Fathers day thoughts

The other day I was browsing through my facebook page- something I do perhaps once a month- when I chanced on this little piece my son Akhil had written:

"Post this if your dad is or was a hard working man, and has helped you as much as he could at the time no matter how good or bad you were, and is just the best dad ever; if you are blessed ti still have your dad with you, or he is in another place at the moment, paste this to your status and let everyone know you are proud of your dad. You can replace a lot of people in your life, but you only have one dad..and remember anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad." 

And I was reminded of my own dad and the place he had in my life. Most people remember their parents or close friends through some vignettes which have remained  in their memories for ever and ever. It is an accumulation of such memories that seems to define our view of their entire life. Rarely if ever do we sit down to think about placing these memories in some context to obtain a coherent and complete view of their entire life. It is these vignettes that define them for us. So it is for fathers.

When asked about their earliest memories of their fathers, many of us would have difficulty in defining them in some details. But ask us if we remember some action or thought that has defined our relationship with them, most would easily find quite few incidents from their lives. So as I reflected on my fathers life- he has now been gone almost fifteen years- a few vignettes stand out which in a certain sense define him for me.

 Of them the earliest was when I asked why he became an economist. We were at that time discussing the profession I would soon choose for myself. It then came out that when he was a young student, he heard Pandit Nehru, the charismatic leader of the Indian National Congress urge all Indians to fight for complete independence on the banks of the Ravi river in 1930. He urged students to help rebuild the country and said that the country would need economists and engineers to lay the foundation for the future.That speech inspired the deep idealism in him to chose economics as his profession. ( Incidentally, mine was engineering).

Another defining incident was when I found that he chose to resign from his job as the editor of the premier economic magazine in the country, The Eastern Economist, rather than bow to the wishes of the proprietors to push the preferred policies of the industrialist who also owned the magazine. He was willing to lose his job rather than compromise on his principles.Since we had a comfortable house close to his office and we had to shift to hutments built for soldiers during the war, the change was a considerable downgrade at that time even though he found a job with the government. That defined for me his strict adherence to a life of integrity.

A third incident occurred when I led a student movement against the powerful professor and head of the hostel at IIT, Kharagpur in the first year of my engineering course.Dr Muthanna was a tough as nails administrator who tolerated no dissent and when a group of students organized to challenge his policies and his executive abilities, he was not only outraged but he took action. Unbeknownst to me, he wrote a strong letter to my father threatening that he may be forced to expel me from the institute for my union efforts. My father sent him an equally uncompromising reply pointing out that Dr Muthana needed to deal with the students more sympathetically and that in any case it was unlikely that his son would be participating in any activities that were not right and justified. He had complete faith in my judgment and sense of responsibility. My father did not send me a copy of this letter -- indeed I found out about it only years later when I was going through his papers. But his unqualified trust in his young son was to inspire me throughout my life.

A few years later I won a scholarship to go to Berkeley but found that I had not enough money for the air ticket. I was busy selling off all my possessions in order to raise the necessary funds when I received a letter from my father containing a check for the air fare. I knew then that I would never be alone in my life's ventures.

We came to a parting of ways for a brief while when I got married and he refused to accept the choice I had made. We remained distant and silent for almost seven years- you see he had passed on his uncompromising attitude to me as well. He was a man of strong and rigid convictions. It took my children to bring him around finally which he did. One day after seven years, at the urgings of my wife, Ena, we decided to visit him. We knocked on his door. He opened the door and graciously invited us in. For the rest of the two hours that we were there, he talked with Shibani and Akhil sat happily gurgling in his lap. Strange! He never raised the issue that had parted us and was just adoring of his grandchildren. And we were to spend his last years as close as we had been all our lives before the break.

And then a few years later, he was diagnosed with colon cancer requiring a major operation. I was then posted in Bombay and would fly down to be with him after the operation while my brother looked after him. He was to live with this for almost fifteen years till he died. But during this period I rarely heard him complain about the pain or the restrictions that these operations placed on him. We would discuss everything under the sun except his medical pains and problems. His courage and stoicism remained with him till the end and he refused to give up.

When I look back, it is these vignettes which define for me his life--his idealism, his courage of his convictions, his stoicism in face of pain, his love for his family and his willingness to confront life without compromise.