First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"I would go to where [famous comedians] were, with an enormous tape recorder from the AV squad, and I would lie and say it was a real radio station. And when I got there, a child … had just shown up, and they would realize they got duped. But, they would talk to me anyway because they were really nice. And I would just say to Seinfeld, "How do you write a joke?" And I would force him to walk me through it. Or, I interviewed Harold Ramis: "How do you write a movie?" And those interviews changed my life because they really told me. It was my college. I had my college [education] in junior [year] of high school. I was just so obsessed, so I thought, "I'm gonna try to interview every original writer from Saturday Night Live. So, I interviewed Al Franken and Tom Davis and—. … What would happen is someone would be nice—like Alan Zweibel. I'd interview him and he would take out the phonebook and say, "I'm gonna hook you up with this person," and he would start giving me all the phone numbers. And I was obsessive. I was always trying to get Andy Kaufman, but … at the time he was always down south wrestling. And I would call his management office and they'd say, "We don't even know where he is.""
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.