Obituaries

Obituaries

1. Veteran Urdu Poet Bashir Badr Passes Away

Padma Shri-winning Urdu literary icon Dr. Bashir Badr, celebrated for making classical ghazals accessible through emotional simplicity, passed away at 91 in Bhopal on May 28, 2026, leaving behind acclaimed collections such as Aas, Aahat, and Kulliyate Bashir Badr.

2. Veteran Playback Singer Suman Kalyanpur Passes Away

Legendary 1960s-70s playback singer Suman Kalyanpur, renowned for timeless Hindi classics like Aajkal Tere Mere Pyar Ke Charche alongside an expansive multi-lingual regional repertoire, passed away from age-related ailments at 89 in Mumbai on May 31, 2026.

3. Veteran Filmmaker Bharathi Rajaa Passes Away

Six-time National Award-winning Tamil filmmaker Bharathi Rajaa, celebrated for pioneering realistic rural storytelling in South Indian cinema alongside legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja, passed away at 84 in Chennai on June 10, 2026.

4. Shooting Legend Jaspal Rana Passes Away

Asian Games gold medallist and Dronacharya Award-winning coach Jaspal Rana, a pioneer of Indian pistol shooting who mentored Olympic medallist Manu Bhaker, passed away at 49 on June 11, 2026. A recipient of the Arjuna Award (1994) and Padma Shri (1997), he played a pivotal role in establishing India’s modern shooting ecosystem through his disciplined coaching and high-performance technical mentorship.

5. François Englert Passes Away

Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel laureate François Englert, who co-discovered the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism explaining how fundamental particles acquire mass, passed away at 93 on June 18, 2026. A recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics (2004) and the J.J. Sakurai Prize (2010), his pioneering 1964 theoretical work laid the foundation for the Standard Model of particle physics, which was experimentally validated by CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.