Obituary Events 2008

Events in January 2008

Jan. 2 Sadhan C. Dutt (86), pioneer of consulting engineering services in India, in Kolkata.

Jan. 6 P. K. Sethi (80) inventor of the world-famous Jaipur foot in Jaipur following cardiac

arrest.

Jan. 7 S. K. Agrawal (55), Director-Projects, Nuclear Power Corporation of India, the man

behind the construction of all nuclear reactors in the country, of multi-organ failure in

Mumbai.

Jan. 15 Roger Anger (84), chief architect of the international township of Auroville,

Puducherry and designer of matrimandir, in France.

K. M. Adimoolam (69) renowned artist, noted for indigenisation of the Abstract

Expressionist heritage at his residence in Chennai.

Jan. 17 Robert James Fischer (65) American chess champion in a hospital in Iceland capital

Reykjavik.

Jan. 27 George Habash (81), founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palastine, of a

massive heart attack in Jordan.

Jan. 28 S. Thiruvenkatachari (97), eminent educationist in Chennai.

Jan. 29 Gopi (71), renowned Malayalam actor, in Thiruvananthapuram.

Events in February 2008

Feb. 1 Russi K. Karanjia (95), veteran journalist and former editor of Blitz at his residence in

Mumbai.

Feb. 5 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (91) the guru to the Beatles who introduced Transcendental

Meditation to the West at his home in the Netherlands.

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Feb. 7 J. Hemachandran (76) CPI(M) leader and four-time MLA from Thiruvattar, Tamil

Nadu, at a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram.

Feb. 8 K. Rajaram (82), former Speaker of the Tamil Nadu Assembly, in Chennai.

P. B. Ranganekar (95) veteran CPI(M) leader and freedom fighter, in Mumbai.

Feb. 9 Baba Amte (93), great social worker and reformer, at his ‘commune’ for leprosy

patients, ‘Anandvan’ at Warora village in Chandrapur district, Maharashtra of cancer.

Feb. 11 Tom Lantos (80), U. S. Congressman instrumental in getting the Hyde Act passed in

2006, battling cancer in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the only Nazi holocaust survivor

to serve in the U.S. Congress.

Feb. 13 Rajendra Nath (76) popular Hindi film comedian of yesteryear at his residence in

Khar, Mumbai, after prolonged illness.

Feb. 19 Basavarajeshwari (86), former Union Minister who won the Bellary Lok Sabha seat

three times in a row after a prolonged illness in Bellary.

Feb. 20 D.G.S. Dhinakaran (72), evangelist and founder-chancellor of Karunya University at

a Chennai hospital after a brief illness.

Feb. 25 Justice Hans Raj Khanna (95) former judge of the Supreme Court known for his

dissenting judgment in the 1976 habeas corpus case in New Delhi.

Feb. 27 S. Rangarajan (73) better known as Sujatha, one of the most prolific writers of

contemporary Tamil literature at a private hospital in Chennai after a brief illness.

Sulochana Pattabhiraman (76), Carnatic musician and eminent musicologist in

Chennai after a brief illness.

Events in March 2008

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 Obituary Events 2008

Mar. 3 Mahema Devadoss (67), writer-artist, at her residence in Santhome, Chennai.

Mar. 6 Leon Greenman (97) the only Englishman sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau

concentration camp in 1943 in London.

Mar. 19 Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (90), the British-born science fiction writer best known for

2001: A Space Odyssey, who had made Sri Lanka his home for the past 50 years, at a

hospital in Colombo after a brief illness.

V. Raghuvaran (49) Tamil actor in Chennai after a brief illness.

Mar. 20 Sobhan Babu (71), veteran Telugu actor at a private hospital in Chennai following

cardiac arrest.

Mar. 21 Raymond Leblanc (92), the Belgian publisher behind the global rise of Tintin’s

comic-book adventures penned by Georges Remi who wrote under the pseudonym

Herge, in Belgium.

Mar. 23 Justice K. G. Shah (73) one of the members of the Nanavati-Shah Commission

probing the Godhra train carnage in Gujarat, in his Ahmedabad residence.

Mar. 25 K. T. Mohammed (79) renowned Malayalam playwright in Kozhikode after

prolonged illness.

Events in April 2008

Apr. 5 Charlton Heston (84), Oscar-winning U.S. actor known for memorable roles in The

10 Commandments, Ben Hur at his Beverly Hills home.

Apr. 10 Gopal Raju (80), founder of the first ethnic newspaper India Abroad in the U.S., after

a brief illness.

Apr. 19 Germaine Tillion (100), French resistance fighter and celebrated anthropologist, at her

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 Obituary Events 2008

home in Saint-Mande, in the Paris region.

Apr. 29 Albert Hofmann (102), the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, at his

home near Basel, Switzerland of heart attack.

Events in May 2008

May 1 Nirmala Deshpande (79), renowned Gandhian, social activist at her residence in New

Delhi.

Irena Sendler (98), who saved some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust

during World War II, in Warsaw.

Robert Rauschenberg (82), one of the foremost American artists of the 20th century

at his home on Captiva Island, Florida of heart failure.

May 19 Vijay Tendulkar (80), noted Marathi playwright in Pune. His Ghasiram Kotwal

(Ghasiram the Constable) is billed as one of the longest-running plays in the world.

May 26 Sydney Pollack (73), Hollywood producer and director of movies such as The Way

We Were, Tootsie and Out of Africa, in Los Angeles of cancer.

Events in June 2008

Jun. 1 Yves Saint Laurent (71), French designer who revolutionised women’s clothing in

the 1960s of a brain tumour in Paris.

Jun. 2 Bo Diddley (79), the rhythm and blues musician in Los Angeles.

Jun. 8 Alladi Ramakrishnan (85), founder of the MATSCIENCE in Chennai, in Gainesville,

Florida.

Jun. 12 Gunther Stent (84), one of the first scientists to confirm the structure of DNA of

pneumonia at his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

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 Obituary Events 2008

Jun. 14 S. Ramachander (63), former Director of the Institute for Financial Management and

Research, in Chennai after a brief illness.

Jun. 17 Cyd Charisse (87), dancer and actor who rose to fame playing the vamp who entices

Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain at her home in Los Angeles of heart attack.

Jun. 19 Barun Sengupta (74), journalist and founding editor of the Bengali daily Bartaman in

Kolkata.Jun. 24; Mallikharjuna Rao (57), a veteran of 375 Telugu movies of

leukaemia at a private hospital in Hyderabad.

Events in July 2008

Jul. 1 Ammannur Madhava Chakyar (92), Kodiyattom exponent at his residence Ammanur

Chakyar Madom at Irinjalakuda near Thrissur, Kerala.

Jul. 8 P. Ramachandran (83), veteran CPI(M) leader after a brief illness in Chennai.

Jul. 11 Dr. Michael DeBakey (99) who pioneered bypass surgery and performed more than

60,000 heart surgeries during his 70-year career at Houston’s Methodist Hospital.

Jul. 14 Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud (88), the former CJI, holding office between 1978-

85, at a hospital in Mumbai after a prolonged illness.

Jul. 24 Leela Ratnam (75), former national president of the Association of Inner Wheel

Clubs of India at her residence in Chennai.

Events in August 2008

Aug. 1 Harkishan Singh Surjeet (92), former general secretary of the CPI(M) of a massive

cardiac arrest at a hospital in Noida.

Aug. 3 Alexander Solzhenitsyn (89), Nobel Prize-winning Russian author at his home on the

outskirts of Moscow.

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 Obituary Events 2008

Aug. 9 Bernie Mac (50), American comedian of complications due to pneumonia in a

Chicago area hospital.

Mahamud Darwish (67), Palestinian poet in a U.S. hospital from complications

following open heart surgery.

Aug. 10 Issac Hayes (65), symbol of soul music in the 1970s in East Memphis in the U.S.

Aug. 15 C. V. Sundaram (78), former Director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic

Research, Kalpakkam, after a brief illness in Chennai.

Aug. 20 Hua Guofeng (87), who succeeded Mao Zedong as Chairman of China’s ruling

Communist Party and briefly ruled the country, in Beijing, from an unspecified

illness..

Aug. 25 Ahmed Faraz (77), revolutionary Pakistani poet in Islamabad.

Aug. 27 C. R. Mitra, former director of the Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, in New

Delhi.

Aug. 30 K. K. Birla (90), eminent industrialist and a Rajya Sabha MP for 18 years at his Birla

Park residence in Kolkata after a brief illness.

Aug. 31 Placid Rodriguez (67), renowned metallurgist and former director of IGCAR,

Kalpakkam, in Chennai.

Events in September 2008

Sep. 1 Thomas Bata (94), Czech-born head of the worldwide family shoe empire in

Toronto, Canada.

Sep. 2 H.Y. Sharada Prasad (84), media adviser to former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi

and Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi. after a prolonged illness.

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 Obituary Events 2008

Sep. 8 Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan (73), violin maestro in Chennai after a brief illness.

Sep. 21 Dingiri Banda Wijetunga (86), former Sri Lanka President of a chest ailment in

Kandy.

Sep. 26 Paul Newman (83) legendary Hollywood film actor after a long battle with cancer at

his farmhouse near Westport, Connecticut

K. Venkataswami (75), former Supreme Court judge who enquired into the Tehelka

case in Chennai after a brief illness.

Sep. 27 Mahendra Kapoor (74), noted playback singer in Mumbai after a heart attack.

Sep. 29 Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, president of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, at his home in

Himayanathnagar, Hyderabad.

Sep. 30 J.B. Jeyaretnam (82), whose name was a byword for opposition in Singapore’s

streamlined politics, in Singapore

Events in October 2008

Oct. 1 Poornam Viswanathan (87), noted Tamil theatre personality and character artiste

aafter a brief illness in Chennai.

Boris Yefimov (109), Russian cartoonist in Moscow.

Oct. 2 Rajendra Singh Lodha (66), renowned chartered accountant and heir to Priyamvada

Birla’s Rs. 5,000 crore legacy of a heart attack in London.

K. Narayanachari (85), retired Chief Photographer The Hindu in Chennai after a

brief illness.

Oct. 6 Laxmi Panda, a member of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army

at the AIIMS, New Delhi after prolonged illness.

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 Obituary Events 2008

Oct. 19 Marilyn Ferguson (70), whose best-selling book The Aquarian Conspiracy helped

establish the New Age movement at her home in western Riverside county in the

U.S.

Oct. 20 C. V. Sridhar (75), ace Tamil film director in Chennai, after a brief illness.

Events in November 2008

Nov. 4 Michael Crichton (66), best known author of science fiction novels Jurassic Park

and its sequel The Lost World, The Andromeda Strain and creator of TV hit ER, in

Los Angeles of cancer.

Nov. 5 B. R. Chopra (94), legendary filmmaker famous for immortal Hindi classics like

Waqt (1965) and Naya Daur (1957) and TV serial Mahabharat in Mumbai after a

prolonged illness.

Nov. 10 Miriam “Zenzi” Makeba (76), South African anti-apartheid icon and singer better

known as Mamma Africa and the Empress of African Song of heart attack shortly

after performing at a protest concert iin Naples, Italy.

Nov. 14 Ajit Panja (72) former Union Minister and senior Trinamool Congress leader, of

cancer at a private hospital in Kolkata.

Nov. 15 James Heitzman (58), historian of South Asia and urban studies scholar in Stanford

hospital, California, of cancer.

Nov. 19 Manjeri Narayanan Nambiar (88), the “handsome villain” of Tamil cinema at his

home in Chennai following a brief illness.

Events in December 2008

Dec. 5 Russian Patriarch Alexei II (79), the iconic religious leader who restored the church

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from a post-Soviet shell to an institution of power and privilege aat his Moscow

home.

Dec. 11 Bettie Mae Page (85), one of America’s most photographed pin-up girls during the

1950s of pneumonia in Los Angeles.

Dec. 14 Saraswathi Gandhi (86), veteran freedom fighter and widow of Mahatma Gandhi’s

grandson Kantilal Gandhi, at a private hospital in Thiruvananthapuram.

Dec. 18 H.N. Nanje Gowda (74) former Irrigation Minister in the Devaraj Urs Ministry and

an expert on inter.State river disputes iin Bangalore.

Mark Felt (95) the man known as Deep Throat, the secret informant in the

Watergate scandal that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon in 1974 at a

California hospice.

Dec. 19 Carol Chomsky (78) wife of Noam Chomsky known for her work in

psycholinguistics of cancer at her Lexington home.

Dec. 20 Robert Mulligan (83), director of the Academy award winning film “To Kill A

Mockingbird”, at his home in Lyme, Connecticut of heart disease.

Dec. 24 Harold Pinter (78), the Nobel prize winning British playwright after a prolonged

illness.

Samuel Huntington (81), political scientist in Martha’s Vineyard, Harvard

University.

Dec. 25 Eartha Kitt (81), the versatile American singer and actor of colon cancer.

Dec. 28 Tuanku Jaafar Tuanku Abdul Rahman (86), Malaysia’s former king in Kuala

Lumpur.

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 Obituary Events 2008

Dec. 29 Manjit Bawa (67) renowned painter in New Delhi.

Agnihotram Ramanuja Thathachariar (100) renowned Vedic scholar in Chennai.

Freddie Hubbard (70) jazz legend at a hospital in California, of complications from

a heart attack.

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