“Ab akhaade mein kood gayi hain, toh kushti toh ladni padegi”, was the advice given to me by Ravish in mid-2018. I had been asked by my party to become the in-charge of the East Delhi Parliamentary constituency and prepare for the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. Having spent much of my time in the Aam Aadmi Party in behind-the-scenes policy work, I was not sure whether I was ready for a transition to electoral politics. As with many difficult personal and political decisions in my life, I turned for advice to one of my oldest and closest friends, Ravish Tiwari.
Ravish and I had been friends since 2005 when as twenty-somethings we had gone to Oxford University as Rhodes Scholars. Even then, Ravish’s passion was to understand Indian society, economy and politics; his sharp and irreverent analysis peppered many weekend dinners where he used to cook tehri for his friends. He talked about going into politics and when the 2007 Uttar Pradesh elections began inching closer, he decided that he couldn’t watch from a distance and needed a ring-side view of the same. He came back to India after completing his Masters in Comparative Social Policy and joined the Indian Express in September 2006. He felt that being a journalist could give him an insight into Indian politics, and maybe even help provide an entry point into it.
He took to journalism with gusto. From his very first beat where he used to cover agriculture and panchayati raj, Ravish hit the ground running. His writing was never constrained by any pre-existing frameworks but based on intensive groundwork into policies and politics. I am not sure when his passion shifted from politics to journalism but interestingly, my own journey from working on education and rural development brought me to India Against Corruption and then the Aam Aadmi Party. Over a lunch in October 2013 in the run-up to AAP’s first Delhi election, I commented to Ravish, “Who would have thought when we came back from Oxford that I – and not you – would be in politics?” His tongue-in-cheek response came within seconds, “If I had joined politics, I would have been in serious politics!” But when AAP won 28 seats in that election, he was the first to concede that he had not spent enough time on the ground in Delhi to assess the political transformation that had taken place.
This is who Ravish was — eager to learn, never embarrassed to admit his lack of understanding of an issue, ready to listen to every voice on a subject and then form his own opinion, an opinion that was unencumbered by fashionable frameworks. He was ever ready with his sharp, analytical lens — James Bond movies were subject to the same scrutiny as the political decisions of Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Ravish’s own life journey was inspirational. From a small town in Eastern UP, he got admission to the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, in Basti District. The school was new and had very limited infrastructure, but Ravish was clearly committed to bettering his life and stuck on. After Class 12, he moved away from home to Allahabad to take coaching classes for the IIT-JEE exam. That is when he learned to cook his signature dishes — tehri, mirchi waali daal and matar sauté — that many of us ate over the years. In 2000, he got admission to IIT Bombay for a dual B.Tech-M.Tech degree in Metallurgy. That Ravish was always ready to walk his own path was evident even in his decision not to follow the MS-MBA-Consulting route that most of his batchmates took, but to shift to public policy. From Basti district to Oxford University to becoming the National Bureau Chief of the Indian Express, Ravish was a self-made man who shaped his own destiny.
As a friend and human being, Ravish was loyal and generous to a fault. He was the friend who would show up at 3 am if you needed help. He was the older brother who always found time to mentor a young cousin who told him she was lonely while studying abroad. Even while he was battling cancer, he found the emotional bandwidth to support others. I remember when he was admitted to Max hospital a few months ago for the administration of a new chemotherapy drug, he spent much of his time counselling a young cancer patient and her family, telling them not to lose hope in the fight against the disease.
No remembrance of Ravish would be complete without acknowledging his brave and wonderful wife, Pujya. A successful professional from the publishing field, Pujya put her entire life on a back-burner and stood like a rock with Ravish while he battled cancer for the last two years. Ravish breathed his last in the early hours of February 19. While the country lost a stellar journalist, I lost one of my dearest friends.
As I write this piece, my Twitter timeline is showing stories about the last two phases of UP elections, and it breaks my heart to think that I will never hear Ravish’s sharp, grounded and irreverent analysis of Indian politics again; to realise that I will not have the counsel of my friend, my political advisor, my sharpest critic when I have a difficult political decision to make. Ravish, you will always be missed.
This column first appeared in the print edition on February 25, 2022 under the title ‘Ravish, my friend’. The writer is an MLA and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party.
