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April 10, 2026
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"How often have things been proved to me impossible! Now I am used to it I expect it. But in those days it troubled me. Still I persevered."
"For the moment I was sure that I was in the presence of death. Well, I will tell it frankly, my sentiment was almost entirely that of waiting and expectation. "What is coming next?" I thought. "What am I going to see and know in a few minutes? Whom shall I see after I am dead?" The thought that I should be meeting my father in a few minutes thrilled me. Indeed, I think that in such moments there is no room either for regret or terror. The mind is too full of looking forward. One is frightened only so long as one still has a chance.""
"I don't want to take any merit away from the Wright brothers, for whom I have the greatest admiration; but it is undeniable that, only after us, they presented themselves with an aircraft superior to ours, saying that it was a copy of one they had built before ours". "Soon after the Wright brothers, Levavassor appeared with the "Antoinette" airplane, superior to all that existed at the time; Levavassor had been working for 20 years to solve the problem of flight; he could, therefore, say that his device was a copy of one built many years before. But he didn't." "What would Edison, Graham Bell or Marconi say if, after they had presented in public the electric light bulb, the telephone and the wireless telegraph, another inventor came forward with a better electric light bulb, telephone or wireless telephone apparatus saying that he had built them before them?" "To whom does mankind owe air navigation by the heavier-than-air? To the Wright brothers' experiments, done on the covert (they are themselves saying they did everything possible so that nothing transpired from the results of their experiments) and which were so ignored in the world that we see everyone qualify my 250 meters as a 'memorable minute in the history of aviation,' or is it to Farman, Bleriot and me who did all our demonstrations in front of scientific committees and in full sunlight?"
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.