For Sri Nameless Freedom-fighter
A note of praise is not this, as a superior usually does it, as an act of recognition and approval. An acknowledgment is not this, as an equal normally does it, as an act of appreciation. An admiration is not this, as an unequal always does it, as an act of realized defeat and graceful exit. Neither is this an applause that we usually give (or fail to!) for artists nor is this a eulogy so typical of narastuthi-mongers. Is this gratitude for what my grandpa always saw and encouraged in me to make out of myself? Didn’t Duc de la Rochefoucauld say in his Maxims (1665), “In most of mankind, gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favors”?
“Become the person you preach,” said Gandhi. Perhaps because he heard it in first person, I have the life of my grandfather, as a colophon to the quote. It reminds me to recognize the importance of convictions, however simple they are and the courage to live by it, however simplistic those convictions may be viewed as.
The loadstone of my life, he is the one who instilled in me the sense of culture, adventure and freedom, at an age when your insatiable brain doesn’t care to discern its input. The pleasant memories of my childhood village are inevitably entwined with the equally pleasant memories I have about my grandpa, which, if retold, become too precious and personal for an audience to understand and appreciate. It is hard to separate as thoughts, my experience of the person from the place. The idyllic place shaped the good in me through his radiant presence, which I later realized was also in turn the inspiration for the thriving goodness of the place itself. As evidenced by the people who were fortunate to get acquainted with him, he is the embodiment of the place’s glory, in all of his legendary travels, which includes within the by-lanes of my memory.
The chosen electrical engineering career that was later neglected on the day of graduation for a greater cause of Freedom, the unselfish participation in the struggle for freeing the country and its government that may not pay his deserved freedom-fighter pension, the Moderate-Congressman status that is usually smirked upon by today’s youth, the white kadar clothes nowadays viewed with derision, the strict and audacious personality that belies a kind and honest soul, the oft misunderstood socialist ideas and sagacious perspectives all directed towards social welfare and human camaraderie, the stentorian voice expressing nevertheless pious and pleasant thoughts, the tall and erect figure that stood well above most of the crowd in more ways than one, all of this may be extolled or forgotten by most of us. For me, they merely serve as gloss to KSR, a compassionate human being, who, with his happy life, made the life of many including mine, happier.
Ruminating at present from a successful and impotent life, I can merely find solace and poetic justice in the fact that, in his own septuagenarian times, the house he lived (and I shared with his grace) is sold and gone for good, once he moved away from our village. Just as we cannot imagine a life without happiness or a world without the means for that happiness, I do not want to see again, leave alone live in, a vestige and crumbling edifice without its fountainhead of yore.
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And he was indeed a great man. My tributes to him here.
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