Malli Mastan Babu, an Indian mountaineer who won fame as the first South Asian to scale the highest peak on each of the seven continents, and who had been missing in the Andes since late March, was found dead on Friday. He was 40.
India’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, announced on Sunday that Mr. Babu’s body had been found in the border region between Argentina and Chile. With the body was a bag containing a copy of the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, and an Indian flag.
Mr. Babu was known as one of the world’s fastest summiteers. In just 172 days, from Jan. 19 to July 10, 2006, he climbed the world’s tallest peaks on seven continents: Aconcagua in South America, McKinley in North America, Elbrus in Europe, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Kosciuszko in Australia, Everest in Asia and Vinson Massif in Antarctica.
In 2008, he trekked from Everest to Kanchenjunga, covering nearly 680 miles of the world’s highest terrain in 75 days. As was the case with most of his adventures, he did it alone.
Once asked in a radio interview why he preferred to travel alone, he said, “Simply because it would be difficult for other climbers and trekkers to match my pace.”
Mr. Babu was born Sept. 3, 1974, into a poor family of fishermen in Gandhi Jana Sangam, a village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He was the youngest of five children.
His survivors include his mother, two brothers and two sisters.
Mr. Babu was a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta. He had worked as a software engineer for three years.
He said his interest in mountaineering was inspired by a statue of a boyhood hero, Lt. M. Uday Bhaskar Rao, who died at an elevation of more than 26,000 feet during an Indian Army expedition on Everest in 1985. Lieutenant Rao was a fellow alumnus of a military school Mr. Babu attended as a youngster. As an 11-year-old, he said, he would stand before the statue, “awe-struck.”
In Kolkata, Mr. Babu formed an adventure club and organized trekking, skiing, rock climbing, rafting and meditation courses in the western Himalayas. He also lectured on leadership and management in India, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
R. K. Laxman, Cartoonist Who Amused India for Decades, Dies at 93
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R.K. Laxman in an undated photo. His character, the Common Man, is pictured behind him in a checkered shirt.CreditPress Trust of India, via Associated Press
R. K. Laxman, a fixture of Indian society whose satirical comic strip featuring a character he called the Common Man appeared daily on the front page of The Times of India for more than five decades, died on Jan. 26 in the western Indian city of Pune. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by his son, Srinivas.
The Common Man was the star of “You Said It,” which Mr. Laxman created in 1951. Wearing a dhoti and a checkered coat, with a bushy mustache, a few wisps of hair, a bulbous nose on which perched a pair of glasses, and thick eyebrows that were permanently raised, the Common Man observed the contradictions, ironies and paradoxes of the world around him with a bewildered look but without ever uttering a word.
Political hypocrisy was Mr. Laxman’s favorite target. The Indian National Congress Party bore the brunt of his satire over the years because it was in power longer than any other party, but he spared no leader, however powerful.
“I am grateful to my leaders for keeping my profession flourishing,” he once remarked. “Alarmingly, the politicians walk, talk and behave as though they were modeling perpetually for the cartoonist.”
Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Laxman was born in the state of Mysore on Oct. 24, 1921. His father was a headmaster, his mother a homemaker. He had a sister and six brothers, one of whom, R. K. Narayan, went on to become a leading novelist and short-story writer.
“I do not remember wanting to do anything else except draw,” Mr. Laxman wrote in his autobiography, “The Tunnel of Time” (1998). He drew with chalk on the floors, walls and doors of his house and, when he learned to wield a pen and pencil, added beards, mustaches and shaggy eyebrows to photographs and sketches in books and magazines. At school, he drew caricatures of his teachers, who, instead of chiding him, encouraged his talent.
While studying at the University of Mysore, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, political science and economics, he began contributing political cartoons to various publications. His first full-time job was withThe Free Press Journal in Mumbai. Six months later he joined The Times of India.
His marriage to the dancer and actress Kumari Kamala ended in divorce. In addition to his son, his survivors include his wife, Kamala Laxman, a writer of children’s stories.
Mr. Laxman also wrote short stories, essays and travel pieces, as well as the novels “The Hotel Riviera” (1988) and “The Messenger” (1993) and his autobiography.
In 2005, he received the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award. Among his other honors is a statue of the Common Man in Pune.
Kailash Satyarthi (born 11 January 1954) is an Indian children's rights activist and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.[1] He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (lit. Save the Childhood Movement) in 1980 and has acted to protect the rights of 80,000 children.[3][4]
He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Malala Yousafzai, "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".[5][6]
Kailash Satyarthi was born on 11 January 1954 in the Vidisha district of Madhya Pradesh. He studied electrical engineering[7] at Samrat Ashok Technological Institute (SATI) in Vidisha and then pursued post-graduate studies in high-voltage engineering. He then taught as a lecturer at a college in Bhopal for a few years.[8]
In 1980, he gave up his career as a teacher and became secretary general for the Bonded Labor Liberation Front; he also founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Mission) that year.[9][10] He has also been involved with theGlobal March Against Child Labor[11] and its international advocacy body, the International Center on Child Labor and Education (ICCLE),[12] which are worldwide coalitions of NGOs, teachers and trades unionists.[13][14] He has also served as the President of the Global Campaign for Education, from its inception in 1999 to 2011, having been one of its four founders alongside ActionAid, Oxfam and Education International.[15]
In addition, he established Rugmark (now known as Goodweave) as the first voluntary labelling, monitoring and certification system of rugs manufactured without the use of child-labour in South Asia.[16] This latter organisation operated a campaign in Europe and the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the intent of raising consumer awareness of the issues relating to the accountability of global corporations with regard to socially responsible consumerism and trade.[17]Satyarthi has highlighted child labor as a human rights issue as well as a welfare matter and charitable cause. He has argued that it perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems,[18] and his claims have been supported by several studies.[19][20] He has also had a role in linking the movement against child labour with efforts for achieving "Education for All".[21] He has been a member of a UNESCO body established to examine this and has been on the board of the Fast Track Initiative (now known as the Global Partnership for Education).[22] Satyarthi serves on the board and committee of several international organisations including the Center for Victims of Torture (USA), the International Labor Rights Fund (USA), and the International Cocoa Foundation. He is now reportedly working on bringing child labour and slavery into the post-2015 development agenda for the United Nation's Millenium Development Goals.[23]
Satyarthi, along with Pakistani activist Malala Yousufzai, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".[24] Satyarthi is the seventh Nobel Prize winner for India and only the second Indian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after Mother Teresa in 1979.[1]
Satyarthi lives in New Delhi, India. His family includes his wife, a son, daughter-in-law, a daughter, colleagues, and friends.[25] Apart from his social activities, he has been described as an excellent cook.[26]
Satyarthi has been the subject of a number of documentaries, television series, talk shows, advocacy and awareness films.[27] Satyarthi has been awarded the following national and international honours:
The New York Times reporter William J. Broad remembers B.K.S. Iyengar, who helped introduce the practice of yoga to the Western world. Iyengar, 95, died on Wednesday in the Indian city of Pune.
Video CreditBy Carrie Halperin on Publish DateAugust 20, 2014.
NEW DELHI — B. K. S. Iyengar, who helped introduce the practice of yoga to a Western world awakening to the notion of an inner life, died on Wednesday in the southern Indian city of Pune. He was 95.
The cause was heart failure, said Abhijata Sridhar-Iyengar, his granddaughter.
After surviving tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria as a child, Mr. Iyengar credited yoga with saving his life. He spent his midteens demonstrating “the most impressive and bewildering” positions in the court of the Maharaja of Mysore, he later recalled.
A meeting in 1952 with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, an early yoga devotee, proved to be a turning point, and Mr. Iyengar began traveling with Mr. Menuhin, eventually opening institutes on six continents.
Among his devotees were the novelist Aldous Huxley, the actress Annette Bening and the designer Donna Karan, as well as a who’s who of prominent Indian figures, including the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and the Bollywood siren Kareena Kapoor. He famously taught Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, 85 at the time, to stand on her head.
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B.K.S. Iyengar in 2005.CreditMisha Erwitt for The New York Times
In a 2005 book, “Light on Life,” Mr. Iyengar mused about the vast changes he had seen.
“I set off in yoga 70 years ago when ridicule, rejection and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India,” he wrote. “Indeed, if I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect.”
The news about Mr. Iyengar — or “guru-ji,” as many here called him, using a Sanskrit honorific — rippled through India on Wednesday morning. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter that he was “deeply saddened” by Mr. Iyengar’s death and offered “condolences to his followers all over the world.”
Mr. Iyengar’s practice is characterized by long asanas, or postures, that require extraordinary will and discipline. A reporter who watched daily practice in 2002, when Mr. Iyengar was 83, said that he held one headstand for six minutes, swiveling his legs to the right and the left, and that when he finished, “his shoulder-length hair was awry, he seemed physically depleted,” but he wore the smile of a gleeful child.
Ms. Sridhar-Iyengar said her grandfather recognized early on that yoga, up until then viewed as a mystical pursuit, “had something for everybody, not just the intellectually or spiritually inclined.”
“He felt satisfied,” she said. “Even at the end, even a few weeks before, he said, ‘I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.’ He took yoga to the world. He knew that.”
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born on Dec. 14, 1918, into a poor family in the southern state of Karnataka. The 11th of 13 children, he was born in the midst of an influenza outbreak. Three of his siblings died before reaching adulthood, and he watched his father, a teacher, die of appendicitis when he was 9 years old. Mr. Iyengar himself contracted tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria; by the time he began studying yoga, at 16, he was painfully frail.
“My arms were thin, my legs were spindly, and my stomach protruded in an ungainly manner,” he wrote. “My head used to hang down, and I had to lift it with great effort.”
His first teacher was his brother-in-law, a Brahmin scholar who had set up a school of yoga at the Jaganmohan Palace, and who sometimes denied his student food if his performance was deemed inadequate. Mr. Iyengar, then a teenager, was the youngest member of the Maharaja of Mysore’s entourage, and was asked to demonstrate his ability to stretch and bend his body for visiting dignitaries and guests.
Mr. Menuhin, who visited India in 1952, heard of his practice and penciled him in for a five-minute meeting, and was so instantly impressed that the session went on for more than three hours. Mr. Iyengar recalled, in an interview with CNN, that “the moment I adjusted him and took him, he said, ‘I’ve never felt this sense of joy, elation.’ ”
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Mr. Iyengar performing yoga at his institute in Pune, India. He credited the practice with saving his life after bouts of illness.CreditBhaskar Paul/India Today Group, via Getty Images
The violinist later brought Mr. Iyengar to Switzerland, where he introduced him to other prominent Westerners who became his followers. In his first visit to New York in 1956, Mr. Iyengar said he encountered little interest in yoga. It was not until the next decade that he began to attract crowds.
“We were just coming out of the ’60s change-your-consciousness thing, and many of us were in our heads, and wanting to meditate, and reach Samadhi,” or enlightenment, Patricia Walden, a longtime student of Mr. Iyengar’s, said in an interview in 2000. “Iyengar was, like, ‘Stand on your feet. Feel your feet.’ He was so practical. His famous quote was, ‘How can you know God if you don’t know your big toe?’ ”
Were it not for his celebrity in the West, Mr. Iyengar would hardly have gained a reputation in India, said Latha Satish, who heads a major yoga institute in the southern city of Chennai.
“He was at the right time at the right place; he would not have survived here,” Mr. Satish said. In India, he said, “everybody was interested in Western education; yoga was not so popular.” Mr. Iyengar’s trademark improvisations — like the use of blocks, blankets and straps to assist in holding difficult postures — were adopted “because of the need of students abroad,” he said.
Mr. Iyengar’s survivors include a son, Prashant; five daughters, Geeta, Vinita, Suchita, Sunita and Savitha; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Past students recalled Mr. Iyengar as warm and charismatic, but also strict. Elizabeth Kadetsky, who wrote a memoir of the year she spent studying with him, recalled that she was standing on her head in a class when he “took his fingers and shoved them in my upper back, and bellowed, ‘In the headstand, this portion of the back is not straight.’ ”
As his influence spread, she said, he was fiercely competitive with other leading yoga gurus, and would get cranky when asked about their methods.
“He demanded loyalty,” she said. “One had to be 100 percent with him.”
By the time he reached his 80s, Mr. Iyengar had become accustomed to the kind of reception usually reserved for pop stars. As power yoga became a multimillion-dollar industry, he occasionally cringed at the commercialization of the practice, and wondered whether it would survive its own popularity. But the pleasure he took in the practice was unaffected.
At the end of a session in 2002, he lay on his back, knees bent so that his calves were beneath his thighs, arms out to either side, weights holding him down. He lay still for 12 minutes, perfectly immobile except for the twitch of a pinkie. Asked what he was thinking, he replied, “Nothing.”
“I can remain thoughtfully thoughtless,” he said. “It is not an empty mind.”
