Reflections

For over 30 years I have been writing. Very little of this got published. On the economy in Economic Times and Business India, a story created for our son, in Children’s World. Some pieces like the “Dodos of Dehli” that I cherish came back from all major newspapers. Newsletters that I wrote as a part of my work in Corporate Planning and then heading an institution. A lot of ghost written articles and speeches.

I have the privilege of writing this from a room in which I am told Gandhiji stayed thrice. A picture of him at the doorstep of this house adorns our walls. Its a 80 year old or more house set in 6 acres of green over growth and 20 varieties of birds. A place conducive to contemplation, reflection. My work, which is quasi public, brings with it a fair measure of tensions. Writing in a way for me is an act of catharsis.

The person I relate to in this endeavour is Neville Shute Norway. He was essentially an aircraft designer in the 1920s and 30s and led a firm. But for similar reasons wrote on the side. The world knows him better as Neville Shute the author of books like “A Town like Alice” , of which too I am fond. But it is “Sliderule” his autobiography, which essentially deals with his work life, that has been a source of much solace to me, in my days of failed entrepreneurship and thereafter.

From being essentially a foreigner in my own country, like most of the urban middle class in India, by predilections and twists of fate I believe I have become an Indian. This journey of 42 years or more has been a good one for me and may hold some value. Maybe to the 11,000 students of the institution that I am responsible for, and some of my colleagues who are making the institution better.

Pasternak in his autobiography has written that since what Russia had undergone was so horrifying, one had to write such that the hair stands. It is as valid for India and for the world today.

For all my working life, I have been doing, with some positive results for the wider world, more so in the last decade. So, I travel hopefully. This morning I was reading a book published in 1920 by Vishvesarayya, “Reconstructing India” and but for the figures little seems to have changed. The challenges and the reasons for hope remain.

As the title says these are reflections. But I have realised the importance and power of perspectives. And so hopefully, read together they will cohere.

I dedicate this blog to Mrs Santiago,our teacher of English in high school at Bishop Cotton School, Nagpur. She taught me to love the turn of the phrase. I only rue the fact that in the dusk of her life, life was not kind to her. But still she bore it with dignity and that smile which emerged slowly and the quiet laugh with a characteristic throw back of her head.