OBITUARY: Nirupam Sen – A Sage who worked as a Diplomat

Nirupam Sen who passed away on 2 July 2017, was a phenomenon even in his college days. We were in the same college (St. Stephen’s) and he was two years my junior. But already in his very first year as an undergraduate, the whole college knew about his formidable erudition and held him in high regard. And I remember an occasion when Nirupam was in his final year of B.A. on which I had gone to meet Robert Saheb, the Head Clerk of the college, who was an extraordinarily kind, wise and efficient person; and he had told me: ‘Nirupam will be the next Rhodes Scholar from our college.’ Nirupam however, rather surprisingly, did not come to Oxford, and did not even pursue the academic career that everybody had expected him to pursue. He entered instead the world of diplomacy by qualifying for the Indian Foreign Service.