Dear Salinger…

 

Dear J D Salinger,

I envy you.  I envy you for the privacy you have been enjoying for over half a century. 

There was a time when I used to accuse you of being an escapist.  You ran away from the world like a coward, I said.  You were not much different from your character, Holden Caulfield, I surmised.  I lamented that you were squandering the wealth of your literary skills that could deliver so many delightful and inspiring novels to us.

I am now sorry for all that.  I now understand that you did the right thing by moving away from the world of men and living your life in your own private world. 

I long for such a world of my own, a world into which no one will intrude without my permission, a world in which I won’t even feel the need to write a letter like this.

Holden Caulfield must have been your own prototype.  I think he is mine too.  He wanted to run away from the world of men and live a romantic life in a wooden cabin in some place far away from men.  But he didn’t follow his dream and hence ended up in the loony bin.  You followed Holden’s dream and lived a happy life (presumably) and a pretty long one too.  If you hadn’t followed Holden’s dream, would New York (or wherever else you chose to set up your nest) have driven you mad, literally?  It cannot be without some serious reason that you chose to hide yourself from the world of people. 

It is not without some such serious reason that I long to hide myself from the world of people.

It is not that I hate the world.  Holden didn’t either.  Nor did you, I’m sure, your legal battles against your unauthorised biographies notwithstanding.  Maybe, you just didn’t know how to worm your way through the web that people wove around you.  Maybe, what you thought were plain delights of life were projected by some well-wisher of yours as serious offences against the society or threats to your own health.  Maybe, they tried to cash in on your talents and skills like the Dracula feeding on others’ blood. 

Whatever the reasons, the world made you feel sick.  It makes me feel so too.  So I am dreaming of my own New Hampshire.  Right now I can only dream of it.  But in a few years I’ll be there.   

Be my inspiration until then.

Guardian Angels and Invisible Chains

 

Wall calendars were a fashion in rural Kerala during my childhood. All the houses I saw had a few calendars hung on the front wall bearing pictures of some deity or landscape or something else.  Eventually matinee idols replaced gods and landscape before calendars vanished from the walls totally.

My home had at least a dozen calendars hung on the front wall all of which carried Christian images.  One of them was of two little children, a boy and a girl, walking with an effeminate person hovering over them from behind, his mantle serving as a sort of shield for the children. My mother explained that the person was the guardian angel.  Wherever we went the guardian angel would be there to protect us from all evils.  I used to think that angels were all women (they looked so in the pictures) until I grew up enough to understand that Christianity did not espouse female angels.

I had many guardian angels in my actual life.  They were all female in my childhood.  I studied up to class 5 in the primary school run by the local parish and the teachers were mostly Catholic nuns.  The convent of the Carmelite nuns was the building nearest to our house.  The nuns, thus, were our next-door neighbours.  My parents being devout Catholics, it became easy game for the nuns to play the role of guardian angels to us, the children. 

“Do you notice anything special about that picture?”  My mother once asked me pointing at a picture of Our Lady.  I looked at the picture for a while and said, “She is sad.”  She looked extremely sad, in fact.  As I recall it now, it was a pale green painting of Mary, mother of Jesus.  It was there in the largest room of the house which we used also as a prayer room in the evenings. 

“Look at her eyes,” said my mother ignoring my observation.

I did.

“Now you go there and look at her eyes,” my mother said pointing to a corner of the room. 

I did.

“What do you notice?” 

I had no idea of what mother was trying to teach me.

“Wherever you stand, you’ll find her eyes fixed on you.”

That sounded like a miracle to me.  I tried it out from a lot many spots in the room and mother was right.  I walked in the room keeping my eyes fixed on the picture and Mary’s eyes followed me wherever I went. 

It took me quite many days or weeks to think of trying out the same experiment with other such pictures in the room.  Then I realised that not only Mary, but a whole pantheon of saints (who looked as sad as Mary) was also staring at me wherever I went.  It was not a pleasant realisation.  There was a whole row of saints on that wall.

It took me years to learn that any photograph would produce a similar effect if the person in the photo had been looking at the camera when the picture was taken.  Any artist can make a painting of just anyone whose eyes will follow you wherever you go.

But my childhood remained in the fear of being watched all the time by an infinite number of eyes in the sky in addition to the eyes of my guardian angels in nuns’ mantles.

That was only a childhood fear, however.  I overcame that fear as soon as I was sent to St Sebastian’s.  Years later, the saints and guardian angels performed a vanishing trick from my mind just as the calendars had disappeared from the walls of Kerala’s rural homes or as easily as Father Veranani had performed a vanishing trick during the strike in his school.

I had never imagined that the guardian angels would make reappearance in my life. 

But they did. 

One of the biggest blunders in my life was to join a college as a lecturer at a time in my life when I was not mature enough for that sort of a job, my age notwithstanding.  [I say “one of the biggest” because other ‘biggest’ blunders followed without much delay.]  There was another Father Veranani in that college, the Vice Principal who went on to become the Principal.  Let me call him the Reverend.

The Reverend became my guardian angel.  And his eyes still follow me, wherever I go, whatever I do.  Miracle?

I know the artist who is painting that miraculous painting.

That’s why I suffer the gaze of Father Veranani.

The Sound of Slogans

1972.  I was in class 8 and the section was E or F.  It was the only section of class 8 which had both boys and girls.  Though St Sebastian’s was a co-ed school, the classes were usually single sex ones.  In fact, the boys and girls studied in totally different wings.  The only year in which I studied in a class with girls was when I was in class 8.  At the beginning of the academic year a voting through secret ballot was conducted to elect the class leader.  The students were asked by the class teacher to nominate their future leader.  I happened to be one of the only two nominees. 

Looking back now, I know there was no genuine reason for my nomination.  I had never displayed any leadership quality at any time.  I was a very diffident student who had not excelled in any field except academics.  I was not a singer, actor, sportsperson, or anything that would merit the attention of other students.  Though I tried my hand at all the writing competitions in the school (including handwriting) many times, I never won a prize.  Only once did I dare to participate in a speech competition and I could not speak more than a few sentences.  An audience of more than 2000 students along with their teachers made my knees buckle. 

All the girls in the class voted for me.  The boys found it out as the votes were being counted.  I myself had voted for the other candidate.  I was just a harmless fella, almost goody-goody, and the girls must have thought it ‘safe’ to vote for me.   Since the class leader had really nothing much to perform, I accepted the mandate which did inflate my ego quite a bit.

A few days after the election, slogans reverberated in the corridors of St Sebastian’s.  A girl, who used to recite mellifluously all the poems in our Malayalam text book at the order of the teacher, told me to shout slogans and lead the class in the strike that was going on. I felt like a donkey in lion’s skin.  I wouldn’t even dare to stand in front of a group of discipline-breakers, let alone shout slogans.   I looked around for Father Veranani with his abiding cane.

Father Veranani did not make his appearance anywhere as Baby Andrews led a large group of students who entered each classroom shouting slogans.  The teachers seemed happy and eager to leave their classes.  Baby Andrews led many strikes later in the college where he became a leader of a student’s union.

It took me a few days to understand why Father Veranani and his cane had performed the vanishing trick as Baby Andrews and his musical slogans laid siege to the school.  The strike was conducted at the behest of the Catholic Church.  The Church was opposed to certain reforms that the Kerala government was implementing in the education sector.  The reforms would curtail certain powers of the Church over the colleges run by it.  

The strike went on for over a month.  Finally the Church won.  The Church always wins in Kerala. 

As a student of St Sebastian’s I learnt the story of the school’s manager, one Father Thomas, who was accused of pouring hot oil on the face of a nun who resisted the priest’s unholy intentions.  The news made headlines in the newspapers for a while and then vanished into the dreary pages of evanescent history.

It was in the same period that I walked an extra couple of kilometres while returning home to witness a woman who sat in satyagraha (the word used by my companions) at the house of our social studies teacher.  The woman had an infant in her lap.  She claimed the child belonged to our teacher and that he had to pay compensations to her.  The teacher’s wife too taught in the same school and they were a childless couple.  I stood along with my companions watching the police force the woman with her child into a jeep.  Then I walked home unable to comprehend many things.  This social studies teacher was the strictest teacher we had.  We lived in terror of his disciplinary measures.  What I witnessed in front of his house left me as confused as the report about the school’s manager.     

Slogans did not seem to match reality.  I learnt to mistrust slogans.  I was never elected a leader after that at any time.

Gospel according to Father Veranani

Reverend Father Cherian Veranani died.  When the information was conveyed to me by my father many years ago, it did not evoke any feelings in me. 

Father Veranani was the headmaster of St Sebastian’s School, Vazhithala, where I studied from class 6 to class 10 in the first half of 1970s.  There was no higher secondary school (classes 11 & 12) in those days. Now St Sebastian’s is a higher secondary school, but Father Veranani is not there to head it.

Whenever I remember Father Veranani what comes to my mind is a slender, flexible cane which he used to carry all the time with him.  His silver hair dashes into my mind almost simultaneously reminding of the picture of the god I had seen in some catechism books. 

Vazhithala was a nondescript village four-and-a-half kilometres from my home and it is yet to make any mark in the history of Kerala though many new institutions have dotted its landscape now and a few more buses have started plying the only one main road passing through it.  But St Sebastian’s Vazhithala was a popular school in the vicinity of our village in those days.  There were other high schools at more or less equal distance from my home and they too were government-aided ones run by the Catholic Church. 

Father Veranani’s popularity in our village was such that my father would put me only in St Sebastian’s Vazhithala as he had done with my elder brother and sister and as also he had not done with my younger siblings.

Looking back now I know why my father fell in love with St Sebastian’s.  It was because of Father Veranani.  It was because of Father Veranani’s slender, flexible cane.  It was because of the Catholic Church.

By the time my younger brother had to join class 6 (our local primary school was only up to class 5) my father became a little more practical.  He put them in another school.  That school was also four kilometres away from home but there were buses running in that direction.  Like my elder siblings, I had to walk 9 km every day.  It contributed much to my robust health, I think.

My father was very fond of punishing his children.  I cannot recall many instances of my father pouring affection on his children.  But I can recall innumerable instances of his wielding the stick (broken from the nearest tree) on his boys’ thighs.  The girls were mercifully spared such ordeals.  We were four boys and six girls.  I used to joke in my youth that our women were as fertile as our land. 

The Catholic Church was absolutely opposed to birth control methods.  Father Veranani with his swishing cane was a commanding symbol of the Catholic Church.  Today the cane has disappeared from the schools and the faithful are no more loyal to the Church’s policy regarding birth control.

I can recall only two instances of Father Veranani’s cane burning through my bones. 

The school had a fairly good PA system.  Father Veranani’s voice would occasionally be amplified through the loud speakers fixed outside every wing of the school. If there was no teacher in the classroom the announcement would be drowned in the usual noises made by the students.  The teachers being no less dreadful than Father Veranani commanded a lot of silence from their students.

On that fateful day, when I was in class 7, there was no teacher in our classroom when the loudspeaker blared Father Veranani’s announcement.  It was just before the last period ended.  The Catholic students had catechism classes and the non-Catholics had moral science classes after the last period for half an hour.  Since Father Veranani’s announcement was drowned in the noises of the class, I asked a companion what it was.  He was mischievous enough to mislead me. 

I was naive enough to be misled by people almost all through my life. 

My companion told me the announcement was that there was no catechism class that day.  I didn’t wait a second longer to verify it.  Pulling up my bundle of books, I homeward plodded my weary way.  There were many other students too plodding their own ways, weary or not.  Nothing looked amiss to me as I pulled out the book I had pilfered from my father’s library and started my usual reading as I walked along the four-and-a-half kilometre stretch.

But there was something amiss.  The next morning Father Veranani came to my classroom, the cane dangling ominously in his hand, and pulling me up asked me to stretch out my arm.   I had bunked off from the catechism class on the previous day. He did not accept my explanation about the announcement.  The cane landed three times on my palm and etched a scar in my soul.  I was, however, grateful to Father Veranani for not reporting the matter to my father. 

The school organised a retreat for the Catholic students when I was in class 8.  A ‘retreat’ is a series of tedious religious sermons preached by an untiring priest from morning till evening with brief intervals in between.  During the morning interval the students, as usual, had retreated to their classrooms.  I was talking with some of my friends in my classroom when Father Veranani called all of us out to the veranda so that the punishment would serve as an example to other students too who would see it from their classrooms or outside.  Our crime?  We had broken the rule of silence.  All through the retreat we were supposed to maintain absolute silence. 

The furious swish of Father Veranani’s cane on the palm of my companions rattled my bones though my own palm had tasted it less than a year ago.  When my turn came I involuntarily pulled my palm back a little and the cane swished through the air to hit Father Veranani’s cassock with a loud noise.  He caught me by the edge of my khaki half pants (the uniform) and fired half a dozen salvoes on my slender thigh. 

Later on when Father Veranani was staying somewhere near my hometown as a retired priest, my father asked me many times to visit him.  Father Veranani was supposed to have built my character along with many other priests and nuns at different times.  I always found an excuse to postpone the visit.

When I was told by my father that Father Veranani was dead I did not feel any emotion.  There was neither love nor hate.  There was neither joy nor sadness.  It was as if some stranger had died.

What was Father Veranani’s contribution to my life?  He was a good English teacher.  He taught me only in class 10 and I loved his classes.  He laid the foundation of my English knowledge.  I can still recall (35 years later) some of his English classes.  I am indeed grateful to him for that.  But that gratitude is not touched with any emotion.  It is just a memory carried by the neurons in my brain.

Punishments don’t achieve any purpose, I think.  At least not the kind wielded by my father and his generation.  Yet I am not opposed to punishments altogether.  Physical punishments are often meaningless.  They seem to carry only the anger of the person who uses them.  Punishments given out of anger serve no purpose whatever except the gratification of the anger of the one who punishes.  Punishments should be given only to make the student understand his fault and help him to correct it.  It should never be given out of anger or even annoyance. 

Father Veranani belonged to a generation that believed in the maxim: Spare the rod and spoil the child.  The rod was his gospel. So he did not spare the rod at all.  How many children were spoilt or made by that rod, I don’t know. 

He did not punish in anger, however.  He looked indifferent as the cane rose and fell in his hands.  He looked liked a serene crusader for discipline.  If I can blame him anyway, it would be about the self-righteousness that his cane symbolised.  But the Church is the most self-righteous institution I have ever come across so far and Father Veranani was a man of the Church.

My Neighbour is Hungry

That one out of every six persons in the world goes hungry everyday is stale news now.  FAO said it quite some time ago and the newspapers reported it on the front pages.  The UN-led World Food Summit going on now in Rome further draws our attention to the problem, though many rich nations have already branded the Summit a failure and refused to attend the Summit.  “It seems that the plight of over 1 billion starving people is not important enough to force the rest of the top brass to attend this 3 day conference,” says one report.

It is quite paradoxical that hunger exists on a massive scale in a world whose men explore the outer spaces and plan honeymoon trips to the moon.

Where are all the hungry people?  Are they so far away from us that we don’t/can’t see them?

“Almost all of the world’s undernourished live in developing countries. In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger; in Sub-Saharan Africa 265 million; in Latin America and the Caribbean 53 million; in the Near East and North Africa 42 million; and in developed countries 15 million in total.”  [http://www.un-ngls.org/spip.php?article1399]

The situation in India is not commendable.  “Countries that have shown some great numbers in economic growth in the last few years like India have pushed an additional 30 million people into hunger because of its neo-liberal policies,” says a researcher of hungerfreeplanet.org.

The same report also says: “One-third of world’s children are malnourished and since 2005, an extra 170 million people have been pushed into hunger which is equivalent to the populations of Germany, France and Canada combined.  It is outrageous that hunger kills a child every six seconds and an equivalent of a classroom of thirty children die every three minutes.”

The G8 Summit had pledged $20 billion over three years to the hungry of the world.  That is not much as the amount works out to $2 per hungry person per year.  What’s more scandalous is that the amount came down subsequently from $20 billion to a meagre $3 billion.

Jeremy Hobbs of Oxfam International says that “Vietnam invested heavily in its farming sector when it looked for economic growth and food security, and in 12 years turned itself from a country that had to import much of its food to be a major exporter. Last year poverty in Vietnam fell to below 15 per cent compared with 58 per cent in 1979.”

Governments cannot be mute spectators when their people are starving.  Old style [pre-globalisation style] welfare activities are required today even more than earlier.  Governments are ready to bail out corporate bigwigs when they go broke.  Billions of dollars come pouring in from government revenues when a rich industrialist hits the rock.  When the poor go starving why do governments turn a blind eye?

Problems such as the Maoist uprising are a creation of the governments with selective vision.

 

Outliers: The Story of Success

Outliers: The Story of Success

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages: 309       Price in India: Rs 399

The other day I asked a group of young students (of class 12) what they thought were the ingredients of success in life.  Their answer (in the order it came from them) was: hard work, luck, buttering…  Being thoroughly familiar with the Hindi idiom makhan lagaana, I understood immediately what ‘buttering’ meant.  I work in an institution whose Manager unabashedly reminds the staff that ingratiating themselves with the people in power was essential for career advancement.  The young students meant the same thing by ‘buttering’.  So I asked them whether buttering was more important than aptitude and skills.  They answered that it was so in their experience.

I had just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, when I asked the question to the students.  The subtitle of the books is: The Story of Success.  I bought the book precisely because like my students I too was beginning to wonder whether ‘buttering’ was an essential ingredient of success.  I was relieved to see that Gladwell doesn’t add ‘butter’ to his recipe.

The book is the result of an extensive research by the author into the ingredients of success.  It differs from others books of the kind in that it is not motivational but factual.  Outliers gives us some facts about certain successful people (and one remarkable unsuccessful person) and draws certain conclusions.

Hard work, opportunities and luck, and the background from which one comes are the ingredients of success, according to the book.  [My students had got the first two right, in the right order too.]

Citing detailed examples of the Beatles and Bill Gates, Gladwell argues that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”  There is a chapter titled ‘The 10,000 – Hour Rule’.  People who conquered peaks of excellence in significant domains had put in about ten thousand hours of labour!  The Beatles had played music and sang songs for about that many hours before their albums started selling in millions.  Bill Gates had put in about that much labour as a young student on the computers that were available to him in the days of his adolescence and youth.

Gladwell also cites examples from the research conducted in 1990s by K. Anders Ericsson and his two colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music.  “In fact,” in Gladwell’s words, “by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totalled ten thousand hours of practice.  By contrast, the merely good students had totalled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totalled just over four thousand hours.”  [That reminded me of Bernard Shaw’s wit: ‘Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, teach.’]

Opportunities and luck also play a vital role in one’s ascent to the heights, argues Gladwell.  “But what truly distinguishes their (the successful people’s) histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities,” says Gladwell.  Let me quote that whole paragraph: “The Beatles, for the most random of reasons, got invited to Hamburg.  Without Hamburg, the Beatles might well have taken a different path.  ‘I was very lucky,’ Bill Gates said at the beginning of our interview.  That doesn’t mean he isn’t brilliant or an extraordinary entrepreneur.  It just means that he understands what incredible good fortune it was to be at Lakeside in 1968.”

Gladwell devotes almost two chapters to Chris Langan, a man with an IQ of 200 (Albert Einstein’s IQ was 150) but ended up as a farmer due to lack of luck.  Langan’s is a moving story worth reading in Gladwell’s rendition.

I didn’t find Gladwell equally convincing when he spoke about the role played by the family/social/cultural/ethnic backgrounds.  I agree with him the backgrounds do play a vital role in one’s successes and failures.  But his explanations are not convincing.  Rather, they are not lucid.  Gladwell has obfuscated his otherwise brilliant writing with a lot of jargon from airlines and other sources while discussing the last ingredient of success.

It was a delightful experience reading the book, the last part being the exception.  But the very last chapter redeems the book again.  It is about Gladwell himself: the history of his own life is a charming detail.

I recommend this book to those who wish to understand success from a realistic perspective.

A note on the title: The word ‘outlier’ refers to “something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.”

Raj Thackeray will dig deeper still

Raj Thackeray is taking Indian politics to new lows.  The attack on an MLS who took an oath in Hindi reveals the degradation of the Thackeray kind of politics.  The BJP MLA, Girish Mahajan, took the oath in English while the Congress MLA, Baba Siddiqui, took the oath in Sanskrit and Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) had no problems with that.  So the problem seems to be with Hindi.  Raj Thackeray displayed his hatred of the Hindi-speaking people earlier on many occasions too.  His mentor, Bal Thackeray, whose policies Raj is following with ferocious devotion, had more hatred in his bitter heart.  Bal, in his heydays, attacked Indians belonging to many linguistic groups.

The violence perpetrated by MNS is totally unconstitutional.  Yet will the culprits be punished?  Yes, they have, for the time being, been suspended.  In all probability, the suspension will be revoked when the four MLAs who attacked Abu Azmi will read out an apology which they won’t mean at all.  And Raj Thackeray will go on preaching on national television channels in Marathi to people who don’t understand that language about the greatness of Maharashtra, its language and its people.  Will Raj Thackeray ever go behind the bars for the umpteen crimes that he has already committed?

We have just witnessed the moral erosion that is degrading the BJP govt in Karnataka.  The state’s new govt has bent its knees before the wealth and political clout of the Reddy brothers.

Wealth rules the roost in most places today. 

Raj Thackeray has not reached that depth in his pursuit of depths.  For want of better imagination he is currently stuck at the depth dug by his mentor.  This depth has already won him a lot of political clout in the state.  With clout will come wealth.  And wealth will dig new depths.  Politics and wealth have this amazing capacity to dig deeper and deeper.

When will we have leaders who will lead us to great heights?

Monster Boss

According to a recent CNN report, 67 percent of people say

they hate their jobs. The vast majority of unhappy workers

blame their bosses. Without question, having a monster boss

is one of life’s challenges. No matter how bad you think it is,

you have a choice: to quiver and hide or to stand up and do

something.

 

That is from the preface to Patricia King’s latest book Monster Boss. 

 

More about the book from King’s website:

 

 

If the reason you hate going to work every day is your boss, it’s time to do something

about it. A bad boss can rob you of job satisfaction, motivation, career advancement—

even your physical and emotional health. With this book, you’ll learn how to improve

your situation, save your sanity, and, when necessary, fight back. You’ll also learn to

change undesirable situations and when your only option is to move on.

 

 

$14.95 (CAN $16.50) Business

ISBN-13: 978-1-59869-399-7

ISBN-10: 1-59869-399-9

www.adamsmedia.com

 

This informative guide offers solutions to every

type of boss problem such as:

 

• Your Boss Puts You Down: When your boss has

only negative things to say in order to mask his own

insecurity, he’s acting like Bigfoot

 

• Your Boss Sucks the Life Out of You: When

your boss expects too much and drains all of your

energy, she’s acting like Dracula

 

• Your Boss Runs Hot and Cold: When your boss

compliments you one minute and criticizes you the

next, he’s acting like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

There are more types of bosses described and dealt with in the book.  To know more about the book, click the link below:

http://www.monsterbossthebook.com/MonsterBoss.pdf

The dilemmas of greatness

“The truth is that heroes can have, most do have, feet of clay, flawed personalities who grapple with baser emotions while they serve the nation.  It is the commitment and the vision that matter.”  A G Noorani wrote this while reviewing two books on J F Kennedy in the Frontline dated Nov 6, 2009.

Noorani mentions a few examples of flaws in personalities that are considered great in history, though an ordinary book review wouldn’t call for such details.  I’m grateful to Noorani for mentioning those details because it made me think much about greatness.  [Having killed, with the generous assistance of the systems in which I worked, the delusions I nurtured about my own greatness, it became interesting to ponder on the topic.]

Gandhi was a great man, according to me (and many other silly people too).  But Gandhi too had feet of clay.  Didn’t he impose his ideas on his wife most of the time?  Did he care for his children one-tenth as much as he cared for the nation?  Didn’t he ask young girls to sleep beside him (mind you, I didn’t say sleep with) in his old age?  Didn’t he use those young girls as kind of crutches, again in his old age?  Well, Noorani doesn’t ask those questions.  It’s silly me who’s asking them. 

Noorani mentions just one example from Gandhi’s life.  The 50-year old Gandhi was immensely attracted to Sarladevi, a rich lady with “a broad cultural education” (Gandhi’s own words about her) and wife of Ram Bhuj Dutt Chaudhuri.  Gandhi confessed that he had lustful attitude toward this woman.   Noorani quotes Gandhi: “I was carried away in spite of myself and but for God’s intervention I might have become a wreck.”  I must add (lest I perpetrate some injustice upon Noorani as well as Gandhi) that Gandhi also said explicitly that this was the only lady who aroused lustful feelings in him. 

Suppose Kasturba was a woman of “a broad cultural education”.  Would she have aroused such “lustful” feelings in Gandhi?  If she had, would we have had Gandhi as the father of the nation?  Did Gandhi choose celibacy because Kasturba could not arouse his lust?  These are three (3 is my lucky number) of the many (blasphemous?) questions that aroused in my mind as I read Noorani’s review.

They are hypothetical questions and can be dismissed summarily if you wish.  Yet I think the questions are valid if you are discussing Gandhi’s greatness. 

Greatness lies partly in being able to overcome the temptations of the flesh.  It is when you are able to deal fairly and squarely with those temptations that you will be able to give due attention to your great vision.  And I’m pretty sure that Gandhi would have overcome the temptations had they even been proffered by his own wife.  That ability to grapple advantageously with temptations was part of Gandhi’s greatness. 

Noorani’s review goes on to mention a few other great men who had feet of clay and says that what matters ultimately is how useful you are to the people around you, to the institution you serve, to your society, to your nation.  Noorani doesn’t, however, discredit morality.  “In any fair assessment,” he says, “moral lapses must not be ignored…”

“Lloyd Geroge was utterly unscrupulous, financially corrupt and a philanderer to boot,” says Noorani.  Yet George has a significant place in British history because he “provided steady leadership to Britain during the First World War.”

John F Kennedy had too many women in his life.  That was the flaw his personality.  Yet Kennedy was great because of the services he rendered to his nation.

Nehru too had a weakness for women.  That does not really detract from his greatness.

While Gandhi overcame his temptations most of the time, many others like JFK succumbed.  So Gandhi was greater than JFK and others like him.  Yet JFK and others too remain great in comparison with (too) many others who add nothing worthwhile to the betterment of humanity or at least a section of humanity.

Anyone who adds more beauty, more compassion, more goodness to humanity is great in my view, even if the person has some personal drawbacks. 

The vast majority of people who have nothing to add to humanity are keen to highlight the drawbacks of the great because they think doing so will keep the greatness under their control.  We like to admire greatness; but not when the person is alive!

A Friend, his religion and some thoughts

Searching out a classmate years after you lost contact can be a very exciting enterprise.  Henry was my classmate at St Albert’s College, Ernakulam during the years 1982-1985.  I had no contact with him during the last 20 years though I knew he had become a priest in the Society of Jesus.  [One of the ironies in our (Henry’s and mine) life is that he chose religion as a profession just a few months after I left it.]

Before I left for Kerala on Diwali vacation I Googled Henry’s name and, after many a twist and turn in the labyrinth of the Internet, located him in Kalady – the birthplace of Adi Sankaracharya.  The very next day after my arrival in Kerala found me – to Henry’s shock, I should say – at Sameeksha, the institution that houses Henry and many other priests as well as students of priesthood.  [I desist from speaking more about Henry lest he finds it too flattering.]

Sameeksha is a charming conglomeration of houses built in the traditional Kerala style amidst an expanse of nutmeg trees – very unlike a Christian seminary.  What struck me most is the meditation house which is also built in the traditional Kerala style and has a very ‘un-Christian’ air about it.   First of all, there is a tulsi thara right in front of it just like the ones you used to find in front of the houses of Hindus before modernity uprooted tulsis (basil) and other such plants that have no commercial value.  On another side of the meditation house is a layered lamp carved out of granite, again an adaptation from Hindu temples.

Inside the meditation house, which you have to enter barefoot as you are supposed to do in any other building in the complex, there are the sacred scriptures of four different religions kept open on very low stands on the carpeted floor: the Bible, the Gita, the Koran and the Dhammapada. 

All this in a seminary that teaches Christian theology to future Christian priests!  It did make me think of all the religious intolerance one finds these days.

A few days later the marriage of a relative took me to a church in Aruvithura, another place in Kerala.  St George’s church in Aruvithura is quite famous in central Kerala for the pilgrims it attracts.  I was struck once again by the brass lamp in front of the church (though Christianised with a cross atop).  What’s more, the devotees were pouring oil in the lamp, an act that resembled the abhishekam in Hindu temples. 

Perhaps, I thought, we could acquire more religious tolerance if all religions incorporated certain practices of other religions and learnt to respect such practices – if only because they (the practices) have some significance to those vast numbers that perform them.

To read this along with the photographs of the places mentioned, please click here.