Journalist Darryl D'Monte offers this ominous footnote to the last two days: “I was editing the Sunday magazine of the ToI in the ‘seventies and we were running a series titled “Dying as a Writer” – as opposed to Living as one. We got an angry response to our request for an interview with Gauri’s father, P. Lankesh, who was a Kannada poet, fiction writer and journalist, who started the weekly which Gauri was editing. He upbraided us ToI journalists for being comfortably off and running a series which was, to his mind, superficial. How haunting the title of that series sounds, in retrospect.”