ABSTRACT
Hrant got some of his father’s gambling genes. And he loved playing cards. And horse racing . . . But he was different from his father. He never played for money. He wasn’t interested in the money, but in winning. That was his attitude toward life itself, I think. He approached it like a gambler. You could see it when he was setting up a new business, or when he was bringing out the paper, or putting himself forward as a leader—there was something in the way he did these things that called to mind a gambler ready to lose everything. He staked everything he had on those businesses he started up from nothing, like when he started up Beyaz Adam and turned it into one of the biggest bookstores in the city. He did it again when, knowing nothing about the newspaper business, he set up Agos. He came to be one of our most important intellectuals, not just inside the Armenian community but in all of Turkey. Winning, yet again. When he was defending his cause, he put everything on the line, including his life. He lost his life, but still he won. Was it just him, though? We won, too. Not just Turkey’s Armenians. We all won. Thanks to him, we won.
