Selling Mirrors in the City of the Blind

As every year draws to a close and as I take stock of the few things that I accomplished I realise painfully that yet another passed by with my reading just one or two books.  My career best I think was three.

That might come as a surprise to people who do not know me well.  They all seem to think that I am well read.  Those who know me well enough like Lakshmi, my wife and Purnima, my niece, realise that over the years I have mastered the art of "shamming", to borrow Purnima's pet expression.

2019 could well be the year when I may break that jinx, God willing.  Barely a week into the year I read two books.  It is another matter that both those books could be completed by a bleary-eyed boozer, between swigs of any kind of liqour.  They were Khushwant Nama and Absolute Khushwant.  The latter was a joint piece of work between the sardarji and Hamra Quraishi.  I still wonder why he needed a co-author to write it.

Khushwant is an easy read.  He says his aim as a writer is to "inform, amuse and provoke".  He does mostly the last of the three and least of all the first.

It is not as if I did not learn anything at all.  I did get to know about how Delhi changed soon after partition.  He confirmed to me a suspicion that I had had all along, that Dr.  Sarvepalli was a man of foibles too - parochialism, nepotism and so on.  So also about the tactless statement that he attributes to the late Rajiv Gandhi when Sikhs were being slaughtered in Delhi:  When a big tree falls, the Earth shakes.  He interprets that a lack of sensitivity on the part of Rajiv Gandhi.

I got sneak peeks into the lives of many people that no writer, less indiscrete than Khushwant, would  dare to provide.  I read about many political leaders, men of letters like VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie.  One of the few people that escaped his vicious pen is Nirad Choudhry whose phenomenal intellect he talks about.  He says he was the only man he was "in awe of".

His pen picture of Mirza Asaduallah Khan Ghalib is the most touching of all.  Understandably so.  Khushwant seems to have loved him a lot.  Here is an example of the sardarji's pithy style of writing:  He (Ghalib) grew into a handsome youth, married in his teens and had several children, none of whom survived.

There is a fair about his own life of course which is interesting and colourful as many might already know.  I did not know for example that he had been born into a wealthy family.  That afforded him the best of education, allowed him to celebrate an enviable wedding and supported a comfortable if not luxurious lifestyle even when he was in penury by himself.  That his father played a part in building Lutyen's Delhi.

What was remarkable though is the scholarship that he says he acquired through voracious reading.  I was almost entirely impressed by it - until I read his Sanskrit quotes from the Gita and other Indian scriptures in Absolute Khushwant.  They way they have been written are patently  wrong.  For someone who says he taught comparative religion in Princeton and elsewhere that is unacceptable.


I sensed what I might refer to as hypocrisy too.  He accuses Gandhi of having treated and Sir VS Naipaul of not having treated their wives well.  I am not sure if he was any kinder to Kaval Malik, his wife, having wooed her to a point of no return.

There are times when you wonder whether you should like the man or loathe him.  There is this confession for example in Khushwant Nama:  "I have never been able to conform to the Indian ideal of regarding women as my mother, sisters or daughters.  Whatever their age, they were, and are, objects of lust." Should one admire his candour?  Or should one despise the coarseness?  And there is the chapter long treatise on sex in Absolute Khushwant where one particular gets really so vulgar that it probably belongs to Harold Robbins fiction.

Barring the many snippets that I do not wish to load this post with, the books were fairly filled with platitudes and cliches.  They are well written though.  Shorn of bombast, my favourite weakness, and unlike my laboured, pedantic style.

More than the style of writing what I enjoyed was his irreverence towards everyone except Gandhi and Mother Teresa and his friend Manzoor Qadir.  I also enjoyed some of the quotes that I wish to remind myself of in and through this post.

There are lines from Mohammed Rafi Sauda, that he translates, that reminded me of a life that I would have loved to lead.

Concern for livelihood, love for women, memories of the past
What else is there left to man in his life?

And of things that he says he would love people to say about him, quoting from Hilare Belloc, that I know can never be said about me:

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said:  
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

Alas, I have committed sins of scarlet; but should I ever write books I know that they will never be read.

Finally his views about himself as a writer, which applies to me even more so as a non-writer, is touching.  It is an Urdu verse that he translates as follows.  I drew from to come up with a title for this post.

You ask me about my business, what I have in mind
I sell mirrors in the city of the blind

And even as I quote from him I am reminded of this couplet that he quotes from Edward Young's Love of Fame:

"Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote."

On the whole it was a great start to a year.  I will not mind if I do not read anything for the rest of the year.  That may well be the case, if the past is anything to go by. 

Reading the books helped me with the much needed levity as I tumbled along through the past month, as I note in my earlier post.  Ironically it also reminded me constantly of my dear friend the Late Manohar Reddy.

I used to mail many of my posts to Professor Reddy, as I have always referred to him.  He would read all of them and comment.  One comment that he made reading after reading every one of them was that I wrote like Khushwant Singh.

I had read Khushwant's books earlier, before I started writing this blog - his autobiography and Train to Pakistan.  I never agreed with Professor Reddy's observation.  I even argued that it was an insult to the great writer.  Yet I felt happy to have my writing compared with him.

In the true irreverent tradition of Khushwant I must say that there were facets about Professor Reddy I did not approve of.  Those do not matter any more. What matters now is that I liked the man in spite of those facets.  It matters to me a lot that I miss him in spite of those.

What matters is that I was shell shocked when I heard of his passing. For the better part of a week I was in severe agony.

I could turn him to in moments of despair, when I felt I was not being treated well at IIMB.  He would lend me his patient and tolerant ears.  I will miss him in those moments of despair, sure as I am to be assailed by similar occasions before I retire.

Right now though I miss him, as I write this post.  With tears in my eyes, I dedicate this post to your memory, my friend, Professor Reddy.



Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Route No 23 A : Post Script

A few people who read my post Route No 23A, who had probably grown up on a healthy teenage diet of Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland and similar sundry pulp, asked me if I knew what happened to R.  Life does not work like an M&B plot, fortunately or otherwise. 

Here is the link to Route No 23A if you missed it the last time.

https://sgchalayil.blogspot.com/2012/07/route-no-23-a.html

I responded to them that when I left Chennai to enter the world of business I had left behind not just my home and family but all thought of R too.  One reader asked me was I sad that I was leaving her without having let her know how I felt?  Irrelevant question, I said.  Did I think R knew that I was crazy about her?  Irrelevant again, I said because my craze for R was not about winning a trophy in the form of her attention or affection.  I was crazy because that is how I felt.  Period.

As far as I was concerned R belonged to another as yet undefined world that I would not be a part of.  I had the luxury of choosing if I wanted to keep the memories.  Well, it is not quite anyone's choice to keep or reject memories, is it?  Ask a dementia patient and he will tell you if it really is!

Inside the muggy and hot second class compartment of the Madras Bangalore mail, as I set out for IIMB, I remember I had more tears in my eyes than stars. Who were those tears for? I could not tell.  My family that I was going away from?  R? No idea.

It was a somewhat cold February last year when I was attending a social gathering in Bangalore.  In the somewhat uncomfortable chill on the open terrace of my friend's bungalow I noticed an intense looking visage.  The middle aged woman carried herself with oodles of grace at the same time.

As people mingled with the rest of the crowd I got to be introduced to the lady in question as R and her husband as P.  (I still have to use anonymous names, in fact all the more so now.)  As Iyengar as they ever come I said to myself.

It was not until the conversation picked up somewhat slowly and tentatively that it was the same R that I last seen in June 1980, two days before I left Madras to enrol at IIMB.

Without dragging the narrative further I got to hear that P had returned to India after having worked in many countries all over the world and that he had been a highly successful molecular scientist who had made his pile of cash from stock options.  He drove an Innova Crysta, lived in a twelfth story penthouse that was probably worth two million dollars in a highly tony suburb of Bangalore.  Their daughter was married to a New York money manager and son was doing his undergraduate in an Ivy League school.  Copybook upper middle class Indian family that had made its fortunes in the prosperous west.

That was clearly a world far apart from that of a struggling academic who drove a car that was hugely popular among taxi drivers for its highly affordable total cost of ownership, whose sons were a long way off from the threshold of adulthood.

And that is the happy ending of another love story.  Whoever said that love stories end happily only when boy and girl live together happily ever after.  They could happily live together with another girl and boy too.  The important thing is happiness and not being together.

Nanni...Namaskaaram...

PS:  This post was written in March 2018.  For numerous reasons I was not sure if I should publish it.  The passage of a year and a half allows me to be more objective.

The start of another year

It has been a busy three weeks more or less over the last fortnight of 2018 and the first week of 2019.  As I sat down to catch up with long overdue emails I was overcome by a rush of thoughts and emotions.

I read about my good friend Pradeep's son, Tejas, joining Georgia Tech for his undergraduate studies.  My association with Pradeep is one of those I would never have imagined.  He became such an important part of my life, all because of his goodness that I have to borrow an expression that I heard in a stand up comedy.  He is nearly a brother from another mother.  

Reading about it Tejas going to GT I was overcome by a strange mix of feelings. At one level it I felt a bit like the Cabuliwallah, just thinking that I have two fellows growing up fast and we will soon have to worry about where they will head by God’s Grace.  

At another level I realized that another generation had come of age.  That of course has already happened with most people of my age.  Many have gone on to become grandparents.  As one's children move on in life one begins to feel that one’s own important responsibilities in life are getting fulfilled and one will have to move on to the next phase where one has to lead a life without those who had depended on you, without them leaning on you any longer, definitely not in the same manner that they had all these years.

I travelled a lot during these three weeks:  Kolkata, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Chennai.  Mostly on work except to Chennai to celebrate my brother-in-law's sixtieth birthday.  And that was again a source of stark reminders.  I was not amused when the family said that they would now look forward to mine in October.  

In the midst of this IIMB processed the CAT results and finalised the interview list. 

As Chairperson Admissions, as I oversee the admissions processes, I am overwhelmed by a sense of power and accountability that the position brings with it at the same time.  I realise that the choices I make in terms of policy will affect the destinies of at least a few ten thousand people who are serious contenders for the 450 seats that we have.  

Granted there is a Committee of five extremely smart and experienced colleagues who are deeply committed to the colleague - traits that I looked for when I requested them to be on my Committee - who closely oversee all major decisions we make.  As Chairperson of the Committee I play an important part in the choices we make as an institution.  

The way admissions is run is also a compliment to the IIMs that the admissions process is independent of the rest of the institution.  That ensures that the Admissions process is incorruptible in any way.

So in these past few days, out of the blue people who had forgotten for me years and decades and whom I had lost track of, hunted me out of oblivion, ostensibly to admire how I have remodeled myself as an academic, but mainly to enquire if I would know anything about the son or daughter of a friend or a relative or a neighbour who had appeared for CAT. 

My honest response to them was simple and brief: As Admissions Chief all that I get to see about the identity of individual candidates is a string of digits that make up their CAT registration number.  I want to be able to say with an honest conscience that I do not even know who all applied, who qualified for interviews and who made it, until they all make it to IIMB.

As I heard those enquiries I was taken back in time to 1980 when I was anxious to know if I had made it to IIMC because someone I was interested in lived there.  I was not so keen on IIMA even though it was No 1 by a wide margin.  My penchant for misplaced priorities had started manifesting right then.  I finally ended up in IIMB when my Dad refused to support my demand to appear for CAT once more, even though he did not know of my real motives.

And then I think of how life has come full circle as I heard that the same girl, who I had lost touch with for many decades, telephoned me recently to inform that she had become a grandmother, and then even more recently to let me know that had met with a serious tragedy in her personal life. 

And so, I tell myself, that these days will pass on also for all those who are waiting anxiously to know the results that they have been working so hard for so months, may be even a couple of years.  

As I go about setting the cutoffs for interviews and admission I remind myself that I am bound to crush more hearts and minds that I am likely to gladden.  The law of averages are loaded more in favour of my inflicting disappointment than ringing in joy.  I further remind myself of how I am a mere mortal, beset with entirely flawed judgement and the only lesson I have learnt in life is that I am capable of just messing things up.

Thus it is that before I sit down every time to work on admissions I pray to God secretly, silently to help me do the right things.  To forgive me for any wrong that I may do, however unintentionally.  And to make sure that everyone whose life I may touch gets what they deserve in His grand calculus.

Let me dispel any feeling that, in saying all this I suffer from any delusion of grandeur.  I am not the first man to run admissions in IIMB.  Nor will I be the last.  But that does not diminish the sense of responsibility that weighs on my mind.

I have also been breathing hard in these past six months as I struggle to lead a team to bring in applications for some of our other programmes.  I have struggled to teach, read and write more than I have in all these years.  My engagement with the Department of BT, GoI  increased at the same as I serve on two of their standing / permanent committees.  

Net net, it has been a hard life, travelling like mad, even as I see my sons growing up quickly by God’s Grace without much help or support from me.  Lakshmi is bearing all the load on that front.  

My "daughter", Lakshmi Reghunath, wrote back to me in response when I sent her a birthday greeting that she is in the family way.  That was another pointer to me of my own moving on to the next phase of my own life and yet another Cabuliwallah moment.  For a brief while I wished I could see her again.  Then I said I could / should not.  It was not meant to be so.

Overall, it has been an emotional roller coaster these past few months.  And I seem to have aged a lot meanwhile in these months.  I get tired more often these days.  I often lapse into long spells of reflection even as I try to increase my reading.

Nanni...Namaskaram...