Life after 70 plus, for these CFTRI folk

Quite a few of the CFTRI retired folk settled in Mysore are going through a productive ‘second adulthood’. Mr B R Srihari of ‘Star of Mysore’ is among those who have turned 70 and still feel they have a lot of life left in them. He took to journalism five years back, following his retirement from CFTRI. Mr K K Mookerji, on retirement as CFTRI scientist, is into company management. He is MD of a Mysore-based software development firm with a staff strength of 300, and rising exponentially. (Look up 'Making of a Boom Town: Sid Shows Us How' on 'Issues & Ideas' web page.)
Mr Mookerji’s Atlanta-based son counts on his retired father to run his software shop in Mysore – ‘we started with a staff of three software engineers, in an office located at my home’. Former CFTRI director Dr.H A B Parpia, who, in his ‘second adulthood’ is involved in NGO work pertaining to teacher training. He is a leading figure in MGP.
Mr Srihari has recently returned from a 14-week ‘working holiday’ in the US, from where he sent regular dispatches to SOM. During the visit he had occasion to get in touch with Dr Rajagopal Rao, another former CFTRI director, vacationing in the US with his wife Dr Vijaya Rao, former director of the Defence Food Research Laboratory. In his last dispatch – 'Calling From Florida' – before returning home, to Mysore, Mr Srihari wrote about a visit to Maryland, and, what he termed, ‘a spin around’ Bethesda, the seat of the US National Institute of Health, which had funded many CFTRI research programmes in the 1960s. Speaking of the Mysore-based institute’s US connection our 70-year-young SOM correspondent recalled that Dr. B L Amia, a former CFTRI director, had worked for the World Bank in Washington DC in the 70s.