Byline: Ajit. Bhide Untimely and sudden death snatched from our midst a great teacher, thinker and psychiatrist. Professor R.L. Kapur died in Bellagio, Italy, while on a writing sabbatical, on Friday, 24 November 2006. His beloved wife Professor Malavika Kapur was with him at the time of his demise from a myocardial infarction. Born in pre-partition West Punjab in 1938, Ravinder Lal Kapur had his medical education at Amritsar. He qualified with a DPM from the All India Institute of Mental Health, Bangalore (the present NIMHANS) receiving a Gold Medal. He then won a Commonwealth scholarship for higher studies-the first psychiatrist to do so-which took him to Edinburgh where he earned his PhD, his guide being Professor Norman Kreitman. After working for several years in the UK, Professor Kapur returned to India and joined the Kasturba Medical College, Manipal. There he was influential in upgrading the Department of Psychiatry. He then joined NIMHANS as professor of Community Psychiatry. Epidemiological work carried out during his days at Manipal led to the publication of the first Indian monograph on psychiatric epidemiology, The Great Universe of Kota (with Professor G.M. Carstairs, Hogarth Press, 1976). In the same year, he became head of the Department of Psychiatry at NIMHANS and was, till then, the youngest person to ever head a postgraduate department of psychiatry in the country. He continued at NIMHANS till 1983. Then followed a stint at the Centre for Theoretical Studies at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and his entry into private practice, which he carried on with till the very end. He joined the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), at the IISc campus in Bangalore, when it was founded in 1988, and was later its Deputy Director. At the time of his passing away, he was Emeritus Professor there. Colleagues and students at NIAS admired his great skills as both an analyser of data and a synthesizer of knowledge. Professor Kapur had also held visiting professorships at various institutions including Harvard University. As a specialist consultant to World Health Organization (WHO), he worked in Somalia during troubled times. Impatient with the mundane, he chose unusual areas to explore. Among these we could include work to study the psyche of terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir, the alienation of youth in late twentieth-century India, studies of senior administrative officers' job orientation and satisfaction from a psychological perspective, creativity among Indian scientists and his research on spirituality. He was the first and possibly the only psychiatrist to have taken a sabbatical to study the subjective experiences of yogic practices, under the aegis of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). He inter-viewed the Dalai Lama with great savvy for an international news channel, and later held a no-holds-barred interview with the redoubtable K.P.S. Gill who is believed to have been instrumental in containing terrorism in the early 1990s. All these pursuits have sometimes earned him the sobriquet of being a 'fringe psychiatrist'; an unfair sobriquet, when one recalls that he had never forsaken hard-core psychiatry, was always happy to be back in his clinical practice and relished clinical discussions. A recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellow-ships, Dr Kapur was well known for his sharp intellect and the talent to distil and condense knowledge. This made him a teacher with a remarkable ability to present even very con-voluted concepts in a simple fashion. A warm-hearted human being, he endeared himself effortlessly to almost all who came in touch with him. An erudite speaker and engaging participant in academic meets, Dr Kapur had inimitable spontaneity and wit. During his days as professor at NIMHANS, an academic atmosphere was created that encouraged intellectual debate, gave rise to phenomenal teaching programmes that have stood the test of time, and everyone from the junior-most students to the senior-most faculty enjoyed full freedom of expression. …