Mohan Raj

My friend Mohan Raj makes an annual visit from New York to Chennai. He comes here in November-December for the music and dance season and stays on for some four months. During this period, he enjoys going around the cutcheri circuit and catching up with his old friends in the city.

Mohan works as a security guard in New York. He is on duty for three or four days a week, preferring to enjoy a longer than normal weekend to slogging all week. He is not ambitious; working in the Big Apple has been a post-retirement benefit he has earned after more than 16 years of service as a driver in the erstwhile USIS of Chennai. He is a green card holder, a privilege offered to him by his organisation, which he accepted after weighing the pros and cons of such a major relocation in his sixties.

Mohan ran away from his native small town to Madras back in the late fifties with dreams of making it to the films. After doing a great number of odd jobs in the film studios of the city and getting to know many film personalities, he finally decided to buy a taxi and drive it.

Both during his affair with cinema and his stint as a taxi driver, Mohan made many friends who shaped his life. Of a literary bent of mind, his reading was quite prolific. He read both classical literature and the best authors in contemporary Tamil writing. From Kalki and Pudumaipithan to Jayakanthan and T Janakiraman, he developed a sophisticated taste in his reading preferences. He continued to watch good cinema as well. And somewhere along the way, he also developed a passion for cricket.

That is how I first came to know Mohan Raj. I was already in my twenties and playing university cricket, but my brother and his friends still played street and colony cricket in the Shastrinagar (near Adyar) of the sixties. Mohan lived on the same street as we did, and already in his mid-twenties or perhaps close to thirty, he would watch the youngsters play cricket in the evenings after returning home from his taxi rounds. Soon enough, the kids allowed him to join them and he became an enthusiastic participant in their evening practice sessions as well as the matches they arranged regularly among teams from Besant Nagar, Indira Nagar and Shastri Nagar.

As a taxi driver, Mohan earned a fantastic reputation for his impeccable manners, unfailing courtesy and honesty. He made many friends in important places and this was to stand him in very good stead when he decided to look for a steady job rather late in his career. One of his regular customers gave him an introduction which led to his eventual employment in the USIS, where he became one of the most popular staff members in the next 16 years.

Of the many friendships he has developed over the decades, Mohan treasures in particular his extraordinary relationship with the Dhananjayans, VP and Shanta, the well known dance couple. Even today, when he comes home from his New York job, he loves to drive them around Chennai. They in turn treat him like family, insisting on his sharing equal status wherever they go. It is a rare bonding characterised by mutual respect and affection.

Mohan has written his memoirs, a fascinating document bristling with unusual anecdotes involving a variety of personalities. He is in the process of fine-tuning it and making it into a book. There is quite some work to do before that can be accomplished, but the manuscript does show considerable promise. Mohan is a rare global citizen from a working class background.