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April 10, 2026
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"The job of a director on the set to a large degree is to keep everybody’s moral up, he’s one of the very few people on the set who doesn’t have anything to do, because he’s overseeing it. He’s not shooting it, he’s not editing it, so a director needs to make sure that the cast and crew can do the best possible job. Sometimes I see films where the actors walk through it almost mechanically, and then there are other movies where every actor, top to bottom, seems to be doing a really great job. Then you know that there’s a chemistry on the set created by the director, an environment that helps them to do their work."
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.