Courage My Companion

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Courage My Companion

Author:

R.V. Rajan

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Dedicated to my parents who taught me the values I stand for,

***

Preface

V.K. Krishna Menon once remarked that people write biographies when they have nothing better to do and those who write autobiographies believe that the world centres on them.

That was an amusing comment, but I don’t agree with it. I have read some excellent biographies and autobiographies. The idea of writing about my own life has nagged me for a long time, and I finally decided to give it a shot. Friends who read a few chapters urged me to go ahead, and I did.

A talk at the Madras Book Club by Mr. S. Muthiah, journalist, author and chronicler of Chennai, gave my book a focus. He said that history is not just about kings and kingdoms but about people. He urged everyone in the audience to write about their lives - it would be valuable as social history if it provided insights into the life, happenings, values and mores of a city or a community or a profession at a certain point of time. I have tried to keep that in mind.

This book is about my personal life, my professional life as an ad man, and my parallel life about my interests in several voluntary and professional organizations (Round Table, Rotary, agencies dealing with ad vertising, PR, printing, media). I believe that the book provides glimpses into all these worlds. I hope it does so in an interesting way. I also hope it conveys the message that if an ordinary person like myself - without great advantages by way of birth, wealth, education or looks - could achieve some success, so could anyone else.

I have written an anecdotal chapter about my immense belief in God (‘My Tryst with God’). I’m sure it will strike a chord in many. Atheists and agnostics among my readers - go through this chapter with an open mind!

Acknowledgments

Iwould like to thank a number of people. My wife Prabha, my children Kavitha, Sowmya and Balaji, my brothers Srinivasan and Seshadri, my sister Prema and by brother-in-law Narayan who went through the first draft and gave me useful suggestions. Among friends, thanks go to N. Krishnan, Ranga, Avinash and Vijay Menon.

Srividya of Anugrah Madison converted my handwriting - which often even I couldn’t make out - into a typed draft. Her patience is admirable. Thank you Srividya!

G. Ramaswamy, Production Manager and his team at Anugrah Madi son, helped me with the cover design and in layout. The cover design features my cartoon by world-renowned cartoonist R.K. Laxman.

I would like to particularly thank my old friend S.R. Madhu, a well known journalist. He gave me positive feedback and practical tips. He said the first commandment of every writer, whatever the subject, should be Thou shalt not be dull. I hope I have followed that edict!

R.V. Rajan

20th October, 2009

Contents

My Life

My Parallel Life

My Tryst with God

Part - 1

My Life

Early Days…

Nerkuppai, literally meaning Rice Dust, is a sleepy village located 45 km from Pudukottai town in Tamil Nadu, South India. With a population of about 10,000 it is dominated by the Chettiar community, an enterprising business community in the South. Straight out of well-known Bharathi Raja films, this village has a pond where locals have a bath and wash their clothes, with an adjacent Mariamman (equivalent to Goddess Kali) temple, which would come alive only during temple and religious festivals. To proclaim it is a developed village, it now has a Primary and a Secondary school, a big overhead tank supplying piped water to the village homes and continuous supply of electricity. A village whose streets are generally empty, be it a week day or a Sunday, because most of the youngsters have left the village pursuing business interests in nearby cities or towns and some have even settled abroad for generations!

I was born in this village on 30th August 1942 as the eldest son, in a middle class Telugu Iyengar family. My grandfather was the village Post Master operating the Post office from his home located just behind the Mariamman temple.

There were no doctors, no nurses, no hospital… I was delivered by the village midwife in the courtyard of my maternal grand father’s home. It was a typical middle class house with no modern trappings. My grandfather, had passed away just 20 days before I was born. It used to be said that my grandfather went away through the front door to enter my soul through the back door. It seems I was very fair (just like my mother) with grey eyes and not so dark hair. The villagers used to tease my mother saying ‘vellakaran poranduttan’ - ‘a white boy is born’ in the house.

My mother was the eldest of eight children and was married to my father, a distant relative, when she was only 11. Immediately after appearing for his intermediate college exams, my father who was the eighth among nine children in his family moved to Baroda for a job. His first job was as an Assistant in the Advertising Department of Alembic Chemicals, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Baroda. Though my parents were married in 1928, their marriage was consummated only when my mother joined my father in Baroda to start a home.

My mother used to say that the best years of her life were spent in Baroda before I was born. When my mother conceived me, she was sent off to her parent’s home for delivery whereas my father moved to Bombay in search of a better job. I was brought to Bombay as a three-month old baby, where I was to spend the next 29 years of my life as a ‘Saala Madrasi’ as locals would call us those days.

The year that I was born was a turbulent one. The Second World War was just over, but the war of independence was raging in India with Mahatma Gandhi spearheading the fight against the British.

Matunga - the Little Madras

We were living in a chawl (a building with three floors which housed 27 tenements and had just two toilets per floor) in Matunga which was dominated by South Indian (Palghat) Brahmins and Gujaratis. Matunga! The little Madras of Bombay like the Serangoon Road in Singapore. Twenty-six years out of the twenty-nine years in Bombay, I lived in this Central suburb. Walking around the streets of Matunga, especially the main market area near Matunga Central Station (There is another Matunga Road Station in the Western suburbs), one felt like being in Madras with ‘mamis’ (ladies) wearing 9 yard sarees and ‘mamas’ (men) with folded dhotis walking around the market place doing shopping!

The chawl where my family was staying was the first building on the right, when one stepped out of the station. Those days a full-fledged fruit market was operating on the footpath adjacent to the outer wall of our building, making it difficult for the commuters to enter or exit from the station. This fruit market was of course removed subsequently and relocated to a multi storied building which was put up by the Bombay Municipal Corporation nearby clearing the way for a parking lot for vehicles in front of the station.

Matunga was truly a place where you could get everything from ‘a pin to an elephant’, as they say. Step out of the station and bang opposite you had a choice of Gujarati, Udipi and Iranian restaurants; a fruit and vegetable market, grocery shops, a silk saree shop, a jewellery shop etc. The vegetable market had all the items, including those that were unique to the South Indians like drumstick, small (sambar) onion etc. The flower bazaar with a row of shops next to the Matunga post office resembled the typical flower shop one finds outside temples in Tamil Nadu. The smell of Jasmine and Rose would envelope you as you walk along. Suddenly if you get a whiff of fresh ground coffee it means you are close to Philips Coffee House, which sold fresh ground coffee powder to customers! Close to the flower bazaar were two temples - one Bhajana Samaj and another called Asthika Samaj where you would find the Sanctum-sanctorum filled with big, framed pictures of every popular deity you can think of. In the evenings, these temples would be crowded with both young and old ‘Madrasis’ who came to listen to discourses by religious leaders of the time, narrating stories of Ramayana or Mahabharata.

Gujarati, Tamil and Marathi medium schools, a Commerce and Arts & Science College were not far away from the station. VJTI (Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute), an old and well known Engineering College was about 20 minutes’ walk from the station. Aurora Cinema, in Kings Circle, close to Matunga was the only cinema theatre to screen popular Tamil movies on Sunday mornings! Later, when the Tamil population in Matunga grew in leaps and bounds, Aurora started featuring Tamil films during regular shows.

I keep going back to Matunga at least once a year on my way to the Bombay airport to buy my favourite Gujarati Teplas, Dhoklas and Kandvis from Cheddha Stores opposite to the Matunga Railway Station.

My Role in Freedom Struggle!

When I was 4 or 5, I remember that Gandhiji had made an appeal to the people of India to boycott foreign goods including the dresses, hats and shoes etc. which represented foreign culture. My father had a hat which he wore to work, which I gallantly donated to the group that was burning the foreign goods in front of our building. Of course, I was not appreciated for my freedom spirit but instead got a sound thrashing from my father for the uncalled for initiative.

My earliest memories of my childhood go back to the time when I was 3. I was a popular kid in the building as I was deemed a well-behaved boy considering the dozens of brats floating around in the building.

As a child I realised, while my mother was kind and very affection ate, my father was a strict disciplinarian who brooked no nonsense from anybody including a little boy like me. What I distinctly remember about those days was that the neighbours always kept teasing me and asking me when I am going to have a baby sister. Those days, when children were born at regular intervals of one or two years in every family, my mother not conceiving another child for 4 years after my birth was a hot topic for discussion. My parents obliged and my sister Prema was born in 1946, exactly 4 years after I was born. She was a lovely child, fair, bonny with twinkling eyes which used to charm people. Unlike me, she was born in a hospital, properly attended to by a doctor and nurses. She was followed by two brothers - Srinivasan (Ramu) and Seshadri (Mohan) with a five-year gap between each other to complete our family of six.

***

Right from childhood I was a dreamer. My mother used to say that whenever anybody referred to me as a baby, I got provoked and would say ‘Nenu Bedda Wadu’ (I am a big man). I also recall that life was tough at home. My father’s meager salary had to not only provide for our family of six but every month my father had to send money to my maternal grandmother in Pudukottai (in Tamil Nadu), who was struggling to eke out a living with my young uncles and aunts, as my grandfather had died leaving behind nothing for the family. I remember, visiting them with my mother on holidays and feeling quite disturbed at the abject poverty that was apparent. My grandmother was lucky if she could rustle up even one meal a day as she was most often dependent on charities from relatives. Every time we visited them, my father bought new dresses for the children and other items required for the house from the money he had borrowed from a friend. Invariably by the next time we visited them, my grandmother would have pawned some of the items to meet some crisis in the family. Besides my aunt (mother’s sister) and one of the brothers were suffering from Tuberculosis - that dreaded disease which invariably led to certain death those days - which left a lasting impact on me. I was always worried that I may also get the disease and imagined all kinds of pains and aches, driving my father crazy as he had to take me frequently to a public hospital for treatment as he could not afford private doctors.

Village Life - First Experience

I, however, have pleasant memories of my visits to a maternal uncle’s house in Andhra Pradesh where he was Assistant Station Master at a small rail way station called Rayala Cheruvu, near Guntakal, on the Madras/Bombay line. It was a typical village life. The modest quarters that my uncle’s family lived in was close to the station and for me and my sister the biggest pastime was visiting the station twice or three times a day. When a train stopped, the station became a beehive of activity - with travellers, vendors and beggars running around. After the train left, the tea stall holder always gave us a cup of tea with some biscuits - which, we looked forward to.

There was a big well, not far from the station where my uncle and his colleagues went for a swim. As a 7-year old boy I was scared to enter the water, but my uncle used to force me to take a dip holding me tight in his hands, while I was screaming like mad. I also remember, on weekends, when my uncle took us on bullock carts to the nearby village Haat (the weekly market), where we had fun participating in some game or the other, while my aunt was busy shopping. So my first exposure to village haats was at the age of seven. I never realized at that time that one day, as a Rural Marketing specialist, I would be visiting weekly haats in different parts of the country as a part of my job.

Another thing I remember about the visits to my uncle’s village was the trips to the touring talkies nearly every Friday to see a new movie that was being screened there. As an Assistant Station Master, my uncle was considered an important man in the village and got free tickets to sit in the balcony (!), a portion at the back of the temporary structure with chairs, which was separated from the front portion by a cloth partition where people used to sit or lay down on the floor to watch movies. It was called ‘tharai ticket’ (Ticket for the floor). Today when I visit the drive-in theatre in Chennai where we can park our car and spread durries and lie down to watch movies on the mega screen, I am reminded of my village experience. The major difference is that the front portions in a drive-in theatre, where cars are parked are more expensive than the balcony with chairs located at the back of the open air theatre.

I also remember that almost every day some villager or the other would come to deliver some quantity of whatever item he was producing in his farm, including fruits and vegetables. The life in the village was not easy, as there was neither electricity nor any other conveniences which a city boy is used to. Unfortunately, this uncle died very young at the age of 35 leaving behind his wife and five kids to fight for survival, adding one more burden to my father’s already overburdened shoulders. The problem of my mother’s family back in the villages used to haunt our family in Bombay, with my mother dreading receipt of any letter from her mother or brothers. They invariably carried some bad news or request for money that used to affect my father who had to frequently borrow from his friends that throughout his working life he was in debt. Only when he took a premature retirement at the age of 55 and got his settlement that he could see some money in his bank account, after settling his debts.

School Days

Back then, the concept of Kinder Garden school was non-existent. Schools admitted children in the first standard only when they were six. So when I was six, I was admitted to the South India Welfare Society’s (Girls) High School (SIWS). Since there was already a school called South India Education Society School (SIES) in Bombay, it seems our school had got recognition from the government only if they would register it as a Girls school. Though it started as a girl’s school, subsequently they started ad mitting both boys and girls and the word ‘Girls’ from the name of the school was dropped, when the government relaxed its rules.

SIWS was a secondary school which was just a two-minute walk from my house in a residential building with a corporation play ground in front. While the school occupied the ground and first floors, there were people living on the second floor. It was a Tamil medium school with English, Hindi and Marathi also being taught as compulsory subjects. I used to score the highest marks in Marathi and spoke the language fluently. But due to lack of practice for the last 35 years, I now lack on fluency. Being a South Indian in Bombay also helped me pick up Gujarati and later, because of my association with Clarion in Kolkata (which I used to visit very frequently) I picked up a smattering of Bengali. This familiarity with languages was to lay a solid foundation for my future role as a Rural Communication Specialist.

While I was still a boy, I remember I was mature for my age. Even at the age of six, I had romantic feelings. There was a small, very fair and pretty girl in my class who I was attracted to. I used to imagine that I would grow up to marry her.

Right from the age of 7 or 8, I became a regular reader of Tamil mag azines (Kalki and Ananda Vikatan) and Tamil novels. I was an avid reader of all the serials in these magazines, much to the dismay of my par ents, who did not approve of my reading anything other than textbooks (Thank God that they are not alive to see what the young children of today are exposed to through TV and computers!). So when Kumudam, the popular Tamil weekly was launched in early fifties and I was only 9 or 10 years old, I took to it like a duck to water, because it contained a lot of juicy stuff for youngsters. Unlike Kalki and Ananda Vikatan which were out and out family magazines (which they are even today) Kumudam was aimed at the younger generation with a number of love stories with serials featuring sections with explicit descriptions, not considered decent those days!

Naturally, my parents did not approve of my even touching a copy of Kumudam. They thought my mind would get polluted by reading that ‘dirty’ magazine. If I was found with a copy borrowed from the neighbour’s house full of eligible bachelors, I would get a thrashing from my father. So I took to reading the magazine secretly in hideouts. (There were plenty of such places in the building) and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. In the absence of sensual magazines those days, Kumudam became a magazine which fanned the romantic thoughts in me, that every other day I was imagining myself falling in love with some girl or the other, even if she spoke only a few words to me related to studies. It was of course, one sided love, as I did not have the courage to express myself to any girl.

A Cricket Fan

As a young boy, I was very fond of cricket. Within the compound walls of three buildings complex that I was staying in, we played underhand cricket with tennis balls and stumps drawn on the walls of the building. Immediately after returning from school, a group of dozen friends in the building would start playing. There would be a lot of excitement when we played matches between teams, which invariably got abandoned midway since some player would break the glass of a window of one of the houses while hitting a six and the householder will come running after us, cursing. Later on, we moved to the Matunga Gymkhana grounds opposite to R.A. Podar College which had a number of cricket pitches. This is where we began to play cricket with a proper red cricket ball.

Of course, we had to wait till the members of the several clubs around the ground finished their practice before we could find a place to play. If the pitch was not available, we would fix the stumps in any open space available and start playing.

Unfortunately, I started wearing glasses from the age of 11 and when I broke the first pair within six months of procuring them, my father warned me and stated that he cannot afford to buy new glasses every time I broke them. He also got me an old fashioned frame, the type that Mahatma Gandhi wore, which went round the ears and protruded below the ears. The boys used to tease me and I stopped wearing them until it became difficult for me to see the ball clearly or read what is written on the black board in class. Within two years my power had gone up.

Because of the ‘spectacle’ issue and my fear of losing or breaking it in the cricket ground, I was relegated to the position of the second wicket keeper, standing way behind the wicket keeper to stop the ball when he failed to collect them in his gloved hands.

Over the weekends, there were matches played on the pitches between popular teams. N.S. Tamhane, Polly Umrigar, Dattu Phadkar (famous cricketers who played for India) were regulars at these matches. On Sun days alone, there would be so many matches, so many fielders and so many balls that it was difficult for onlookers to know who hit which ball where! It was all great fun! Later on when I was doing my B.Com. in Podar College, I had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with the likes of Farrokh Engineer, Indian wicket keeper (who was my classmate) and other popular local cricketers whose names I have forgotten. Needless to say I knew all of them but except Farrokh others did not know me.

In the absence of television, running commentary on the radio was very popular among cricket lovers those days. Vijay Merchant, Vizzy (Maharaja of Vijayanagaram), Sarvadhikari, Balu Alaganan, Anand Rao etc. were very popular commentators who brought the cricket field to life, with their commentary, making up for what we could not see.

Throughout my school life, I longed to watch a test match at the Brabourne Stadium of ‘Cricket Club of India’ (CCI), but could not do so because my father could not afford it. There was this one time when my uncles took me to a match there but as we could not get the tickets, I came back home very disappointed. In spite of India losing most of the matches, the interest in the game was as high then, as it is today. Even if the Indian team drew a match with another team, it was considered an achievement. If a batsman stayed on at the crease for a long time, even without scoring, he was considered a great batsman. My craze for owning a cricket ball and bat was satisfied when I was promised the same by Ganapathy Iyer, our neighbour (who was very fond of me), but only if I got within the first three ranks in the sixth standard final exam. I got the rank and of course the ball and bat also, making me a hero among my friends. I was always included in the game because of this.

While my interest in cricket endured, I had a brief fling with football, mainly as a spectator. The local team, Matunga Athletic Club (MAC), included a few of my building friends and was very popular in the Rovers Cup Football Tournament, a popular tournament in Mumbai those days. I was part of the group that cheered the MAC team whenever they played a match at the Cooperage grounds in Bombay.

I was also very fond of cycling. During our summer vacations, a group of friends hired cycles by the hour, to go around Matunga and have fun. A serious accident in which my cycle got badly damaged (fortunately I escaped with minor bruises) put a full stop to this part time activity.

Even as a young boy of 8 or 9, I took to reading seriously. Mostly they were Tamil weeklies and Illustrated Weekly of India. After the age of ten, I also began to read stories about successful people in life.

Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi was one of the earliest books I read and this had a profound impact on me. I also read Tamil novels by M. Varadarajan and others popular at that time. My favourite author was Tamilvaanan, who was the editor of ‘Kalkandu’ Weekly, a student magazine from the ‘Kumudam’ group.

The magazine had, apart from the usual short stories and mystery serials, a question and answer section where Tamilvaanan sorted out special problems relating to boys and girls. I remember the slogan ‘Thunive Thunai’ (Courage is companion), which used to be featured prominently on the front cover of the magazine. This line became a guiding spirit