The Indian Design community went into a collective depression on hearing the news that Professor MP Ranjan is no more. Hailed as the Design Guru, Ranjan, 64, was a senior professor and a principal faculty at NID, Ahmedabad.

The design fraternity is still in denial and is mourning the loss of its biggest champion. The outpour on social media that started as a huddle on Facebook, has now grown into a huge avalanche of web pages, groups, multimedia tributes, blogposts and Wikipedia entries.

After his death on 9th August 2015, memorial services and remembrance meetings have taken place in several cities, including Ahmedabad, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, London and San Fransisco, reinforcing the effect he had on people. There was also one in the village Katlamora in Tripura, where he worked on building a design institute for the craftsmen.

"Ranjan was many things to many people," writes Sajith Ansar. "He was an educator and a mentor, pushing boundaries and encouraging each of us to do more and think more. He was a design evangelist, speaking up for causes and being a catalyst of change. He was a source of inspiration, igniting in each of us an ability to think beyond our abilities. He was a farmer, planting within each of us the seed of curiosity and discovery."

Ranjan was all this and more. He was busy juggling all these roles and he did these effortlessly. Ranjan had a lasting influence on the lives he touched and the students he taught. He taught his students that design-thinking is a powerful tool that can be used to usher in change. He made every student feel special and important and was always connected to them, sometimes, even years after they graduated. He made his students think, perceive, question, grapple and deliver. He was genuinely proud of his students' work and constantly blogged about them. He made it a point to let everyone know about it.

He worked to spearhead the cause of design with missionary zeal. He lamented the lack of understanding of design in successive governments. He questioned the absence of designers in the Padma awards. He was disappointed that several design projects are 'flying under the radar', with no recognition or support. He rebelled against decisions that did not acknowledge this. He was a lone crusader who used blogging to highlight the state of design in India. His blog soon became the authoritative tool for evangelism that merited global attention. He would gleefully rattle off statistics about the fact it had a few million hits and designers from world over were quick to sign up for his posts.

His global moment in the sun came when he was chosen as one of the world's top 20 Design Thinkers of the world along with IDEO head David Kelly and Brad Pitt in the list. He had a sizable number of friends and followers in the international design community as well. Don Norman, author of the book, Design of Everyday Things, writes that, "Ranjan was a warm and compassionate person and a great educator. Thousands of students will mourn. I was pleased to be able to call him my friend."

Harold Nelson, the author of The Design Way had made a lasting impact on Ranjan, who later became his friend and fellow traveller. Nelson writes, "Ranjan and I were just exchanging emails on a quest for new insights into old design terms in design. I will miss him as a colleague and friend of immense integrity and intellectual honesty."

He was born to an entrepreneur father, M V Gopalan in Madras, who influenced him with his design enterprise. Ranjan claimed that while children his age were busy playing with toys, he was busy making them. Sujata Shankar Kumar, a furniture design graduate says, "He would always tell me that the day he was born in the year 1950, his house in Madras got connected with electricity, like he was the brightest star. He said it with that adorable brag quotient he had that few could get away with."

Ranjan's toy-making skills came in handy, when he joined NID to study Furniture Design. As a student of design, he worked on projects alongside design big-wigs like Charles Eames, Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller, which left a deep influence on his thinking. He returned to NID to become a faculty. As a teacher, he evolved from teaching basic geometrical construction to young foundation students to teaching design thinking and strategising to students across all disciplines through a course he conceived called 'Design Concepts and Concerns'.

His enthusiasm to learn and teach was infectious. He was always enthusiastic to share what he learnt. He would do this either through elaborate posts in his blog or through engaging conversations over chai. Everyone agrees that he was generous and giving, when it came to sharing what he had.

His interests were varied and eclectic. Whether it was geometry or basket weaving, philosophy of justice or information technology, he would do a full immersion into the subject. That's how he was: thorough and intense. He documented the entire cane and bamboo crafts of North East India, along with his colleagues Ghanshyam Pandya and Nilam Iyer. Together, they published the book Bamboo and Cane Crafts, that, to this day is the authoritative guide on the craft. It is both tragic and eerie that all the three authors died well before their time.

His passion to document, his ability to share and his method to simplify complex concepts, all came in handy, when he co-authored a book with his wife and fellow designer, Aditi Ranjan, Handmade in India. The book was published by the Department of Handicrafts, Ministry of Textiles, Government of India and is now the official directory of all the crafts.