The day before he was shot, Pramod Mahajan told a party colleague that he wanted to tour Uttaranchal soon and issued instructions to ready Mumbai’s partymen to campaign there for a month. ‘‘We tried in Assam, now we have to go to Uttaranchal,’’ Mahajan told Atul Shah, BJP’s south Mumbai leader.

“Mahajan always carried a railway timetable with him because he planned his tour itineraries himself,’’ remembers Shah, who cherishes a letter Mahajan wrote to party workers who had campaigned in Assam recently.

The party’s prized orator — he always carried a memory pad to jot notes and nurtured his overworked voice with a nightcap of hot milk and turmeric — will be missed in his inner circle for long, energetic conversations and not just in politics.

On Wednesday, a ‘‘stunned’’ Nitin Desai, award-winning Bollywood set director of Devdas, watched the news and recalled intense hours spent planning the BJP’s grandest public event in December that had a flamboyance typical to technomaven Mahajan.

Four months ago, a giant lotus bloomed at Shivaji Park to reveal the top BJP leadership on stage to celebrate the party’s 25 years — and few know that Mahajan had rehearsed every hi-tech scene.

‘‘Pramod would come to my Karjat studio and ask many questions to understand how the lotus would work, from hydraulics to safety mechanism,’’ says Desai. Mahajan insisted that he wanted to stand in the middle of the lotus to rehearse, he remembers wistfully. ‘‘Then he went to check the view from the audience section, and the media section. He was so thorough.’’

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