Good bye, Ajai Banerji

 Ajai was 9 years my senior in IIT Kanpur. So obviously, I didn't know him as a student. I interacted with him online during my graduate student days in US. There were these online discussion forums called newsgroups those days. One of them was named as "soc.culture.indian." On this forum, we discussed everything related to India. Whenever something related to trains would come up, a few of us would have to comment on it.

One of them was Ajai Banerji who was studying at Stanford University at that time. Soon we created a separate mailing list whom we named IRFCA (Indian Railway Fan Club of America, once the Internet spread to India, we stopped expanding 'A'). In 1991, we decided to have a physical meet of the founders at New Jersey in which Ajai showed up. Here is how we all looked 35 years ago. We, of course, had a lot of fun discussing railways, and Ajai was inarguably the most knowledgeable about the Indian Railways in terms of history. Particularly, he delighted us with his knowledge of Railway lines between India and Pakistan/Bangladesh, and the story of how the rail routes to North-East went through Bangladesh and how we created the new rail routes through Chicken's Neck immediately after independence.

We both returned to India in due course. He joined Doon School and I joined IIT Kanpur. The IRFCA kept getting bigger. More discussions and it was always a treat to read his posts. But he was not just a railbuff or an expert only in the history of Indian Railways. He had vast knowledge about several domains, cricket being one of them. Another one would be wars. In 1999, he became world famous by becoming the winner of BBC Mastermind India. In this competition, he chose "History of Indian Railways" as topic in the zonal final, and "World Cup Cricket" as the topic in the national finals. Here is the link to the finals of that competition.

BBC Mastermind India 1999 - Finals

In 2006, we started organizing the annual conventions of IRFCA. As a co-founder, he attended many of the initial conventions, though he stopped attending them for the last few years. Here are the photographs from 2014 convention held in Ooty.

The convention was attended by the DRM of the division Mr. Shubhranshu and the GM of Southern Railways, Mr. Rakesh Mishra as well.

He gave a presentation on Railway Safety. Here is the link to the safety presentation by Ajai Banerji.

 

 

 

 

Here is another picture of his attending the IRFCA convention in Delhi in 2010. It was held in National Railway Museum.

 

His knowledge of history of Indian Railways was really fabulous. When I joined Punjab Engineering College in 2019, I posted a picture of a plinthed loco on the campus. Not many colleges would have a plinthed loco, and this was really cool. But I had no clue about the history of the loco and one day I asked Ajai to find out more about it. And within a very short period, he wrote a blog about this loco. Here is the link to the blog full of information about the loco.

He was an avid blogger and he blogged about his two passions: History of Indian Railways and Cricket. (Though he was a multi-faceted personality and had other deep interests.) Here is the link to his blog.

My last meeting with him was in 2023 when one of our common railfan friend (and IITK alum), Praveen Tripathi, came to Jaipur. It is really sad that even though both of us lived in the same city, we could not meet for so long and now, there is no more possibility of meeting.

He breathed his last on 15th February, 2025 in Jaipur. The entire fraternity of Rail fans is deeply saddened by his departure. But may be God wanted to win some quiz and he couldn't find a better person to represent Him. He has left us with a lot of memories whom we will always cherish. But we will miss interaction with him and learning from him. We pray to God to give all of us - his family and friends - strength to withstand this irreparable loss.

Goodbye, my friend. And I hope you are winning all the quizzes up there.