In the early 1950s I caught a glimpse of the former Nizam when he boarded a DC-3 Dakota that I was travelling on at Hyderabad. I was flying from Bangalore, on my way back to England. Like me, he got out at Bombay. We other few passengers had to wait while he was ceremoniously disembarked.

He was once the richest man in the world and a generous and charming philanthropist but, following Indian Independance, he was deposed as Nizam in 1948. He remained the Rajpramukh of Hyderabad but was evidently not too proud to share a plane with other mortals.

Whoever the "Hyderabad pasha" really was, all praise and thanks to him for looking after Seitz for perhaps the most pleasant few years of his troubled life!