It was in the year 1986 when I first heard of Sitaram Yechury. I had just joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and was told by a fellow student that we should go to hear him speak. JNU in those days had the tradition of organising talks in hostel messes after dinner, around 9 pm. Leaders, intellectuals, journalists and academics were invited to speak on various topics and students used to attend such talks in great numbers. In those days, JNU was a great centre of learning and had not been invaded by regressive forces. Frank discussions on any subject irrespective of the ideology and religion was the rule; nobody complained, nobody would get hurt, and every speaker had to go through the gruelling rigour of students' questions.

Sitaram Yechury was a speaker I was always fascinated to listen to despite my disagreement with his ideology. That day, when I heard him speak, I was simply blown away by his erudition, depth of knowledge, and his command over language. Little did I know that after leaving the university, as a reporter I would be covering the Left Front and thus the Communist Party Of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), of which Yechury was a prominent leader and Politburo member.

During my stay in JNU, the communist movement across the globe had almost waned, except in countries like China and Cuba. Sitaram himself was a JNU alumnus and senior to me by more than a decade. When he was a student leader, the world was divided between two superpowers. It had been the era of the Cold War. But by the time he was inducted into the central committee of the CPI(M) in 1984, communism had come to be in deep crisis, and nobody understood it better than Mikhail Gorbachev.

After taking charge of the USSR, Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) tried to salvage the situation. He introduced two words - 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika'. He realised much before any leader in the Soviet bloc........

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