Samikhsya Bureau
It is the normal perception that, Naveen Patnaik started from where Biju Patnaik left. However, last twenty years under his son Naveen Patnaik, showed that, the latter has been able to maintain himself on a balance cycle to fulfil the dreams of his father.
Biju Patnaik a name that is synonymous with braveries that the legendary leader was capable of.
Regardless of what place was offered to the man, who had catapulted himself to the realm of fame with an aerial passion to fly high, floating through a maze of unpredictability, parleying a fame of a war time hero, was a figure who could not be easily missed as an Indian politician of international repute.
Whatever the man did was always in link with his rare whims, those were far removed from the orthodoxies of that time.
As an ace pilot, he was unorthodox also, in his actions and ambitions, as an industrialist he had an unenviable penchant for being uncommon in his passion to lead the state from a slender industrial foundation to gigantic leaps, in which his strides were a mix of pace and falterings.
Back-pedaling to future
As a politician also, a known and loved by a few as a ‘maverick’ he had his ways of conducting himself on the ground.
Biju babu, as a leader, had not only demonstrated guts but he, in many ways, chose to be on the ground confronting the realities, taking on any challenge thrown up at him politically.
There was a time when the grand-old politician grew an urge to play the austerity card and took a bi-cycle from his residence to reach the then Secretariat but failed to do so. Which his critics loved to describe as a phase of back-pedalling to the future.
He was always a man who refused to be a soothsayer that the politics of those days even required.
His tryst with power- politics was short but his footprints were so long that, for the present day generation in politics, a trace to where he wanted to reach, remains a hard task.
