{"id":136,"date":"2009-01-28T05:27:23","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T05:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naresh.blogsome.com\/2009\/01\/28\/the-passing-of-r-venkatraman\/"},"modified":"2009-01-28T05:27:23","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T05:27:23","slug":"the-passing-of-r-venkatraman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/the-passing-of-r-venkatraman\/","title":{"rendered":"The passing of R Venkatraman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read of passing of former Indian President R Venkatraman somewhere hidden inside Rediff news on the second tab. Perhaps he wasn&#8217;t celebrity enough.<\/p>\n<p>I have two personal memories of him:<\/p>\n<p>One, when he passed by in a closed government car in the &#8216;hospital daara&#8217; (area in front of STNM hospital) of Gangtok, Sikkim in 1987 as we, as children, stood watching, most with a little paper Tricolor in our hands.<\/p>\n<p>Second, when he walked past us in December 2001, wearing a traditional white shirt and weshti, and a red shawl over his shoulders, at the Kalahasti temple near Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. I was on a temple tour of South India taking my parents and elder sister on a pilgrimage right after their surgeries. Sri Kalahasti is one of the five temples celebrating Lord Shiva as the embodiment of the 5 elements &#8211; with &#8216;air&#8217; being the element under worship here, thus referred to as &#8216;Vayu Lingam&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Ramaswamy Venkatraman passed away at the age of 98.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read of passing of former Indian President R Venkatraman somewhere hidden inside Rediff news on the second tab. Perhaps he wasn&#8217;t celebrity enough. I have two personal memories of him: One, when he passed by in a closed government &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/the-passing-of-r-venkatraman\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india-places"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/naresh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}