The Rautela family regrets to inform you that Yashwardhan Singh Rautela, Sanawar, batch of 1959, passed away recently. He had got Covid. 

He leaves behind a loving wife, a devoted daughter and son, a younger sister, and a large and adoring extended family. Some of you, his school mates, may remember Yashwardhan as the boy who carved nude figures out of chalk sticks. Dad was always artistically inclined and, one way or another, art would guide his choices in life. Dad’s first love though were aircraft and after Sanawar, dad went to the NDA. He wanted to fly fighter planes and he came close to realising that dream. But during the final week of graduation, Dad hurt his ulnar nerve. He’d been horsing around with a friend when he crashed his hand through a glass pane. 

The authorities told him that with a damaged ulnar nerve, he wouldn’t be allowed to fly ‘planes but that he could join the Army. Dad said no, packed his bags and went to Government College, Chandigarh. After graduating, he applied to the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, the IIMs, and to a Tea Company in Calcutta. He was accepted by the art and management schools and told his father, an Army man, that he wanted to become an artist. His father was disapproving – Dad had lost his mother when he was four; a few years later his father had remarried – and told him, in what has now become family lore, ‘Instead of going up the hill, you want to go down the valley!’ Dad had had enough, he wanted to get away and he went to an interview with a Tea Company in Calcutta. The gentleman interviewing him noticed the art Dad had mentioned on his résumé. “What do you draw?” he asked dad. “Horses,” Dad replied. “Does your hand work okay after your accident?” he asked. “Yes,” Dad said. “Can you draw me one then, a horse?” he asked. And so Dad did, sitting there in that office with a pad on his lap. The company sent Dad to a tea garden in Assam, which was where dad really hit his stride. And where he earned the name that he would come to be called by – Speedy Rautela. The nickname came from a can of oil called Rotella Shell Oil. 

Its tagline was ‘The Speedy Oil’. Dad’s first two managers were Britishers – an Englishman called Peter Castle and a Scotsman called Jimmy Strang. This was 1966, long after Independence but the Brits would hang around in tea till 1976, three years after India passed its FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act) laws. Peter had served with the Gurkhas and Jimmy had been with the RAF. After the great earthquake of 1950, when the floods had hit Assam, the two of them had rescued a number of stranded locals – Jimmy up in a plane directing Peter down in his boat on a swollen, engorged river. Dad had bought Peter's outboard motor when he retired. Jimmy, after he retired, had written a trio of books about life in Assam, the first of which was called ‘A Damn Fool Career’. True to form, when dad first landed at Lilabari airport – this is a beautiful part of the country, just below the lush, green hills of Arunachal – he carried with him a suitcase, a tennis racquet, two fishing rods, a shotgun and a rifle. A squash racquet was added later. That was what you needed then to make a life for yourself on the tea gardens of Assam, and all of them were put to good use. 

Dad married Mum five years later in 1971. Dad was 26, Mum a very young 20. Mum’s father was a District Forest Officer at the time and at their first meeting, she told Dad about being chased by an elephant. “Not really,” dad had said, stretching out his ‘a’ and speaking in the affected British accent that most tea planters of that vintage used. That “not really”, Mum always says, is what had floored her. And so, she had nodded when her father had asked her, “Nimmi, ladka achchha hai?” Dad had always had a penchant for pushing the envelope. I remember him staring down an angry, limp elephant bearing down on our car. Worker unrest in the area? Speedy would be sent to sort it out. Even when the ULFA insurgency began to grip the state and the non-Assamese managers were prodded to move to the Doars in West Bengal, Dad refused to leave. 

“I’ve worked here all my life,” he said. “I’m not leaving now.” 

Dad finally left in 2000, a little after the death of his step-mum – the woman who had raised him – coming back to the farm in the Uttarakhand Terai that his father and step-mum had retired to after the Army. He hadn’t wanted to leave his father alone and between them, Mum and Dad divided up the work that goes into the running of a farm. Towards the end, Dad even bought a few horses but he never really lost his proclivity for staring down angry elephants. 

I’d called him on Monday, 20th April that Delhi was going into lockdown. I’d wanted to tell him that maybe he and Mum should go into lockdown too: isolate themselves from the rest of the world on their farm. “Yes, I’m being safe,” Dad had said. “I went today to sell my wheat. I wasn’t able to, so I’m having lunch now and will then go to the wheat center again after I’ve eaten.” “Dad, come on, that’s not being safe…” I said. “No no, I’m being safe.” On Friday, dad had developed a fever and on Monday we were rushing him to the hospital. “You just get well,” mum had told him as we bundled dad into the car. Unfortunately, he didn’t and he passed away. He will be sorely missed not only by the Family but by all his friends, colleagues, farmhands, and his workers. - 

Obituary By Parakram Rautela (Son)