I recall that he was a cool guy back in b school. Unflappable. Unaffected by the highs and lows of young adult hood in a high adrenaline campus.
The thought we were all destined to alter the face of corporate India seemed to have hardly affected him, quite unlike what it did to many of the rest of us, who responded to that enormous sense of burden in different ways.
Some of us took to various herbs. Others hit the bottle. A few others threw themselves headlong into the world that the boffins had created for all of us. A world of irrelevant drivel that would be of no use in the mad world of real business. Much like the stuff that I shovel into the heads of my students thirty five years since then.
VK did not allow any of it to go to his head - in a metaphorical sense of course. It was as if he knew that this too would pass. And after two years of quietly ignoring it he would one day sail into Redemption.
In a literal sense I think he reluctantly played ball, with remarkable results of course inside the classroom and outside!
And then, like good classmates, we forgot each other for nearly thirty four years till he burst into my life again, with undiminished radiance, untouched by the feckless craziness of a corporate career.
Shorn of the pretenses of a young man with a mission, I now began to rediscover VK. I got to know of his distinct Malayali lineage, his encounters up close with Mohan Lal who had just been a celluloid icon for me for many years, of his tryst with the Divine every morning when he sat down to meditate, of the many parts to his interesting life in the world of business and of all that the world had taught him which in his inimitable simplicity he reduced to a handful of pithy aphorisms.
More importantly than all that he made me realize that all the other Menons that I had known - and a fair number of them there were in my long life - had distinguished themselves through their intellect.
There is Mohan Menon in the railways with a Wodehousian sense of humour, there was Achyutha Menon, the former CM of Kerala, there was VK Krishna Menon, KPS Menon and last in a highly incomplete list, but not the least, Lakshmi Reghunath who continues to give me a complex with her stupendous academic achievements.
In rediscovering VK I rediscovered a whole lot of other Menons that I had known. What more can I say about the sheer profubndity of my new-found admiration for this remarkable specimen of an extraordinary species called Menonia Malayalicus?
Nanni.....Namaskaram...
The thought we were all destined to alter the face of corporate India seemed to have hardly affected him, quite unlike what it did to many of the rest of us, who responded to that enormous sense of burden in different ways.
Some of us took to various herbs. Others hit the bottle. A few others threw themselves headlong into the world that the boffins had created for all of us. A world of irrelevant drivel that would be of no use in the mad world of real business. Much like the stuff that I shovel into the heads of my students thirty five years since then.
VK did not allow any of it to go to his head - in a metaphorical sense of course. It was as if he knew that this too would pass. And after two years of quietly ignoring it he would one day sail into Redemption.
In a literal sense I think he reluctantly played ball, with remarkable results of course inside the classroom and outside!
And then, like good classmates, we forgot each other for nearly thirty four years till he burst into my life again, with undiminished radiance, untouched by the feckless craziness of a corporate career.
Shorn of the pretenses of a young man with a mission, I now began to rediscover VK. I got to know of his distinct Malayali lineage, his encounters up close with Mohan Lal who had just been a celluloid icon for me for many years, of his tryst with the Divine every morning when he sat down to meditate, of the many parts to his interesting life in the world of business and of all that the world had taught him which in his inimitable simplicity he reduced to a handful of pithy aphorisms.
More importantly than all that he made me realize that all the other Menons that I had known - and a fair number of them there were in my long life - had distinguished themselves through their intellect.
There is Mohan Menon in the railways with a Wodehousian sense of humour, there was Achyutha Menon, the former CM of Kerala, there was VK Krishna Menon, KPS Menon and last in a highly incomplete list, but not the least, Lakshmi Reghunath who continues to give me a complex with her stupendous academic achievements.
In rediscovering VK I rediscovered a whole lot of other Menons that I had known. What more can I say about the sheer profubndity of my new-found admiration for this remarkable specimen of an extraordinary species called Menonia Malayalicus?
Nanni.....Namaskaram...
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