India, Feb. 25 -- Who was Lali? Why do the lovers of art and literature hark back to him so often? These are the questions asked very often. The answer to these queries is never too easy. If one goes by the book, he was born to a rich landed family of Sangrur in 1932 and named Hardiljit, he was a professor of Anthropological Linguistics at Punjabi University, Patiala. He was married to Satwant Kaur and he passed away in 2014 at the age of 82. He had two sons and a daughter. Too simplified a biography and not worthy of a person revered as a legend by writers and artists. To know Lali one required to spend a sleepless night with his writer and artist friends or have shared a cup of coffee with him outside the coffee house on the Punjabi University campus as he held forth on the arts in sync with the oral tradition of the past. My introduction to this one-of-a-kind person came somewhere in the late seventies from my brother who worked as a medical representative in Patiala. He happened to have rented some accommodation in an old haveli at the Sheranwala Gate and the kind of information he offered was not all too complementary. The landlady would complain that her son had been misled by a wealthy aristocrat called Lali who rode a bicycle as a fad and misled young boys into arts and literature instead of advising them to take up stable jobs. The young boy in question was her son and later a journalist colleague, Kamal Dhaliwal....