Ambarasan Etirajan

Mark Tully was a towering figure in South Asian media for decades. The rich, warm tone of his voice, familiar to BBC audiences in Britain and around the world. He reported on some of the defining moments in South Asia, from wars to famines to assassinations. In 1992, he witnessed a huge crowd of Hindu hotliners tear down an ancient mosque in Ayodhya in northern India.

Mark Tully was fluent in Hindi and grasped the complexities and nuances of Indian culture and religions. For many Indians, he was always Tully Sahib. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2003, he said he believed that spending most of his life in India was his karma.

I grew up listening to Mark Tully's dispatches and reports in the 80s and 90s, and he was an inspiration to many aspiring journalists at that time.

His colleagues and friends remember him as a uniquely warm, generous, gentle and helpful man. As the historian William Dalrymple put it, as the voice of India, he was irreplaceable. A man prepared to stand up to power and to tell the truth, however uncomfortable.