When he was a child, his teacher adopted numerous tactics to discipline him. Until, one day, the teacher drew a bindu on a blackboard and asked the nine-year-old to stare at it to correct his restlessness. Syed Haider Raza was mesmerised, and never forgot that lesson. The bindu was to become central to his oeuvre, one that he described as “the force that awakened a latent energy inside”.
That force was extinguished on Saturday. Raza, who had been admitted to Delhi’s Max Hospital for over a month and had been on ventilator support for the last few weeks, died after a heart attack. “He had this amazing ability to bounce back every time, but this time he just could not. He fought hard, though,” says Ashok Vajpeyi, trustee of the Raza Foundation and a close associate.
