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April 10, 2026
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"I started playing bluegrass music at such an early age that it never really dawned on me that I was the only female around at times. I think that was one of the reasons that I fell in love with Alison Krauss so early on. I was nine years old when I got my first Alison Krauss recording and she really became a big hero to me. I remember getting my first Rhonda Vincent album, too. I didn’t know anything about her music, yet, but I thought it was so cool to see a woman holding a mandolin on the album cover. I remember being about nine or 10 and thinking, ‘that will be me someday—a woman mandolin player!"
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.