Raghurama Shetty was struggling hard to keep the publication afloat. Mungaru faced a serious financial crisis soon after its launch. I do not wish to think about it even now. I was unable to fathom the depths of Raghurama Shetty’s sad state of mind. The youngsters who quit Mungaru amidst all this were also my favourite young friends. I think those former young lads have also realised this now. They could roar like a tiger but did not know the tactics of a clever cat. Watching all these developments I had thought then: Well, these youngsters only knew how to break into Chakravyuha but did not know how to win the war.
But they fell victim to their own juvenile ideals and quit Mungaru after a few months. They were capable of breaking into the formidable Chakravyuha. True, those young lads in the editorial team of Mungaru were like Abhimanyu. Each of those young lads is like child-hero Abhimanyu. This Raghurama Shetty is like the bhootas (spirits) that people worship here.
They would wonder how on earth this man can plunge into this battle with only a bunch of young lads. Perhaps they would wonder if Raghurama Shetty has brains. I am curious as to how the people here would see Raghurama Shetty’s Mungaru adventure. This the land of Bhootaaradhane (spirit worship) and Yakshagana (a traditional folk dance in parts of coastal Karnataka). In my part of the state, we think that people of Dakshina Kannada district are intelligent and educated. I remember those sentences even now, exactly as I spoke them, maybe because I have fallen in love with what I could speak there. I spoke just five or six sentences on the occasion.
Reluctant as I was, Raghurama Shetty had virtually dragged me to the launch function, organised in Mangalore. This is painful to me, and I am here before you with that pain. All the marginalised communities whose upliftment was closest to his heart also do not remember him anymore. His Bunt community has forgotten about him. He tried to ensure that his own chosen field of journalism was full of people from these backgrounds while he, himself, hailed from the Bunt community of the Dakshina Kannada district. He wished that Dalits, Other Backwards Classes (OBC), the rural poor and other disempowered communities should take an active part in all public fields. He always stood for social justice, which is a rarity now. Then, he started his own newspaper, Mungaru. I had known Raghurama Shetty from his Prajavani days. I have not been going out much these days. Shetty was the legendary editor of Mungaru, a reader-owned Kannada newspaper published from Mangalore in the 1980s. The following is a translation of the speech delivered in Kannada on the occasion of the release a book titled, Bereye Maatu, a compilation of articles by the late Vaddarse Raghurama Shetty.
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