Obituary Events ‐ 2007 

 
January 2007  

Jan. 2 Ashok Kumbhat (72), Chartered Accountant and Sports Administrator, in Chennai.

Jan. 9 Carlo Ponti (94), one of Italy’s greatest film producers in Switzerland.

Jan. 17 Lalit Mohan Thapar (76), doyen among Indian industrialists at the Escorts hospital in New
Delhi following cardiac and renal failure.

Art Buchwald (81), legendary U.S. newspaper columnist of renal failure in Washington.

Jan. 28 Omkar Prasad Nayyar (81), veteran music director in Thane, Maharashtra.

Jan. 30 Sidney Sheldon (89), an Oscar-winning Hollywood screen writer and novelist in California of
complications from pneumonia.

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Jan. 31 Adelaide Tambo (77), African National Congress stalwart at her Johannesburg home.

February 2007 

Feb. 11 N.C. Raghavachari (89), senior advocate at his residence in Chennai.

Feb. 15 Robert Adler (93), the co-inventor along with Eugene Polly of the TV remote control at a
nursing home in the U.S.

Feb. 17 Maurice Papon (96), French war criminal convicted for his role in the World War II deportation
of French Jews to Nazi death camps between July 1942 and June 1944 at a private clinic near
Paris.

Feb. 20 Chittabrata Majumdar (71), general secretary, Centre of Indian Trade Unions, in Kolkata.

Feb. 22 Lothar-Guenther Buchheim (89), German author of acclaimed war novel Das Boot, of heart
failure in Bavaria.

Feb. 23 Sham Lal (94), veteran journalist and literary critic in New Delhi.

Feb. 24 Amitabha Chakrabarti (59), Press Registrar of India of a heart attack in Varanasi.

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March 2007 

Mar. 11 T.Muktha (92) of the well-known Carnatic vocal duo Brinda-Muktha at her residence in Adyar,
Chennai.

Mar. 29 P.V. Subramaniam (91), better known as Subbudu, veteran music and dance critic in New
Delhi.

April 2007 

Apr. 1 Laurence Wilfred Baker (90), English ‘architect of the poor’ and pioneer of the low-cost eco-
friendly housing technology, in Thiruvananthapuram.

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Apr. 4 Jagjit Singh Chohan (80), Khalistan ideologue of a massive heart attack at his residence at
Tanda in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur district.

Apr. 5 Leela Majumder (100), Bengali litterateur and widely read children’s author in Kolkata following
a brief illness.

Apr. 11 P.U. Shanmugham (82), a senior DMK member and four-time Minister, in Chennai.

Apr. 27 Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich (80), legendary Russian cellist and emblem of resistance to
the Soviet Union at a Moscow cancer clinic.

May 2007 

May. 18 Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (74), French Nobel Prize-winning Physicist renowned for work on liquid

crystals, hailed as the “Isaac Newton of our time”, in Orsay, a suburb of Paris.

May. 19 L.Vaidyanathan (65), music director of yesteryear and elder brother of violin duo L.Shankar and
L.Subramaniam, in Chennai.

May. 24 R.Ramachandran (83), founder-secretary of the music sabha ‘Hamsadhwani’, in Chennai.

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 Obituary Events ‐ 2007 
 
June 2007 

Jun. 12 Sir Wally Herbert (72), English explorer and first man to cross the entire frozen surface of the
Arctic Ocean on foot, at a hospital in Inverness, Scotland.

Jun. 14 Kurt Waldheim (88), former U.N. Secretary-General and Austrian President, at his home in
Vienna.

Jun. 19 Piara Khabra (82), Britain’s oldest Member of Parliament, in London.

July 2007  

Jul. 10 Bharat Ram (93), Chairman Emeritus of the DCM Group and Shri Ram Fertilizers, in New Delhi.

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Jul. 23 Mohammad Zahir Shah (92), Afghanistan’s last King in Kabul.

Jul. 30 Ingmar Bergman (89), Swedish film director at his home, in Sweden.

Kazi Lhendup Dorji Khang Serpa (103) first Chief Minister of Sikkim at his residence in
Kalimpong, North Bengal.

Michelangelo Antonioni (94), Italian film director, the maker of ‘Blow Up’ ‘Zabriske Point’, ‘The
Passenger’ and ‘Red Desert’ at his home, in Rome.

August 2007  

Aug. 6
Kamal Guha (79), veteran All India Forward Bloc leader at a nursing home in Cooch Behar,
North Bengal.

Aug. 21 Qurratulain Haider (80), renowned Urdu writer in Noida after a prolonged illness.

Aug. 25 Rajyogini Dadi Prakashmani (85), head of the Prajapita Brahmakumari Ishwariya
Vishwavidyalaya in Mount Abu in Rajasthan’s Sirohi district.

Aug. 29 Banarsi Das Gupta (90), former Haryana Chief Minister at a hospital in New Delhi.

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September 2007  

Sep. 3 Dr. Rangaswamy Narasimhan, the designer of India’s first general purpose digital computer
TIFRAC in 1959, in Bangalore.

Sep. 6 Luciano Pavarotti (71), Italian tenor nicknamed “King of the High Cs” of pancreatic cancer, at his
villa near Modena in Italy.

Sep. 14 N.P. Ramajayam (70), general secretary, The Hindu Office and National Press Employees’ Union,
at a private hospital in Chennai.

Sep. 25 K. Jana Krishnamurthy (79), one of the founder-leaders and former national president of the
BJP, in Chennai after a prolonged illness.

Sep. 29 Lois Maxwell (80), Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond movies of cancer in Western Australia.

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October 2007  

Oct. 3 M.N. Vijayan (77), critic, social activist and Marxist thinker at a private hospital in Thrissur, Kerala.

Oct. 6 L.M. Singhvi (76), India’s longest serving High Commissioner to the United Kingdom at a
hospital in New Delhi.

Babasaheb Bhosale (86), former Maharashtra Chief Minister in Mumbai following a brief illness.

Oct. 10 Somappa Rayappa Bommai (84), former Karnataka Chief Minister and Union HRD Minister in
the H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral Governments at a private hospital in Bangalore after a
heart attack.

Oct. 11 Sri Chinmoy (76), spiritual leader who ran a meditation group One-ness – Heart -Tears and
Smiles at the United Nations, of a heart attack at his home in the New York City borough of
Queens.

Oct. 12 Justice Ranjit Singh Sarkaria (91), former Supreme Court Judge who headed the committee to
study Centre-State relations in 1983, after a prolonged illness in Chandigarh.

Oct. 16 Deborah Kerr (88), British actress remembered best for her role in the war time drama From
Here To Eternity, of Parkinson’s disease in Suffolk.

Oct. 30 L.S. Ramamritham (92), veteran Tamil novelist and one of the ‘Manikodi’ era after a brief
illness in Chennai.

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 Obituary Events ‐ 2007 
 
November 2007  

Nov. 1 Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. (92), the American commander of the B-29 Enola Gay that dropped
the 9,000 pound ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, at his
Columbus, Ohio home.

Ali Raza, who wrote the script of the classic Hindi film Mother India , in Mumbai.

Nov. 4 Swami Gahanananda (91), 14th president of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, at a
hospital in Kolkata.

Nov. 11 Norman Mailer (84), the macho prince of American letter known for works such as The
Naked and The Dead, of renal failure.

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Nov. 17 R.S. Pathak (82), former Chief Justice of India, at a hospital in New Delhi following a heart
attack.

Nov. 20 Ian Smith (88), the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in Cape Town, South
Africa.

December 2007

Dec. 9 Trilochan Shastri (91), renowned poet and Sahitya Akademi award winner, in New Delhi.

Dec. 14 Krishna Srinivas (94), president of the World Poetry Society Intercontinental, in Chennai.

Dec. 15 Tejeshwar Singh (60), former managing director of SAGE India and long-time Doordarshan
newscaster, at his hillside home in Landour above Mussoorie.

Dec. 25 G. P. Sippy (93), Bollywood film producer of ’Sholay’ fame in Mumbai.

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