During his many assignments as he relentlessly pursued fraudulent and well-connected shipping magnate Dharma Teja in the US and Costa Rica and ensured his extradition to India, crossed swords with nefarious arms dealers in London, handled the aftermath of military coups and bloody executions of the Heads of State in Ghana and Liberia, witnessed a Japanese politician being assassinated in Tokyo and secured major economic gains for India in West Asia and Latin America.

And, of course, there was his turn-around of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), “taking it from a lethargic, low-wattage cultural body into the strong arms of India’s cultural diplomacy” as he put it. Proof of this was the Festivals of India in Britain, the US and the Soviet Union and a raft of other events worldwide that were held during Nazareth’s time. One particularly memorable event was the India-Greek Symposium held at Delphi in 1984, at which Culture Minister Melina Mercouri (“Never on Sunday”—Best Actress Award at Cannes in 1960) went beyond the usual platitudes to describe India and Greece as the “algebra and geometry of world cultures”.