As usual I am writing to you on the eve of Professor's birthday. He laid a solid foundation for literary studies and inculcated in his students a sense of commitment to teaching and to defending the values of literature, at a time when teaching was losing its charm because of the emphasis on research and extension and literature was considered secondary to the acquisition of language skills. The result was research became derivative and the dream of proficiency in language skills remains unfulfilled.

Our Professor was a shining example of one who considered teaching and research as inseparable twins. He had further a broad humanitarian vision that made him lovable and personally fulfill the message his alter ego communicates in his novel The Farewell Party, "Professors are lovable!" To this day at SV University, which I visited last in the first week of May before leaving for the US, people remember his contribution as man, scholar and teacher. They express grave anxiety about the contemporary drift.

6th September is Professor's birthday and I have always been writing to you on that day year after year recalling my association with him. He was not only an outstanding teacher but one who exemplified the humane approach. That was what endeared him to his students. He lectures were steeped in scholarship but at the same time there was a remarkable lucidity in them that riveted the attention of his students.

I had the pleasure not only of close association with him but of critically analyzing him from an aesthetic distance and writing on his Milton criticism, and with equal felicity, on his creative writing. 2020 is his centenary year and we are exploring possibilities of collaborating with universities in celebrating the centenary by organizing a seminar on his works as also on other Indian writers in English.

Today is Professor's birthday. He completes 100 today, which is a landmark event for his students, especially for me to celebrate in words. He was a great teacher who inspired generations of his students by his abundant love, profound scholarship, and astonishing ability to place before the student the essence of a complex subject in a nutshell. He taught us Othello and imprinted on our minds the idea of the tragedy of the handkerchief. His engagement with Shakespeare and Milton gave him a philosophical disposition, which he used to amplify and illustrate in the classroom much to the pleasure and profit of the students who felt enriched by those stimulating thoughts and found in him a torchbearer who was showing them a higher path to traverse in addition to the path to the profession for which they received sound, unadulterated training too. Not for Prof. Rama Sarma "the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world".

He was never absent for a day from his classes, never unpunctual. The British tradition of scholarly demeanor must have made its impact on him for a lifetime, apart from his own uncultivated grace and uprightness of conduct. His innate nature added luster to his careful nurture under S L Bethell of Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Imagination fame. For otherwise, how do you account for The Heroic Argument and The Farewell Party? The other allurements of the profession never attracted him and deterred him from his steadfast devotion to teaching. Either when he expounded the Miltonic doctrine, "Just are the ways of God / And justifiable to men" or when he interpreted Samson's "I must not quarrel with the will / Of higher dispensation", the students caught in his reverberating voice a rare conviction which he so enticingly transmitted that the moral being of the student was shaped too, along with his mind. I am personally deeply beholden to him for his and your mother's abund2ance of love.

Today is the day when I recall my cherished association with our beloved Professor whose eloquence in the classroom swept the students off their feet to make them part of an enchanted circle. His lectures were scholarly, but laced with humor they no longer retained their scholarly abstractness and rigor. They were therefore always looked up to with enthusiasm. The classroom was also a kind of pulpit for Professor from where he taught his students morals and manners and the ethics of public conduct and the teaching profession. Since most students would turn into teachers, Professor's implicit aim was to strengthen their analytical, interpretive abilities so that in their classroom in their turn they would successfully employ some of those techniques.

His aim was to place the text being taught in its historical background which involved understanding the events and experiences surrounding the work, especially the life of the author and the influences on his craft. These findings were used to interpret that work of literature. That is the reason why, while teaching Milton, Professor laid emphasis on the great chain of being and in the case of Bernard Shaw on the evolutionary movement of the "life force" and the Ibsenian drama of ideas. He always envisioned Shakespeare as in the midst of the University Wits, Kyd, Marlowe and Ben Jonson. As much as his scholarship, Professor's deep humanity influenced his students so much that he remained enshrined in their memories. We unfailingly remember him on his birthday and on this day go down the memory lane to capture some precious moments of our association with him.

As you know, it is customary for me to write to you on Professor's birthday to share with you my thoughts about him. As a teacher he remains ever enshrined in his students' memory. He had a way of presenting abstruse thought either on Milton or on Shakespeare in a lucid manner so that the dullest of students could make some meaning out of it. His lectures, interspersed with his gentle humour, added to the easy comprehensibility of the subject matter he was dealing with. But for the first five minutes of warming up during which he devoted his time to inculcating a sense of discipline in the students and training their sensibility, he never wasted his time in the class on inanities.

He was not one of those "light half believers of our casual creeds". The Miltonic sense of vocation never left him. In the world of scholarship he will remain one of our foremost scholars with his Heywood: A Prose Shakespeare, Heroic Argument, Things Unattempted, Harmony Restored, and Milton and the Indian Epic Tradition which continue to be well received in academic circles. In the field of creative writing, The Stream seeking to discover the hidden soul of harmony, The Farewell Party appearing in a stream of consciousness, and The Bliss of Life devoted to unfolding the mundane in the beatific, among others, will continue to make interesting reading for their thematic concerns and for the philosophical exposition they offer. Let me take this opportunity to share with you my review of The Bliss of Life published quite some time ago. Professor's eloquence in the classroom and in a public lecture and his unadulterated love of his students made him an endearing person for the student community who adored his scholarship, affection, integrity and sterling character.

6th September is Professor' birthday and naturally we reflect on this day on his contribution as a teacher and scholar and to his students' career, and their making as men, scholars and teachers. Professor was a passionate and peerless teacher who by example taught his students the value of a conscientious approach to teaching, living, and career-making. Most of Prof Rama Sarma's students became teachers not entirely because life deprived them of other opportunities or they lacked the spirit of challenge, but they sought to model themselves after him.

He was a model man too to emulate because he knew no guile and was full of hope, cheer, love and optimism which he instantly communicated to his students. The parameters of this kind of an influence can't be defined nor can we measure its pervasiveness. That is the value to society of a teacher whose professional ethics and integrity are innate to him, rather than cultivated graces. We realize how we miss such a precious gift to society in today's world of rank opportunitism and commercialism.

It is Professor's birthday today. Professor's love for his students was unbounded and it cut across, in the most democratic vein, distinctions of all kinds. He taught Milton and Shakespeare combining passion for teaching and for the two authors. His lectures, filled with humour, were aimed not only at teaching the authors / texts he assigned himself but at "enlivening morality with wit and to temper wit with morality" (the function of The Spectator) without being didactic in tone.

He was fond of the British University system and tried to enlighten his students on the uniqueness of that academic ambience but to the detriment of the American educational mode which had its own distinction. I had a particularly loving and lasting relationship with him which I cherish with deep admiration for him.

Here I am once again, observing my annual ritual of paying obeisance to my revered teacher, Prof Rama Sarma, on his birthday, 6th September. I joined the Department as a student in late July 1966, and thus this is the year of my diamond jubilee association with the Department and with Prof Rama Sarma. He was an extraordinary human being and a multifaceted personality, a teacher of rare dedication, a distinguished scholar and critic, a creative writer with a humane vision and a lively outlook on life, an acknowledged public speaker, and above all, a remarkably affable human being.

For him, writing was a form of living that helped his inner sustenance, and he continued with it, especially with writing passionately on Milton, till almost his end. Writing is regarded as a kind of inner cleansing, and in the context of his passion for writing, I am reminded of the lines, "Art washes away from the soul / The dust of everyday life." Prof Rama Srama could, at his first encounter, present a stern exterior, but as Shakespeare so aptly reminds us, one must not judge the "inward man" by his "outward habit". Beneath his hard exterior resided a heart of tenderness and compassion, which his students could discover in no time. His scholarship commanded respect, but it was his humanity that inspired affection. On his birthday, I remember him with profound gratitude, reverence, and affection. Having carried forward his academic legacy, carrying his memory forward is a blessing and a privilege.