine's "Young Asian Achiever Award" died of pancreatic cancer on 6th of january.

He was 41 and is survived by his doctor wife and two sons. Goswami, who is also an MBBS, was a resident of Dehri-on Sone in Bihar's Rohtas district and was an accused in the multi-crore Bihar flood relief scam.

I Visited his wife and kids with a friend of mine who knows them well.
I owed him this visit for a good gesture he once obliged me with.

Gautam had saved me from the wrath of an over enthusiastic Superintendent of police , Shobha Ahotkar, who was recently awarded a presidents medal.

He was the District Magistrate of Vaishali, my home district, in 2002 and I had met him for an arms licence, which he said he will look into.

later during elections, a candidate was shot on the booth, right opposite my house and i was taking him to the hospital.
DM and SP's cavalcade stopped me on the road, and found a bleeding body at my rear seat, the cop lady assumed me to be the culprit and dragged me by the collar.
it was that timely intervention from Gautam who recognised me, that I got a chance to explain myself and continue to the hospital, or else I would have been admitted my self.

For days till today I did follow his life. He was the gen next IAS officer, simple in lifestyle, but flamboyant in aspirations.
His bollywood style made him a hero in the media, who were looking for some good stories out of Bihar, He took the stories of the Media too seriously and started to beleve in them. He stopped Advani from speaking beyond the 10 PM deadline.

The citation read: "When flash floods hit the Indian state of Bihar in July, millions of people were displaced from their homes, many without access to food or drinking water.

A catastrophe was looming, and Gautam Goswami did more than anyone to avert it."

One Aravind Adiga authored the citation, the then South Asia correspondent of Time. It is one of the great ironies of fate that whereas the much lauded relief effort caused Gautam's fall from grace, embroiling him in charges of misappropriation of funds, the writer of the citation went on to win the Booker Prize last year for his debut novel, The White Tiger.

His drawing room is full of those plaques and engraved cups, As he rubbed shoulders with Shahrukh Khan to get the Time Hero of the year award. He aspired to get bigger than Big.
His Wife tells us he wanted to go really too far, bigger than he could do any thing here, join politics et al.

For some one no more, I shouldn't comment more.
But Gautam is not the only of his types. brilliant people loosing goals, a generation getting mugged by hype.
Don't they realise, some things are inevitable.