‘People like Jishnu don’t simply occupy space, they alter it’

Some people light up a room. Jishnu was the current running through it. Conversations quickened when he arrived. Ideas crackled. Laughter travelled. He had that rare ability to make everyone around him think faster, laugh louder and feel more alive.

He was my junior in school and, years later, I persuaded him to come into advertising. Looking back, it remains one of the better decisions I ever made. Not because of what it did for him, but because it allowed an entire industry to experience that wonderfully restless mind and irrepressible spirit.

When I left for Hong Kong, I handed him my motorcycle. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

So did what happened every time I returned.

Before I’d even finished unpacking, Jishnu would be inside my suitcases, calmly helping himself to shirts, jackets and sweaters. Permission was never part of the equation. By the time I flew back, half my wardrobe had quietly changed ownership. I don’t think he ever believed he was borrowing my clothes. In his mind, I was simply transporting them back and forth on his behalf.

That was Jishnu.

He possessed that rare combination of intelligence, instinct and curiosity that can’t be taught. He connected dots that others didn’t even know existed. He saw possibilities where the rest of us saw obstacles. His intuition wasn’t just sharp; it was uncanny.

Last month, he called me. “We must do something together. I am bored.” I said I would call him the next morning. I forgot to, sadly.

This morning, that current stopped.

The silence feels unfamiliar because people like Jishnu don’t simply occupy space; they alter it. Their energy lingers—in conversations that still make us smile, in friendships they forged, in ideas they set in motion and in the memories that continue to carry their charge.

Sylvia Nasar, writing about John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, observed that Nash’s genius lay in flashes of intuition that came before logic—that he saw the vision first, and only later found the proof.

He always seemed to know before the rest of us.

So did Jishnu Sen.

He was a beautiful mind.