The calm demeanour of Dr D Babu Paul, who passed away on Saturday, seldom betrayed the deep currents of knowledge running within his mind. He had an opinion on almost anything under the sun and he found no difficulty in conveying his mind to the learned and the uneducated. He did not hesitate to speak his mind.
The former additional chief secretary gave a thumbs-up to the Left Democratic Front on its anniversary, though he said that chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan could work on his image and body language. Curiously, he put forward K Karunakaran as a model Pinarayi could emulate.
Dr Babu Paul was the mentor emeritus of the Kerala Civil Service Academy for five years. He helped groom civil service aspirants from the state without taking any remuneration. He took on the assignment as a payback to his own confused youth. He always told the students that there was no substitute for hard work.
“I decided to write the IAS exam in 1962. I had no idea where to start or how to go about it. I consulted G Gopala Krishna Pillai, who was then training as an assistant collector in Kottayam after cracking the exam in 1961. (He later retired as PSC chairman),” Dr Babu Paul had said about his life-changing decision.
“I bought old question papers, from 1949 to 1961, from the book shop run by Swamy opposite the secretariat. I was helped in my studies by a history lecturer at Mar Ivanios College. He prescribed books for me to read. That was the beginning. Apart from Rao’s Study Circle in Delhi, IAS aspirants had nothing to rely other than K S Iyer’s Notes received by post from Madras,” he said.
He made a mark as an author as well. His ‘Vedashabdaratnakaram’ won more than a dozen awards, including the Kerala Sahitya Akademy Award and the Gundert Award from the International Society for Dravidian Linguistics. His service story, titled ‘Katha Ithuvare’, became a model for others.
His oeuvre spanned essays, travelogues and children’s literature. He teamed up with Dr C A Abraham and P Govinda Pillai to write ‘Achan, Acchan, Acharyan’, a biography.
He referred to the birth of his younger brother, K Roy Paul, as his first memory. “My first memory is a relative telling me that my younger brother was born. It was in 1944 and I was three years old. My father was a school headmaster. We lived on the campus. Those days no one went to a hospital for delivery. I was playing with the son of the school peon on the veranda when a relative told me that mother gave birth to a baby. I asked him whose mother. He told me Babu’s mother,” Dr Babu Paul wrote.
Idukki task
Dr Babu Paul was tasked with leading the nascent district of Idukki in 1972. “I nurtured the Idukki district,” he would say. “I went to Idukki first in 1971 August. The roads were riddled with potholes. I travelled by the Meenachilar River, rubber plantations and the dense forests. The toil of the farmers had blessed the valleys. The demand for an Idukki district was spontaneous. Someone argued for a Moovattupuzha district. Someone lobbied for a district of high-range areas. Consensus eluded on the choice of the district headquarters too. Thodupuzha, Kattappana, Nedumkandam and Munnar vied for the honour. This was the situation when the government became suddenly interested in the demand. The government approved a report submitted by revenue secretary A K K Nambiar. The order to form Idukki was issued on January 25, 1972. The order demanded me to assume the responsibilities of the district collector apart from my duty as the special collector of Idukki (hydroelectric) project.
“I was summoned from Moolamattom to Idukki to receive the order. I was told to set up the district administration within 24 hours. I returned to Kottayam by late evening. Raghunathan was the then Kottayam collector. We went in search for a building to set up the collector’s office. We chose a building near the Union Club. The building owner agreed to rent it to us on January 26. I raised the national flag on that building by 4 in the evening. I signed the papers to take charge as the district collector. A new district was born.”
Social critic
He was caustic while pointing a finger at the hypocrisy of his fellow men. “Charity is a great act. Charity is not about doing away with unwanted things, like waste disposal by a municipality. Charity is not unloading the leftovers from a birthday party at an orphanage. It is not donating a shirt you have overgrown. Charity is when you go to an orphanage and dine with them or when you invite those inmates to your house for a party. Give your most cherished clothes to the needy and that is charity.”
He was critical of the super speciality hospitals too. “Even starving people want to go to a five-star hospital when they fall ill. They want to consult a super specialist. We have many government medical college hospitals in Kerala but our political and religious leaders always depend on five-star private hospitals. Do not go to a specialist for every silly reason. We have to set up sophisticated medical equipment, including ventilators and scanning machinery, in all government hospitals.”
He was a devout Christian. He timed his day by prayers yet he shunned pilgrimages and festivals.