I am continually dazzled by the extraordinary men and women that India has produced. One such person is Sir Gurunath Venkatesh Bewoor KCIE (1888 –1950) a member of the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS). His name came to mind when I read his great grand-daughter Dr. Amrita Bewoor Sen's report of a post office dedicated to him in Mysore. I think one important measure of a person comes in the family he created. Among his descendants are grandson Arun Bewoor, and Arun and Gayatri Bewoor's children, Amrita, and Capt. Madhav Bewoor.
The following information is culled from various sources, including Wikipedia: Sir Gurunath served on the Viceroy's Executive Council during World War II and was the first Indian director of the Post and Telegraph department of India. He later served as Managing Director of Air India. The Indian Postal service issued a postage stamp in his honor on his birth centenary, November, 20 1989. The family name comes from Bevoor village, then part of Bijapur district of the old Bombay Presidency and now in the Bagalkot district of northern Karnataka. Gurunath Bewoor was born there. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree from Deccan College, Pune (then part of Bombay University) and won the Dakshina Fellowship. His further education was at Cambridge University, following which he passed the Indian Civil Service entrance examination.Sir Gurunath joined the ICS in 1921 in the Central Provinces cadre. After a year of district service he was transferred to the Posts and Telegraphs Department in 1922. He served as Post Master General at Patna, Nagpur and Bombay. He was appointed a CIE in the 1932 King's Birthday Honors List. In 1934, he was appointed as the Director General of the Post and Telegraph Department of India; he was knighted five years later, being officially invested as a Knight Bachelor on June 20, 1939 at Viceregal Lodge, Simla, by the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow.In 1941, he was appointed Secretary, Posts and Air Department. Despite the pressures of World War II and the disruptions caused by the Quit India movement, Sir Gurunath efficiently managed the communications infrastructure of Britain's Indian empire. Along with stalwarts such as C.D. Deshmukh, N. R. Pillai, Y. N. Sukthankar, R. K. Nehru, H. M. Patel, and S. Jagannathan, Sir Gurunath was a member of the Finance and Commerce Pool (FCP), an elite group of Indian administrators tasked with managing the economic, commercial, industrial and supply-related issues of the war in India.In 1946 he reached the pinnacle of the British Raj as a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council under Lord Wavell and was appointed a KCIE (Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire) in the New Year Honors List. He was the originator of a formula known as the "Bewoor Time Test" to judge the efficiency of postal work. This was based on a report he authored for the postal department in 1929, similar to the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. In 1944 he represented India at the ICAO Conference in Chicago. He was also a member of the United Nations Transport and Communications Commission.Sir Gurunath Bewoor died unexpectedly in 1950. His older son Madhav (father of Arun Bewoor) was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and died during World War II. His younger son Gopal Gurunath Bewoor was India's Chief of Army Staff from 1973 to 1975.The photographs below are drawn from the Facebook pages of Amrita Bewoor Sen. The first one shows the stamp that India issued in 1989; the next picture shows Amrita and her husband, Prashanto Chandra Sen; then are Arun Bewoor and Amrita, followed by Gayatri Bewoor and Amrita. The penultimate picture portrays Amrita's brother Madhav, and his wife Neha Dar Bewoor. And the last depicts the Bewoor Post Office Building in Mysore.A wonderful family, a glorious heritage, all very much a part of India's ethos and DNA. It is impossible not to be proud of Sir Gurunath Bewoor and his legacy.