Noratan Mal Dugar, an aide of the founder of The Indian Express, late Ramnath Goenka, who served as General Manager of the Express Group, passed away at his residence in Jaipur earlier this week.
He was 80, and is survived by his mother, wife and three children.
At 29, Dugar was entrusted with managerial responsibilities in the Express Group and, subsequently, became instrumental in the development of Jansatta as India’s premier Hindi newspaper.
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Before joining the Express Group in 1968, Dugar, who went to school in Churu and was a graduate of St Xavier’s in Kolkata, was engaged in the jute business.
Once he left the Express in April 1982, he returned to his home state of Rajasthan to pursue the family business in Jaipur. During his later years, he shifted his focus to social work.
“For my father, working with Ramnath Goenka and the Express Group was the vindication of the values and principles he believed in, it shaped his life and became one of his most treasured experiences,” said his son Niranjan Dugar.
At a prayer meeting held in New Delhi last Friday, the Express Group’s Executive Director Anant Goenka recalled Dugar’s bond with his grandfather, the unique sense of “apnapan,” calling him “The Man with Seven Hands.”
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“I often felt he didn’t just have two hands, I felt he had seven,” Anant Goenka said, “One hand would appear in front of me to guide me to cross a bridge that he had already crossed, another he’d place on my head to bless me with his affection and deep heartfelt best wishes, a third would be on my shoulder to empathise with my struggles, a fourth on my back to reassure me that if I fall he’s there to catch, and all this while he stood and walked beside me, shoulder to shoulder, because whichever path I chose, he was happy to join me on.
“Hands five and six he used for himself, to keep his own body in perfect balance, never letting himself be a liability in our journey together. And, finally, hand number seven which he used every now and then to wave from far, far away across the fields…It was on an entirely different journey of its own. He used it to remind me that he does have his own path and that I must be able to walk mine without him one day,” Goenka said.