Srinivasan Master

Srinivasan Master was a hero to hundreds of students who passed out of Vidya Mandir, the Mylapore school that celebrated its golden jubilee a couple of years ago. He was certainly my hero when I was growing up. He was my history and geography teacher in my final year of school but remained a friend and mentor until his untimely death in 1993, in his sixties.

His classes were original and inspiring. He made Indian history come alive, lighting up the class with fiery anecdotes from the freedom struggle, though there was an RSS bias to these stories. Somehow, when he spoke of the sacrifices made by such people as Veer Savarkar, there was no religious fanaticism behind his utterances, only fierce patriotism. He had a sonorous voice that had enough modulation in it to lend itself to song, and he used it to advantage in Vidya Mandir's famous General Class on Friday afternoons, belting out such unforgettable melodies as 'Hum Karen Rashtra Aradhan' and 'Are Sadhak, Sadhana Kar'. The old teachers we met during the recent golden jubilee were surprised to find that some of us still knew those songs.

Srinivasan Master's Geography classes were no less exciting, believe it or not! He made games out of the driest of lessons, pitting one team against another in quiz programmes, 'match the following', etc. He was also always there for you when you were in a spot of trouble common to teenage years. He could give you sage advice, even visit your parents to explain your viewpoint to them when they did not see eye to eye with you, or to convince you that they were right.

He cycled everywhere, and it was not uncommon for his young wards to go cycling with him. Often, he cycled along with you until you reached home, and then went on to his own home. Sometimes, he patiently listened to your woes or explained some problem to you standing at the street corner, and you returned home in an uplifted frame of mind. Through him many of his students learnt deep breathing and meditation exercises that helped them greatly at a crucial juncture of their lives.

For a few months after school, I accompanied Srinivasan Master, on his long cycle trips to nearby villages and slums to perform his social work. These were great learning experiences for a young man who had never been exposed in such proximity to poverty. With him, I learnt to sit down at some poor man's hut and accept his hospitality, be it a cup of tea or bowl of gruel. Initial aversion gave way to appreciation of the simple generosity of these humble folk. But for Srinivasan Master, I for one would have never shed my inhibitions about poor people.

For years after I left school, he was there to guide me or at least hold my hand when I courted trouble of one sort or the other. Once when I was particularly nervous about a university exam, he appeared as if by magic just outside the college gate, minutes before I entered it, and gave me such an encouraging smile and powerful slap on my back that my nervousness vanished and I did the paper extremely well. Many years later, when I was at a crossroads, he assured me I was doing the right thing by choosing a writing career. To know that I had his - and another teacher Shrimati Buch's - approval in my 'eccentric' decision, was to feel confident about my future during a time of great anxiety.

A few months before Srinivasan Master's death, I lost my father, and he was there by my side at the cremation ground. That was to be expected of him. But when he turned up the next morning there when I went to collect my father's ashes, I knew I would never see another like him.

A tough, proud man

First published Cricinfo, Wisden Asia
February 6, 2004

Venkataraghavan wasn't in the business of asking for favours, nor granting them © Getty Images

The news that Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan has decided to call it a day means that the ICC's elite panel of Test umpires will soon be without the services of one of its outstanding members. Before he gained the respect of players and commentators as a top class international umpire, Venkat was player, administrator, selector, commentator and match referee at different times. In an arena wider than the field of play, he must be cricket's most versatile all rounder.

The qualities that make Venkat such a good umpire were evident in him as early as during his schooldays, when I first met him. These were a thorough knowledge of the game and its laws, fearlessness, superb physical fitness, the ability to concentrate hard for hours, a brisk decisiveness and a commanding presence. These are not necessarily endearing qualities, and Venkat has never been in the race to win any popularity poll.

I have played with or against (mostly against) Venkat from the time I was about 10 and he 12, but though we have had occasion to meet intermittently on the cricket ground as well as socially all these years, I cannot count myself as one of his friends, for he is a very private man, with few intimate friends. On the field, however, we had some enjoyable exchanges, highly competitive and intensely fought. That is the only way the offspinner knew to play his cricket. The needle was a bit extra, at least on my part, when we competed against each other, because I was an offspinner myself, trying to dislodge him from the Indian side, though without success. Every time I faced him I was determined not to lose my wicket to him, and every time I bowled to him I desperately wanted his wicket. I do not know if he reserved any special effort for me, but the going was never easy when I was at the receiving end from him.

We both played for the same school, P S High School of Mylapore, Madras, but in college cricket, we were regularly pitted against each other. He led the formidable Guindy Engineering College against Presidency, my college, which had a number of talented players. In addition to bowling his accurate and nippy off spinners, he batted high in the order and scored consistently. He was a brilliant fielder, especially close to the wicket, a facet of his cricket for which he was admired at the highest level. (One remarkable catch I saw him take in local cricket, however, involved his running to midwicket off his own bowling and holding on to a skier, a truly fantastic effort, on the Marina ground). He was already a Test cricketer, and some of the senior batsmen in my side got out to him even before they left the safety of the pavilion, so complete was his psychological domination of them. Our first victory over Engineering was achieved only after Venkat's graduation.

Our worst performance against Engineering came when I was captain. We were dismissed for 42 on the University Union ground, and though we managed to cause a few alarms when Engineering batted, they passed our score after losing four wickets. It was the final of a tournament, and the umpires tried to continue the match -- naturally to my delight, as it gave my side an outside chance --thinking it was a two innings affair, but the party was spoiled by Venkat, who, rule book in hand, proved that the match was in fact won and lost already.

My enduring memory of Venkat is one of the seriousness with which he approached net practice, bowling non-stop for three hours everyday, following that with an extended session of fielding practice. Taking a hundred slip catches a day was about par for the course for him.

Everyone knows that throughout his career, Venkat never left the ground citing injury. Two occasions stand out in my memory. The first was during a Duleep Trophy match against Central Zone at Bangalore in 1975. One evening during the match, Venkat met with a minor road accident, falling off a scooter. (Can you imagine a current Test cricketer on two wheels?) On the morrow, he carried on as if nothing had happened, bowling a long, match-winning spell with little or no indication that he was in any discomfort. But back in the pavilion he had great difficulty taking off his trousers to change, because he had been badly bruised from waist to foot on one side.

On another occasion, Venkat bowled a marathon 72-over spell against East Zone in the Duleep Trophy at Eden Gardens, nursing a very painful injury. Left-hander V Sivaramakrishnan, who played that match, rates that spell as the bravest, most disciplined effort he has seen on a cricket ground.

No tribute to Venkat can be complete without mention of the terror he struck in the hearts of team-mates and rivals alike. Stories about the nervous wrecks he made of some of them are a frequent cause of merriment in the dressing room. I remember him describing the South Zone fielding in that same Bangalore match as "diabolic" and my wondering how many of my team-mates understood the word. And sure enough, I found one of them scurrying off to the KSCA office and asking the clerk there if he could borrow a dictionary.

Another time, playing for Madras Cricket Club in the Chennai league, he was the non-striker, with S Vasudevan in the midst of a brilliant spell of left-arm spin, claiming six wickets on a placid track. Vasu bowled one ball down the leg side during that spell, possibly the only bad ball he bowled that day, and to his utter shock the non striker literally barked: "How many times have I told you to bowl the faster one on the stumps!" Venkat was then the captain of the state team and Vasu was one of his main bowlers.

Of most combative sportsmen it can be said truthfully that they mellow with age. I believe Venkat suffers from no such constraint. He continued to be aggressive and relentlessly focused on his job as an umpire, just as he used to be as a player. He still does not seek to win popularity contests and revels in calling a spade a bloody shovel. He is indeed a professional, with whom pride of performance in all he does is an article of faith.

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.

Charles Goschen

This is the story of a much-travelled Englishman my family and I knew, someone who visited us on and off during the 1990s. He was in his thirties then, handsome, well-read and articulate, prone to acts of kindness towards all around him.

My early memories of Charles Goschen are of those of an unusually tall man, almost doubling up with mirth at the recollection of an incident at the Chennai secretariat. This was some eight years ago. Charles had gone to Fort St. George in search of records of his greatuncle Lord Goschen, who had been Governor of Madras. Unimpressed by his curiosity, the clerk at the counter had told him not to waste her time with frivolous requests.

Charles was at the time writing a novel, one of three he wrote, I was to learn later, but never published. He moved to Pondicherry to continue his work there, but was still an occasional visitor at home.

Smiling, laughing, easygoing, a great fan of the cartoon serial 'The Simpsons', which he enjoyed in the company of my son, then about ten years old, Charles was equally at home discussing Montessori with my schoolmarm sister-in-law, film criticism with my journalist wife, or cricket with me and my son. He was a sensitive listener and we knew that underneath that cheerful exterior was a heart that cared for the underprivileged of the world. If he found India hugely amusing - there were always little incidents to have a roaring laugh about - he also had great admiration for the resilience and smiling ways of her poor.

I did not know then that Charles Goschen had fought the ravages of epilepsy since boyhood. His sister Caroline wrote to us recently: "Charles was born on 17 August 1958 in Rhodesia. My parents farmed just outside a small town called Rusape and Charles and I had a magical childhood with lots of animals, space and freedom."

Until 15, life had been a song for Charles. He had joined High School in Salisbury a year ahead of his age group. According to his father: "He achieved record distinctions at O level. At that time people were saying that it wasn't fair that Charles had everything, looks, brains and charm".

The epilepsy started when he was 15 as petit mal and affected his work, though he passed his A levels ahead of his friends. After a year's National Service, he went to the University of Cape Town to do civil engineering. The grand mal seizures started there and he had to leave.

He joined a firm of stockbrokers in Johannesburg but a seizure he suffered on the trading floor made him quit. He also had two minor car accidents and decided he could not drive and risk other people's lives.

Charles decided to try a completely different climate in the West Indies, beginning his novel writing efforts there. He taught English in Ecuador and started a fund there for a native girl's heart surgery, with a considerable donation of his own. He trekked to the source of the Amazon, to the southernmost tip of South America, and generally did a great deal of travelling.

"I think during this part of his life he abandoned thoughts of money-making and, whilst he had never despised the poor," says his father.

According to his sister, "Charles' life was a constant roller coaster of thinking he could control his epilepsy, followed by times when nothing he did made any difference and he had seizure after seizure. But he never gave up".

When Charles announced his decision to move to Srinagar, I was surprised because I had always believed him to be a south Indian at heart, though an Englishman by birth, born and brought up in Zimbabwe. It was much later that I learnt that Kashmir indeed had been his window to India when he first visited there with a friend years ago.

This second visit to the valley was to prove momentous. After seeing a cow's carcass floating on the Dal Lake, Charles launched what has now become famous as the Green Kashmir movement, beginning with distributing wicker baskets to shopkeepers for them to deposit their rubbish. He also wrote a regular column "Environment Watch" in the local newspaper, gave talks to school children and generally raised the level of awareness about pollution.

The "Green Kashmir Conservation Trust" which Charles set up received a grant from the local government, with which he extended the scheme, using shikaras to collect rubbish from other houseboats and other parts of the city.

All this resulted in a noticeable improvement in the ecology of the lake by 1998, and GK drew much media attention. BBC has telecast programmes on the project and several newspaper articles have been published on it.

1999 was a bad year for Charles. On a visit to South Africa, he had taken his internationally known wine maker brother John's wife and children to the beach, when they received news of John's death by electrocution. Six months later, his mother died.

His epilepsy once again went out of control. A bout of malaria in South Africa was followed by a broken leg while back in Kashmir.

When Charles went to South Africa to recuperate, his father took him to an old family doctor and soon his epilepsy was responding to treatment. He started swimming regularly to strengthen his injured leg.

On the morning of January 31, 2000, Charles Goschen was found dead in a swimming pool.

"John's wife said at his memorial service that she thought of him as being a travelling man and that he was just off on another one of his travels", writes Caroline. That is how most of his friends would like to think of Charles Goschen's passing.

First published in The Hindu Metroplus

MS

My earliest memories of M S Subbulaksmi are of concerts at RR Sabha back in the late fifties, when I, Carnatic music ignoramus though I was, could not help being mesmerised by her glorious voice, especially her tremendous reach in the higher registers. She was relatively young, and her voice was still evolving into the majestic form it achieved in her mature years.

The first time I saw her at close quarters was some ten years later at Vasant Vihar, the Greenways Road home of the Krishnamurti Foundation. It was at a mellow, meditative concert for the benefit of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the fortunate few who had gathered there were able to catch a glimpse of greatness up close. Like everyone who has come into contact with MS, I was struck by her simplicity. Equally striking was the beauty, vivacity and humour of her brilliant vocal accompanist, Radha Viswanathan.

My next memory of MS is from a cutcheri at the University Centenary auditorium in 1969. I was seated next to the girl who was to become my wife soon afterwards and her mother, though none of us knew it then. By sheer fluke, I guessed a raga right—it was a close shave, because I debated between two choices, and mentally tossed a coin before stumbling on the right answer—and that must have impressed my companions.

Gowri and I were married not long afterwards, and that is what brought me into the privileged circle of those fortunate enough to know MS on a personal level. It was a fantastic experience to listen to her music in a private ambience, without instrumental accompaniment or amplification. Amazingly, during home visits or at the oonjal at weddings, she would happily sing alone or lead a chorus with no concern for the level of accomplishment of her accompanists. On rare occasions, I heard both MS and Semmangudi in such intimate gatherings. This is a blessing that I have enjoyed, along with other members of my family, as long as they both lived..

One unforgettable experience was listening to MS at the grihapravesam of our home in 1993, when she sang sitting on the rough floor of a house still-under construction. She was in magnificent voice and the whole room was surcharged with emotion as her sonorous tones filled the place with an aura of sheer devotion. My thoughts were full of my father who had passed away months earlier, and it was a rare moment of sublimation such as I had never experienced before.

In the early days of our marriage, Gowri frequently nudged me to compliment ‘Kunjakka’ at the end of her concerts. Naturally, it took me a long time to gather the courage to do that—imagine walking up to a legend of our times and appreciating her performance. When I actually did it the first time, her acceptance of the compliment was so spontaneous and genuine that it was difficult to believe I was talking to someone of her eminence.

In the last decade of her concert career, when poor health prevented the peerless Radha from providing her vocal accompaniment, Gowri had the honour of assisting her. While both of us considered it a proud privilege, as anyone in our position would have, MS never failed to thank me whenever I met her, for “allowing Gowri to help her”. Though we found it extremely embarrassing, we were also touched by her concern for us and her extraordinary humility. To seek and receive blessings from MS and Thatha (Mr Sadasivam) on those occasions was to pause from the frenetic pace of our lives and experience a great sense of peace and calm.

Famil history 1

My father P N Venkatraman was born on 10 April 1919 to V Narayanan and Sarada at Madras. The family was orthodox south Indian brahmin, which among other things, means they were originally from the priestly class, though already in my grandfather’s generation, leaning towards professions of a more secular nature. Grandfather Narayanan was a lawyer by qualification, but an academician and journalist by profession at different stages of his life. He was proficient in three languages—Tamil, Sanskrit and English--in all of which he wrote commentaries on matters spiritual and theological. He was for a while Editor of The Indian Express, an English language daily, in which I worked as an apprentice sub-editor in the sixties.

My boss then, C P Seshadri, a veteran journalist highly respected in the newspaper world, often told me what a good editor my grandfather had been, how much he, a young reporter, had learnt from him. Narayanan was a major contributor to the first Tamil lexicon of modern times, as an assistant to the celebrated S Vaiyapuri Pillai, its editor. He also edited numerous publications of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the spiritual headquarters of the saivite subsect (followers of Siva) of Brahmins to which my family belongs. It is hardly surprising that Narayanan wrote beautiful Tamil, the language he spoke at home, but samples of his English writing I chanced upon some 20 years ago stunned me with their timelessness—they could have been written in this day and age, so simple yet sophisticated his style. (I hope I can unearth those samples again). According to a family tree drawn up for me by the late M Krishnan, eminent naturalist, photographer and writer of fiction and non-fiction in English, and a great-grand uncle of mine, Narayanan’s ancestors were Avadhanis[1] who moved from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh to Tirunelveli in present day Tamil Nadu. Narayanan married Sarada before either of them reached the age of ten, and I believe he was older than her by some five years! She grew up to be a six-footer (a rarity among women even today) and he was a short man, so they were to become quite a physical mismatch in their grown years. He died in his early fifties and she was barely 36 when she died. They had eight children, the eldest a son, Sundaresan and my father, the second. The youngest, Pattabhiraman, was only two when his mother died. In between were five sisters, Janaki, Visalakshi, Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati.

Narayanan was a rather unworldly person who enjoyed hardly any material success. Moving to Madras from his village on marrying Sarada, the daughter of a judge of the Madras High Court, P R Sundara Iyer, he lived in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house built by his father-in-law for his daughter. This was on Murray’s Gate Road, a street in Alwarpet close to Mylapore, an ancient village turned suburb, which had become the home of the Brahmin aristocracy of Madras. Between Mylapore and Alwarpet, on Luz Church Road was Sree Bagh, a vast property that had been Sundara Iyer’s home in the early 20th century before a business misadventure by his sons had resulted in its sale along with much of his other assets. (In fact, his sons had to file for bankruptcy, and the family was able to salvage only property standing in the name of the youngest son P S Ramachandran, who was then a minor). On Murrays Gate Road was another house, Srimukha, belonging to Narayanan and Sarada, and this was rented out in the 1940s to a young executive of Burmah Shell, the oil company which had a major presence in India then.

Ramaswamy was an engineer who qualified from the famous Benares Hindu University of Kasi, the famous centre of pilgrimage in north India every Hindu of the time visited once before his death to attain salvation. (The true believer actually went to Kasi to die there). Ramaswamy was the son of Sivaramakrishna Iyer who had retired as Inspector of Schools in the princely state of Travancore-Cochin (now the state of Kerala), the southernmost tip of India. Like my father, he was the second of eight children including five daughters. The eldest, Sita, is 99 today and all her sisters are alive, my mother Rukmini 79, and the youngest, Saraswati, 78, while Ramaswamy and his brothers Ramachandran and Mahadevan are no more. Sivaramakrishna Iyer (known in the family as Anna or elder brother) and his wife Subbulakshmi came to live with Ramaswamy at Srimukha, and soon there developed a friendship between Anna and Narayanan as the two men shared a common love of literature and philosophy. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two and they spent hours discussing books, both literary works as well as the Indian epics. The two families became friends and before long, Ramaswamy found in Narayanan’s second son, the gentle self-effacing Venkatraman a future brother-in-law! Sivaramakrishna Iyer made a formal approach to Narayanan, horoscopes were exchanged and found to match and Venkatraman married Rukmini, Anna’s fourth daughter.

[1] An avadhani is a person who speaks extempore (preferably in verse) on different topics at a time—to an audience of eight, 100 or 1,000 people who pose a question each to him or her—and answers them all. To an audience of 100, he has to answer questions or create verses based on the questioner's hints, after every 25 questions. The art is known as avadhanam.

Jayasri

A friend wanted to know the background behind my interest in Vipassana meditation. Did you go to a shibhir, she asked. I have never attended a meditation camp. I came to know of it first from Peter Ryce my wonderful friend from California--he claims we were brothers in our earlier birth--after he learnt it from Goenkaji, the man who really brought it back to India, the land of the Buddha, the creator of vipassana, from Myanmar where he had been the disciple of U Ba Khin. Years later, my sister-in-law Rukku and her friend Amala did the ten-day course in Hyderabad. Recently, I could not stop the flow of tears as I watched a documentary (http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/vipassana/video/xqhdl_doing-time-doing-vipassana-english_news) on the vipassana experiment at Tihar jail, a moving account of the transformation of man that defies conventional wisdom on crime and punishment.

Everytime I think of vipassana, I can't help thinking of Radhi, a friend of ours who teaches it. I first met her when she was a schoolgirl (or was she in junior college as they called it back then in Hyderabad?) I was in my thirties then, a bank officer, and my wife Gowri an English lecturer in a college. Radhi's elder sister Jayasri was Gowri's colleague, brilliant, vivacious and articulate, even argumentative. She taught science but her interests were wide and she loved the good fight. She and Gowri got on famously. I got to know her very well too and some of her loudest arguments at my home were with me. Her views tended towards fiery feminism and I invariably ended up on the losing side of these verbal battles.

We got to know Jayasri and her family well and they lived within shouting disatnce of our house. They were simple, hard working middle class Tamil folk, with fairly orthodox views. Jayasri was the second of three daughters. They led predictably normal, south Indian lives, a closely knit family. Little did any of us know what fate had in store for them.

Jayasri suffered grievous burns in a kitchen accident in August 1980. I remember my being slightly annoyed with Jayasri for some silly reason and my impatience when Gowri asked me to take her to visit her in hospital, imagining it was a minor problem. I was ashamed of myself when I found out the extent of the burns.

Jayasri did not survive. She succumbed to her burns on 19th August, a few days after the accident. What we can never forget is the way she kept asking Gowri to sing one song after another as she lay dying in her hospital bed. M S Subbulakshmi was her favourite, and she repeatedly asked for specific songs of hers to be sung. This went on for a couple of hours, and I don't know how Gowri managed to respond to Jayasri's requests without breaking down.

Naturally we spent the next couple of weeks trying to be of some support to Jayasri's family. That's the time, I came to know young Radhi, shattered beyond consolation, but quietly dignified as only the young can be.

Over the decades, we have been in touch with Radhi but only just. I can only guess what vipassana must mean to her, but she is a picture of serenity today, and must be bringing solace to many lives as a teacher.