While writing this piece, I remember a quote on procrastination – “While we are postponing, life speeds by”. There is a reason for this remembrance because I lost an opportunity to meet a genius in his own right, simply because of procrastination! Of course, I can justify in so many ways, why I could not do it but now I realize that no justification stands as compared to what I have lost!

It was somewhere in September 2010, I was sitting with my dear friend and creative genius Subrata Bhowmick. He informed me that Dashrathbhai Patel was in Ahmedabad and both of us should meet him for a story on this multifaceted persona. But since I was busy with Nirman 2010, I deferred the meeting. Subsequently, I was busy with a national plumbing convention at Kolkata. Then, I got engrossed in an investment summit at Khajuraho. By the time I was free, it was Diwali and thereafter, I had the responsibility of making D-Cube a success. So, these are the valid justifications.

But I was unaware that while I was postponing the meeting with Dashrathbhai, his departure for his heavenly abode was speeding up! Suddenly, on December 1, 2010, came the news that, he was no more! It is at this moment that I realised the heavy price I paid for my procrastination! I wish I could have remembered the quote earlier. This could have avoided the loss of my meeting a product designer, a photographer, a ceramist, an exhibition designer, an artist and, above all, a down-to-earth gentleman — all bundled into one human being called Dashrath Patel!

I had heard a lot about him and read a lot about him. I had read a piece written by Sadanand Menon and also a beautiful tribute Chitra Padmanabhan has written. But all this is posthumous! I wish, we could have carried a story on him and could have shown a copy of Insite to him — all before December 1, 2010! But while I can only feel sorry for this loss, I also remember my pet idiom – 'Sorry can't make a dead man alive”!

At the same time, I also believe in “better late than never” and hence, we (Subrata Bhowmick, Pinakin Patel, Ravin Vasavda, Shrikant Nivasarkar, Parmanand Dalwadi, Roopa Sabnis Pinge and, of course, myself) are working on a story on the life and legacy of Dashrath Patel – a thinker in the visual realm…