From "God's Own Country"......1

We landed at Trivandrum this morning, my favourite corner of Planet Earth. We were greeted by the festivities of electioneering, the peaking of Kerala's daily political life.

Trivandrum is where I was born and raised for many years, in different spells. Other than the temple of Lord Padmanabha I am not sure if Trivandrum is famous for anything else. That does not matter to me though. It still is, and will always be, my favourite place.

Whatever one might say about Trivandrum, or one might not, it is hard to imagine any other place as the political capital of the state of Kerala. I cannot tell you quite why, but there is something about it that makes you feel it is the location for the capital of God's Own Country. There is that smell about it, when you walk by the Secretariat or its relaxed looking rain washed streets, that you do not sense in Kottayam, Kollam or Kozhikode. You certainly do not get that sense in that upstart commercial capital of the state called Kochi. More about Kochi in another post, till my keypad screams for mercy!

Interestingly, not much of what happens in Trivandrum politically gets decided there. It all happens in two or three major epicentres of Kerala. There is Central Kerala where the Christians rule the roost. Then there is the North, popularly known as Malabar, where the Thangal and his Muslim League hold darbar, unchallenged. Woe betide anyone who tries to challenge their political writ. And there is the rest, which is mainly the rag-tag geography of Kerala, formerly known as Travancore.

Nearly all of that happens in Kerala is the result of the dynamic jostling that takes place between the powerlords of the North and Central Kerala.

Yet, neither of those regions has been able to establish that the road to Trivandrum passes through their own heartland. Unlike the folks in UP who seem to have successfully persuaded the rest of the nation that the road to Delhi passes through Lucknow. In that sense democracy in Kerala is far more real than democracy in India as a whole.

How could it be any other way in a state where every man, woman and child would like to lead and not follow? No part or region of the state would be allowed the kind of political hegemony that the states of UP and Bihar have usurped from the rest of the India.

We were greeted by the sounds of electioneering as the train sped through Kerala in the early hours of Monday morning. More electioneering and more window pane shattering noise followed, with stacks of loudspeakers mounted on the ubiquitous white Ambassador, as we reached our home. It was the last day of electioneering before the state went to the polls.

The day we landed was significant for another reason: On that day the incumbent political patriarch of Kerala labelled a prominent leader of the opposition an "Amul baby". When it comes to biliousness you got to hand it to the Mallus. Anyone other than a Mallu may have chosen any other expression that is more strident or less hard hitting, but definitely nowhere as memorable.

The Amul baby metaphor is more than just a political repartee. To put it in Marxian dialect, an Amul baby is is symbolic of a social class that is distinct and cut off from, if not inimical to, the toiling proletariat. Amul milk is what the wealthy mothers of Kerala have brought up her children on. The toiling mother's child suckles at its mother's breast, if it does not go hungry.

The use of the metaphor is yet another instance of how Marxism is alive and kicking in Kerala, whatever may its bill of political health look like elsewhere in the world. Well, Marxian rhetoric surely is, even if one were to be a little skeptical about the health of Marxian thought or philosophy, given the schism within the party cadres.

So, on this momentous day, when my sons asked me their first questions about elections and politics I could not help start the 101. I could not think of a more auspicious place or time. In Hindu tradition place and time make all the difference between failure and success.

With prayer on my lips that I might be sowing the seeds of political awakening in their tender minds and that they might keep alive the Mallu legacy of being politically aware, if not active, I started on how elections work and finally give some people the right to rule over the others; in other words just tell them what to do - the essence of political power struggle.

Hopefully, I said to myself, before long my sons will realise the interchangeability of money and political power in India, well before they learn about the interconvertibility of mass and energy.

The elder of my twins tried to relate it to his world of cars and races and asked me: So that is like a race and someone wins, right? The younger one had a glimmer in his eye. He asked me with his signature shy smile: So if I win an election I can ask you and Amma and Vinayakan to do whatever I want?

I was happy to see the making of a 21st century Indian political leader. Amen.

Nanni. Namaskaaram

Interview blues

One of the highlights of life at IIMB is interviewing students for our various programmes. I do not miss that opportunity if I can. I would be surprised to be if anyone can think that it is a chore s/he can do without!

Interviews give me a peep into the new generation's thinking. Their worldview. Their upbringing. Their attitude to life.

It is true that they impose an enormous sense of responsibility on you. You have to do your best to ensure that the programme gets the people best suited and the ones that deserve most to be in on it. A task that is more easy to describe than to execute. And all the while you have to make sure that your prejudices do not come in the way. And God help you there if you have an observer ego as dominant as the one I am blessed with.

But then to get something in life you have to give something, right? Well at least when I was brought up they had not started auctioning air waves. So I do not have the benefit of learnings from spectrum auctions. You know what I mean.

So it is with interviews. Over about six to eight hours everyday you meet the most talented among the young men and women from among the top 1500 out of some 250,000 contenders. All of them acutely competitive. All of them realise that those twenty or thirty minutes could make an important difference to their lives. So their powerful engines are firing on all thirty two cylinders. And you have to make sure that all the eight cylinders in the old heap that your mind is are firing away too. It is exhausting in a way, to say the least. But invigorating too, in many ways.

So when the admissions office approached me this year I happily said yes to as many days as I could afford to.

The sense of deja vu at the end of the interviews this year was not new. And here is what is striking. It is a binary experience.

At one end of the spectrum you meet some truly extraordinary young men and women. People who have attended schools with such formidable reputation that folks in the technology and commercial capitals in the world are in awe the power of their intellect. People who can hold forth on how and why a cricket ball swings to what they think needs to be done to the agricultural sector in India. Men and women who do amazing things in a day's work such as design chips that will help patients deal better with chronic diseases. People who have played highly competitive sports and won commendable laurels.

At the other end you meet people whose CVs make you feel your whole life was a waste compared to their marks in school and the ranks they scored one entrance exam after another. All of this on top of excelled in some art or sport. Yet they flake up on the simplest of questions. They have trouble spelling "convenience" and "occasion".

Which makes you wonder what is wrong with our educational system. Or if it is the parenting that has to blame. Personally I think it is a bit of both. I think today's schooling and education are to blame in large part. Today's schools in India are miserable hell-holes. I will write more about that in another post.

But I do believe equally it is the social pressure and life styles that are to blame. The disproportionate amount of emphasis on success over substance . The obsession with achievement as opposed to character.

As I reflect on those long hours of interviewss I think about the two young men back in my own home. I begin to wonder what kind of a world they will inherit when they attain the age of these interviewees. I let off a long sigh and say to myself Allahu Akbar, as I always do when I do not have answers.

Nanni. Namaskaaram

People in my lives

Hello there...

I returned this afternoon to my cyber-corner after a brief absence. I plan to write a about some people who made me what I am. Dont get me wrong. I do not suffer from any delusions of grandeur. In fact I am going to say that these are wonderful people whose attention and care I did not put to good use. People whose expectations I let down.

First in that list is my late mother, G Lakshmy. No prizes for guessing that one. Which man or woman would be what he/ she is without the mother's love and care. My mother showered more than just love and care. She believed that there was nearly nothing that I could not accomplish if I set my heart to it.

Luckily for her, she is not around to see the rout! More about her in another post.

Nanni. Namaskaaram.

Rama Aiyer Sir

RamaAiyerSir

RamaAiyer Sir was my maternal grandfather.  I grew up with him or spent many long holidays with him, as school children.  We remember him for giving us those memorably happy days of childhood.  There are other equally good reasons that I  remember midlife confronts me.  The values that he made me imbibe are the most significant of these:  Industry, honesty, morality, the value of learning and reading and a strict abstinence from gossip, especially the malicious variety. 

But those are not the reasons I write this piece.  Rama Aiyer Sir led a life of many hues, many parts.  Each of these touched the lives of the many people who came into contact with him, some directly and some through his innumerable writings.  Rama Aiyer’s achievements were commendable in their own right.  Viewed in the light of his humble beginnings and the sheer industry that helped him realize these achievements they appear even more impressive.

K. Rama Aiyer, popularly known as RamaAiyerSir, and better known in the publishing circles of Kerala in his later years as “Guide RamaAiyer”, was a primary school teacher.  School teachers, I am told, were lot more respectable in the days of RamaAiyer Sir in the forties and fifties.  And they in turn conducted conducted themselves in a manner that befitted the respect.  RamaAiyerSir was the quintessential school teacher.

But It is the many other remarkable things that he achieved that he never advertised that make him stand out.  RamaAiyerSir was a naturally great communicator.  He was so passionate about the English language that he must have read a significant number of the books and magazines in the British Library.  Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, AJ Cronin, Sir Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli were some of his favourites that he introduced me to.  If anyone had kept a record of all the books that the members of the library had borrowed, RamaAiyer Sir’s name would lead all the rest. 

He was a great believer in the value of sport in rounding off a man’s personality.  He was a good footballer, tennis player and swimmer.  When he was too old to play he became a commentator for the local newspaper and the nascent radio broadcasting stations.

RamaAiyerSir lived in a time of social and political transition.  The caste system was under attack at that time.  The Brahmin community was especially the target of much ire and criticism.  None of it seemed to affect RamaAiyerSir.  He empathized with many of the liberal ideas; yet he never swerved from the Brahmanical way of life, centred around religion as a path to spiritualism.  In a world where a lot seems to be going topsy turvy around us, where in the name of modernism many of the lofty values of our society seem to be under attack at the altar of modernism and westernization, we his grandchildren manage to hold on to our traditions, partly because somewhere deep within us RamaAiyerSir’s way of life has moulded our values and beliefs. 

May RamaAiyerSir’s tribe increase!