India, Aug. 25 -- I grew up reading GK Reddy's dispatches in The Hindu. For a budding journalist, he was nothing short of a phenomenon. At a time when most newspapers were stingy about giving bylines to their reporters, every story he wrote appeared under his proud signature. Each report had a certain authority about it, a certain flourish that made it stand out from the routine reporting of the day.

His sentences were not for the fainthearted reader. They were often long, sometimes extending into a paragraph of 150 words or more, but never meandering. They carried weight, rhythm, and precision. His vocabulary was so vast that, as a young reader, I often had to keep a dictionary at hand. Yet, I never skipped a single piece of his writing...