New Delhi, May 26 -- The death of Balbir Singh Senior does not mark the end of an era. The era in question had long disappeared in a vortex of fevered imagination and half-remembered truths. The man himself had seen it disappear. He had tried to alert others to the fact more than forty years ago but, like Cassandra, he had gone unheeded. That is why his death is a great loss: we never understood what we had....