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!