Veteran journalist Rajkumar Keswani passed away today (21st May) in a hospital in Bhopal where he was admitted after testing COVID-19-positive. He was first undergoing treatment in J.P. Hospital in Bhopal, from where he was shifted to Bansal Hospital in the city. He was 70 years old. By a strange coincidence, Rajkumar Keswani breathed his last exactly a year after his father had died (on 20th May, 2020), also due to COVID-19.
Before becoming a journalist, Keswani used to be a distributor for the C.I. circuit. Among the films he had distributed was Ayee Milan Ki Bela (in re-issue) jointly with O.P. Goyal and Uttam Nahar. He had assisted in the colorisation process of Mughal-E-Azam and had much later also written a book on the landmark film of India.
Keswani, who was the erstwhile editor of the Indore-Bhopal edition of Dainik Bhaskar, had predicted the Bhopal gas leak tragedy much before it happened. He had warned the Madhya Pradesh government through his columns that Bhopal was sitting on a time bomb which would explode sooner than later, causing misery and destruction of unimaginable magnitude. Although the M.P. government ignored his warnings, it later awarded him for his foresightedness.