By Dilip Vaidya, Nandu Kulkarni and Ajit Pimpalkhare
All three of us were very close to Arvind Tongaonkar (Tonya to his friends) during all the five years of IIT and later, until his unfortunate passing at the young age of 39. In this article, the three of us fondly remember Tonya’s brilliance, his ready wit, and also some of his eccentricities. We hope his other friends will post their memories of him in response to this memoir.
Dilip
“Once I sat next to him” was the title of the small red book that our Chemical Engineering class compiled, containing names, DOB, addresses etc. of our classmates, at the end of our time at IIT. I not only sat next to him in class many times, watched movies, listened to music, and studied together, but we shared umpteen slices of our lives with each other.
I first saw him at the time of registration at IIT. I was told that he also came from Elphinstone college like me. But I came after Inter Science and he after FY Science, so we did not know each other at Elphinstone. On that day I had no inkling of the great friendship that was to take shape.
Later I came to know that his mother was professor of French at the same college and father professor of Mathematics at the sister institution RIS. He was a Jagannath Shanakrshet Scholar, having scored the highest marks in Sanskrit in the SSC exam. This scholarship ran in the family as his father and uncle were also Shankarshet scholars.
As luck would have it, alphabetically Vaidya followed Tongaonkar, so he was Roll number 54 and I was 55. Next was Manguexa Wagle at Roll number 56. So, I was sandwiched between the two geniuses. Wagle, as you might know, stood first in SSC and went on to win the President’s Gold Medal in our 1974 IIT batch. Sadly, both Tonya and Wagle are no more.
Somewhere along the line, we started calling him Tonya and that very soon became viral, in today’s terminology.
Nandu
Yes indeed! He came from a family of brilliant intellectuals, and he had inherited the brainy genes from his parents. I first met him in the first week of IIT, and I think we were even ragged at the same time, but he was let off a little lightly because of his ready wit.
Everybody else in our wing was from Mumbai (Bombay then) and would go home on weekends after the Friday movie in the convo hall. I was one of the very few people in the hostel from out of town, and I would feel terribly lonely on weekends, because travelling to Pune from the campus wasn’t as easy as it is now. My wing mates soon realised that and took pity on me and would take me home on weekends by turns. So I have spent many weekends at Tonya’s place first when they lived in Dadar, and later in Santa Cruz East. Tonya had coined a name for me: “Kulkarnyache bewarshi por”, KBP for short, meaning Kulkarni’s orphan child.
Ajit
I met Tonya when I had come to take possession of my room in H-3 and dump my luggage in the room. I saw a bespectacled very mild looking boy who was to be my neighbour. I was allotted room number 50 and Tonya was allotted 51. That mild look was utterly deceptive. We hit on pretty well and ragging by our seniors formed a kind of bond.
Tonya had a phenomenal memory, and he could grasp the essentials of all the engineering subjects very quickly. He could therefore get by with a minimum amount of study and a maximum amount of fun.
Tonya’s sense of humour was mainly pun based and was not only astounding but also infectious. This led to all of us trying to crack jokes throughout our I.I.T. days and thereafter. Tonya’s ability to be funny stemmed from a keen sense of observation, timing, and punning the language. His use of irony, satire, rather too much exaggeration, could lend humour to a perfectly ordinary situation. We used to crack jokes all the time and it was a laugh riot. One of his pun gems went thus:
One sardaarji saw a bird flying and as a matter of courtesy asked the bird, “Birdie, Birdie kee Gal.”
This bird could speak and answered right back, “Surdie, Surdie, Sea gull hai”
I remember with particular fondness that Tonya tortured four of us for more than 40 minutes with his story of Pink Ping Pong ball. We were all ready to hit him at the end of that story.
He used to travel by bus from his home in Santacruz to his office in Worli. He used to do the Times crossword in the bus and had vowed that the day he could not complete the crossword before reaching the office he would come back and not attend office that day. However, he never once had to come back which was great considering the complexity of the Times crossword then.
Even his love of old Hindi film songs was infectious. I myself became a reasonable expert due to Tonya and listening to old Hindi songs in the Hostel lounge for nights together. Tonya was the cause of this.
Tonya was also a voracious reader. All of us discovered P.G. Wodehouse, George Mikes, Henry Cecil, Richard Gordon, Spike Milligan, James Thurber, and Busybee due to Tonya.
Dilip
Tonya’s wit and sense of humour was extraordinary. While he could crack jokes and relate anecdotes which were witty and funny, he could laugh at himself equally well. He was quite dark to look at, and he often joked about it. Once he went as part of an audience for some TV program and he quipped that people adjusted the contrast on the TV when his face was shown as they felt the screen had become unusually dark.
Also, he used to tell us that the Government of India declared 4th March as National Safety Day since he was born on that day.
Nandu
As I have mentioned above, he had inherited the brainy genes from his parents. He had a phenomenal memory for facts. He was extremely fond of old Hindi film songs, and remembered the name of the film the song was from and the year the movie was released, the singer, and the lyricist and music director. He had beautiful handwriting – both English and Devanagari and could write in multiple fonts. He had compiled a list of his favourite songs with all the details mentioned above, written out by hand in his beautiful handwriting. I wish we had had the foresight to preserve his oeuvre.
Starting from the third year onwards, I think he felt that attending classes was not the best use of his time, and he must have realised that he could get by without attending lectures. From then on, he was rarely spotted near a classroom. He would be found in his white kurta pyjamas hanging around in the hostel, or in the cafe opposite Hostel 2, which had recently started, drinking endless cups of tea.
Ajit
After passing out we continued to meet, drink together and laugh together. Shivaji Park M.G.M.O. Swimming pool cafe was our hangout. Normally we would gather there on weekends at around 6.00 pm and stay on till about 11.00 pm. One could carry quarter bottles of the tipple to this cafe and the cafe would supply us with cigarettes, ice, glasses, soda etc. The seating was open air.
I remember a particularly funny episode. While drinking one day it started raining very heavily. We all opened our umbrellas and protected our drinks as the drinks would have become water in minutes. We blithely continued drinking for the next 2-3 hours getting drenched in that torrential rain but we never allowed a single drink to get diluted. Nandu was also working in Mumbai then and all of us were bachelors. So many evenings we would meet in VileParle where Nandu was staying as a Paying Guest.
Dilip
After finishing IIT, I joined Ion Exchange and Tonya also joined the same company 6 months after me. He joined as a Junior Sales Engineer and by the time he left, after 13 years of working in various departments including spending a few years at their Ambernath factory, he was heading the Design department and was recognized as a knowledgeable authority in the field of Water Treatment. On leaving Ion Exchange, Arvind took on an entrepreneurial role and founded a company called URMINUS with a few of his colleagues.
He was married to Snehal, and they had a son whom they named Surya. It was sometime in late 1991 Arvind and Snehal had come to my place for dinner. While chatting, he told us what Surya, who was about 5-6 years old then, had said to him. Arvind’s father had passed away about a year earlier and his photo with a garland hung in their hall. Surya one day asked Arvind, “Baba, when will we hang your photo on the wall?” We all laughed and wondered how children can sometimes be funny and strange without realizing that this innocuous sounding question would soon become a tragic reality.
Nandu
Another example of his great sense of humour: Tonya’s eyesight was far from 6/6, what is considered to be perfect vision. He was always near sighted and wore glasses even when he came to IIT. Later on, when he turned 36, he had to start wearing reading glasses too. In Marathi, reading glasses are called “चाळीशी” meaning something you start wearing when you are 40. Tonya used to joke that he had got a 10% discount and acquired the चाळीशी at 36.
Another example of his delectable sense of humour. Although all of us know brilliant sardarjis, unfortunately sardarjis have been the butt of a lot of jokes, rather unfairly, to my mind. We had a Punjabi amongst us, who was not a sardarji, but who often behaved like the sardarjis in the jokes. Tonya had coined a phrase for him: “poor man’s sardarji”, somebody who is not a real sardarji, but almost one. 🤣
Ajit
I vividly remember that day, January 3rd, 1992, when he passed away due to a massive heart attack. He was only 39 years old!
A friend called my wife, and she phoned me. My wife still remembers that I shouted very loudly at her over the phone that this cannot be true. Alas! It was true.
I reached his house and his body was laid out in the living room with Snehal, Tonya’s Mom, his brother, and us friends sitting by his side shell shocked. No one was crying as if they could not comprehend the enormity of what had happened. The crying started the next day and would not stop for months. For a few days I would cry in my sleep muttering “माझा टोण्या गेला ग !!!”
It has been over 30 years since Tonya left us. He left us with his sense of humour, old Hindi songs, books and authors. You cannot ask for more from a friend.
Dilip
Yes, that day Jan 3rd, 1992, is etched in my memory permanently. I also received a phone call in my office and rushed to Tonya’s house. There lay his body sprawled on the floor in his trademark reddish kurta and jeans. Ajit was seated near his head and so was his mother. Looking at him I could just utter: “This is not fair Yaar!” Later we went to Dadar Crematorium and his body was consigned to the flames in the electric furnace. And that was the end of the physical remains of our friend. About a month later, Ajit, Nandu and the other friend, whom he used to call poor man’s sardar, met at Nandu’s place with our wives. The idea was to pay respects to the memory of our departed friend. But as it happened, we kept remembering and repeating his jokes, witty repartees and puns and were roaring with laughter for the entire afternoon. Our wives thought we had gone crazy. But maybe that was our way of catharsis and getting all the sadness out of our system. Tonya is long gone but his being can never get out of us.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 