In Writers Buildings, there was a sense of shock when word of Basanta Choudhury’s death spread through the centuries-old corridors of power. This was exactly 21 years ago and many of us moved on to the Nandan film complex, Basanta Choudhury’s workplace in some sense, to express a collective sense of grief. I had known him for over two decades and had become fairly close in the last few years, enough to take cheeky liberties. What all of us really regretted was that he had left us much too early.