There is a memory I carry with me from my years as a civil servant. It has never left me.... Back then, I had just been transferred as Collector to Mangalore, a city then shadowed by communal violence and a menacing sand mafia. Before I left, word came that the Chief Minister wished to see me personally. It was unusual. Collectors don't typically get called in. I walked into his chamber with a knot in my stomach. He looked at me, that familiar, unreadable face. Steady. Unhurried. "Banri…" he said. (Come in.) "Nimage ondhe kelasa… alli ennum communal aaga baradhu." (You have only one job there. No communal incident should happen.) That was it. No preamble. No politics. No performance. Just a Chief Minister, alone with a young IAS officer, telling him exactly what mattered. In that single sentence lived an entire philosophy of governance. one rooted not in optics, but in the protection of ordinary people from extraordinary hatred. Fifteen days later, Mangalore erupted. Two communal murders, two communities, one city on edge. He called me again. Just as directly. "DC... Do what is required. Take anyone into custody, even our party people. Don't bother. But stop this within a day." To a young collector, those words were everything. They were permission. They were protection. They were political will at its most honest. I have known the contrast too. Under a different dispensation, in a similar crisis, the instruction from the top was the opposite. Do nothing strongly. Let things fester. …That silence said everything about who governs for whom. Siddaramaiah Ji was never that kind of leader. He carried government finances in his fingertips and social justice in his spine. He refused to tour places that reeked of feudalism. He spoke plainly, governed sharply, and stood on the side of the last person in the room. If there was one political figure I have genuinely admired, from the stage and up close, it has been him. His legacy is not in the schemes he launched or the budgets he read. It is in the kind of Chief Minister he chose to be when no one was watching. . On that quiet phone call. In the way he asked a nervous young officer to go out and keep the peace. And now, as he steps back with the same quiet dignity with which he always led, I find myself moved. He has handled this transition with the grace of someone who always knew that principles outlast positions. Siddaramaiah Ji....long life, good health, and please keep guiding us. The Congress, and this country, still needs the kind of moral clarity only you carry so naturally.