PEOPLE! my dad has met rajaratnam! and it's such a ridiculous story i have to tell it to you all! this would have been between 1960 and 1963, because at that time my dad was still a schoolboy at st andrews, and this would have been either upper sec or pre u. st andrew's was having a funfair to raise money, and he and his best friend took it into their heads to sell a funfair coupon to rajaratnam. (yes, i know!!!) "he's the minister, he ought to support education." so the two of them actually took a bus to the city hall and went to raja's office and asked to see the minister! i couldn't stop laughing when my dad told it to me. and the secretary said, quite rightly, that the minister is very busy (and he was. if this is in the early 60s it would have been a time of great political upheaval) so could they please go away, but they insisted on seeing the minister and would not be made to leave. and after a long while they heard the secretary go into raja's office and say, sir, there are two boys here to see you and they won't go away. and the next thing they knew, the great man himself came out of his office, smiling, courteous, to find out what they wanted. so they sold him a book of coupons for $10. and the lovely thing was that raja opened his wallet and he hadn't ten dollars - how wonderful - i want all our ministers to be like that - in the end he borrowed the money from the secretary and sent my pa and his friend on their way with a warm handshake. have you ever heard anything to touch it - the utter imbecile innocence of my pa and his best friend. you try going to sell funfair coupon to any cabinet minister nowadays and see if the security guards don't throw you out for wasting government time. and the wondrous thing was that raja didn't throw them out.

my pa says that in one of the obituaries (i can't find it though) someone, was it tommy koh? or maybe some other diplomat who was terribly junior at the time? talked about how he had to accompany the minister around new york, and raja would always want to go into book stores and would spend so much time in them that the junior diplomat (who had had no lunch) started getting horribly hungry! eventually raja told him, don't worry, just leave me here and come back and collect me later. my father says he can well believe it, because when he first left school my dad worked at the stamford road mph, and, as a young clerk, remember seeing raja come in to buy books and spending a long time among the shelves on his visits.

(every obituary points to his passion for books, words. so many world leaders today are trained in law, political science, economics, business - why do literary men no longer lead countries?)

Tommy Koh's eulogy for S. Rajaratnam:

We thank him for teaching us the virtue of courage which he demonstrated in full measure when he single-handedly stood up to the bully boys at the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana in 1979. We thank him for teaching us the virtue of magnanimity when he extended his hand of friendship to Vietnamese foreign minister Nguyen Co Thach. We thank him for teaching us to treat our subordinates: the secretaries, security officers, drivers, the domestic help with kindness. We thank him for teaching us to love and respect our wives as he did his beloved Piroska. We thank him for teaching us to believe in the Singapore Pledge. We thank him for teaching us that it is possible to be a good man in this wicked world.