All men are not born equal. We do not start at the same points. If life is a race, the starting points differ for all. Thus, to determine the magnitude of progress one was able to achieve during one's lifetime, is to meticulously trace the starting point and then measure the distance all the way to the end point, figuratively. My Grandfather came from a small village inside what was once the capital of one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas, the ancient Viratnagar, where the Pandavas, the heroes of the 'Mahabharata' are believed to have spent their Agyatvasa, the exile with the defining condition of maintaining the secrecy of their identity and to remain unfound. By way of inheritance, a small stretch of some semi-arid land had fallen to his father's share. It fel l on his mother alone to shoulder the responsibility of raising him and his siblings. For me, she embodies the archetype of 'Mother India', played by Nargis in the film of the same name. She and in genera...
People are remembered in many ways. A human being has God-knows-how-many dimensions, but when people are asked how they remember him long after he has gone, the way they summarize him, offers a realistic glimpse into one of those dimensions, sometimes revealing rare aspects of his self. When I try to remember my Grandfather, an image of a man of a medium stature, clad in a soft almond-yellow kurta and a white dhoti appears. He is carrying a stick in his right hand, and is wearing a vintage HMT watch in his left. The stick is bent in a u-shape at its handle, and has a black spot in the middle of the handle, resembling a serpent. Although there were an array of reasons why he left his job of a revenue collecting official (Patwari) halfway, the most prominent one was that the pay was too meagre to support his large family. Immediately after resigning, he started his private practice of writing registries for people of nearby villages that his Tehsil covered, ma...