I met Dilip Chitre a little over a decade ago outside Juhu's Prithvi Theatre. I walked up to him, chatted for a while, and then interviewed him at length about his work as a poet, critic, painter and filmmaker. In any other country, meeting Chitre would have been like spending time with royalty. He was an artist of enormous value to Maharashtra. Yet, after he died at his Pune residence in 2009 following a long battle with cancer, he faded into obscurity almost instantly, his honours and awards forgotten, his books relegated to back shelves in stores crammed with badly written novels and biographies of cricketers.

Few among us know who our regional writers, poets or artists are, though we know all about our actors. It’s the reason why our children fail to recognise MF Hussain or his works. Pic/AFP