My father, Gandhi


I always thought I knew Gandhi. Prominently figured in boring speeches by fat, uninspired politicians was Gandhi - the author of our great country's great independence.
Much like independence, however, my school-boy version of Gandhi was relegated into the realm of the conceptually elusive. Something so familiar and oft-repeated that one failed to question it. Quite like the word 'Father', really.

The first thing I knew about my father was that he was a paediatrician. It was only later that I learnt the Greek word meant 'man who takes his kids to just one family vacation in their entire life-time, and that too to Madras'. While I dreamed of American dads with their fishing boats and backyard baseball, and wrote what-I-did-with-my-summer-holidays essays which sounded suspiciously like the latest Enid Blyton book; my dad worked from nine in the morning to seven in the evening. Every day. For forty years. Except on Sundays, when he went in at a lazy ten.

You grow up in India not expecting your father to be a parent. Instead his only duty, it seems, is to provide a figure you can hope to be. You're edged to saying that you want to be a doctor when you grow up. You're taught that the only reason he's working so hard - from nine in the morning to seven in the evening - is so that you can be educated in the mighty Bishop Cottons. You're taught to save the best pieces of butter-chicken for him, and lie to him that you already had your full. You're taught that he's the one with the motorbike, the one who lifts things that no one else can, the one who'll drive up in the dead of the night. That pain can't hurt him, and that he's not afraid of the neighborhood dog. That he never cries and gets away with not believing in God.
You're not taught, however, to feign innocence of his drunkenness, on nights when Ma tiptoes into your room and lies down beside you on the bed, the ends of her pallu still wet. Somethings .. somethings you just learn by yourself.
You wake up the next morning, loudly exclaim that you slept so well last night you didn't notice a thing, put on your pristine white school uniform that Ma has ironed and folded and kept by your bed, gobble the dosas and dark green chutney that only she can make, and head out to stand in the torrid Indian sun, as the principal gives you a speech on the great Gandhi.


Gandhi - your principal's barely audible speech insists - was the sole reason we got our independence. Bose was foolhardy, and Jinnah was a weak atheist who founded a religious state. And that everyone, including Ambedkar loved and respected Gandhi and clung on to his every word. And by definition, that you should too.

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And then one day, after all those years of indoctrination, you unexpectedly crash into the road bump of adolescence.

When you see how he treats Ma in front of his relatives. When you notice that you've never seen him physically touch her like he desires her, or once tell her that he loves her. When you can no longer pretend you hadn't heard her that night when she had caught him cheating. That our independence was brought at the cost of five hundred thousand Indian lives. That he thought that weaving was the path to our salvation.

We're a nation in the adolescence of Gandhi's greatness. With one half telling us that Gandhi was great because he eradicated Sati and untouchability and brought us independence through the revolution of non-violence. While the other-half laughs and ridicules the notion that independence was 'won' by us at all, and that Gandhi was a lucky fool - an ordinary man who happened to be around when independence was thrust upon us by a weary British Empire; a man who did more to impede our path to independence through his 'revolution of non-violence'.

I belong to neither of the above groups, I think. Partly because I think the issue is argued along flawed lines. We err by measuring greatness with success, forgetting that the right word for a successful man is just that - successful. Not 'great'. Plain and untrumpeted 'successful'.

Greatness belongs exclusively to those who make you want to be them. And Gandhi did that. He might have not won us our freedom, and may have had naïve economic notions, but he made millions of Indians want to be him. And for that, alone, he will be great.


I don't know why I 're-fell' in love with Gandhi. Only this time I didn't approach him with forced respect, but with curiosity. I read everything I could lay my hands on about him, and watched the few documentaries and movies I could find. I learnt about his experiments with the 'Sahara of atheism', his relationship with Rabindranath Tagore, his uncanny wit, his father, and his obsession with sexuality. I learnt about his willingness to challenge the religion he held so dear, his absolute conviction in himself, his fasts, his notion of courage and his belief in the inherent goodness of his oppressors. I learnt that he completely read the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran. I read his quotes: on non-violence "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence" and "Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary"; on work "My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition"; when asked what he thought of Western civilization "I think it would be a good idea"; on religion "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."

And amidst of all that, I felt something perplexing: something that tingles you as you read his words - that this man's life was somehow tinged by the divine. That he had a dimension to him that we still have not completely grasped.


My indifferent hostility towards my father, coincidentally, turned around a couple of years ago. I remember it distinctly: there were these unholy riots in Bangalore and with certain areas resorting to pelting cars to prove their righteousness. He prepared to go in because he got a call from the hospital, ignoring Ma's desperate cries. I was so angered that he would ignore us so - that our opinion meant nothing to him; when he looked at me and told me that he was a doctor and a man, and that his duty - his karma - was to do his work. The rest, simply, was unimportant.

Those words shake me to this day - maybe he has a truth greater than those from 'The bridges of Madison County' or the infinite web-pages on how the modern man ought to behave. Maybe happiness is in performing your karma. Maybe happiness lies in self-sufficiency and weaving your own clothes.

I hope that one day, I can be half the man he is.

It feels odd then, that in a week's time, I will be leaving both of them: Gandhi's India and my father. I'm moving to the US to work for Yahoo! there.

My father will never visit the States. He's married to his work and his particular brand of whiskey. That and he could never make the twenty-hour non-smoking flight. It's a disconcerting feeling: to know that I will probably never know the man, and that my next flight home might be to his funeral.