Moving on Archives - And then...

Passage…

ram1 My mother, Malathi Ramaswamy, who passed away in Chennai last month, was a little over eighteen when I was born. This photo on the left, of the two of us, was taken some time in 1954 in Madras, a short while before we left to join my father who was then posted in Srinagar.

Sometime last year she completed a memoir of her childhood and wrote about the Madras that has all but vanished. This was mostly to tell us, our children, and her sisters’ children and grandchildren what little she remembered of her childhood and of those times. Ironically, she went a few days before the final printed copies of the book could be delivered to her, but she knew it was in the making.

The book, titled ALLATHUR VILLA: Nathamoony Chetty and the story of our family is available to read online, and it tells of how my grandmother, Seethalakshmi, was adopted by Allathur Nathamoony Chetty across caste and linguistic boundaries and a huge economic gradient. My mother and my four aunts grew up speaking Telugu at home, Tamil outside, and compared to the rest of their family, were much better off. When any of the five of them would talk about those days, it was always a magical world that they conjured up: the contrasts, the improbability, the role of chance…

Their home, the Allathur Villa of the title, is gone now; sold, torn down, and in its place on Poonamallee High Road, stands a hotel. A few days ago, S Muthiah who does The Hindu’s Metroplus column talked about the book: The tales a house tells.

Many tales indeed. Married at sixteen, my mother entered a very different world as an Army-officer’s wife. She must have imbibed much from her Chetty grandfather during her growing years though, since I can scarcely recall a time when she was not working. First as a school-teacher, shifting from one school to the other around the country as and when my father was posted, and then, after a longer stay in Delhi, as a tourist guide.

And eventually, as an entrepreneur. She found her métier as a tour operator when in the mid 1970’s she and my father founded a travel company in Delhi. Over the next thirty or so years, they promoted tours and accompanied them. From Kashmir to Nagaland, there were few parts of India that she had not traveled through. And as it happened, many parts of the world as well.

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The picture above, of her sitting in a truck on the India-Bhutan border shows her at her happiest: traveling, taking people around the country, and being appreciated for it. Her enthusiasm was infectious, as was her optimism – she was the introduction to India for many people, particularly those who came here to explore handicrafts. Some years ago, she and those who had traveled with her described these various journeys on her website, Speaking with Hands. One of these friends of hers wrote to us recently to say that “Malathi has been an inspiration to many with her fierce love, intense interest and devotion to her beloved India. She was a woman of great integrity and conviction fused with love and compassion… She will be missed, by so many.“

Like many women who were moving into the business world on their own in the 1970’s and 1980’s she had to write her own rules, and that was not always easy. Not for her, and frequently, also not for those around her… And she always had a project or two, was ever exploring, a characteristic that was admirable (and I did tell her that occasionally, even though it was often not easy to take). She did not shy away from trying to learn, whether it was trying out a new cellphone or laptop, or even reading difficult essays on the nature of modern physics.

Untitled Never at rest, till the end she was always looking forward to that next bit of travel, that next journey, and that next step. These words from Eliot, I suspect would have resonated quite strongly with her:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Depart, I say

Perhaps not unexpectedly, I have been having a bit of a writer’s block these past few months. Talking with an older friend the other day, we both remarked that in the aftermath of a loss, the pointlessness of some things just becomes starker, and one has to find the strength within to go on, or more often, the strength within to not stop going on.

rocker The difficulty of not stopping though, is exacerbated when the only thing one can do is academics… and the inability of even the most well-intentioned amongst us to not fall into the easy trap of seeking out extension of services long after it seems reasonable to others. As the time of my own retirement draws closer – another two years under normal circumstances, which seems both frighteningly near and yet comfortably still some time in the future – it is tempting to not call it a day just yet. But one has to find some alternate ways of keeping intellectually alive, contributing to the institutions one holds dear (and there are many of them still left!) without inadvertently or deliberately preventing them from growing and changing.

Knowing when to leave – that well timed exit, stage left – may be one of the best strategies to learn, as an anonymous Chinese proverb and Burt Bacharach have said in as many words. But when it comes to academe, there is a problem. A fixed retirement age cannot by definition apply across the board: there is deadwood in every department, as much as there will always be some who continue to astound us all with their continued productivity and creativity. Although a median should be respected, the median is not really the message.

images The question of what to do, as well as how and where… These and other such night-thoughts have tended to occupy my mind a bit more these days, more often than in the past. This year has necessarily been a time of summing up and one of re-evaluation.

But as this year draws to a close – an annus horribilis by even the most generous of reckonings – I am reminded of the good Cromwell, who in another context and to another audience said, “Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”.

I feel much the same emotions: Depart, 2016. In the name of God, go! Enough. There is a new year on the horizon…

Carrying on

ccx Commenting on my last post, an old classmate wrote to say “Ram, we are both at an age where we mark the passage of time by composing eulogies for our friends and loved ones. One day someone else will do the same for us….”

True enough. I found that in the past year or so, I’ve done this four times, and each time has been painful in its own way… The passage of the years does indeed makes these occasions more frequent, but every passing is none the easier for that. And every cliché in the book has some ring of truth to it, each day has its own new regrets.

I have been overwhelmed by the several letters that friends from all over the world have written in the past few weeks. And touched by the genuine expressions of grief, by the concern and the affection. I am beginning to respond to these, but each response goes with its own memories, so this note is both to acknowledge how heartwarming it has been to read each message and to say I will write back, but maybe slowly. We will meet, and when we do we will speak of other things, without forgetting this connection.

A Physicist and a Gentleman

On the very untimely death of Prof. Deepak Kumar of the School of Physical Sciences at JNU.

Dr Deepak Kumar (1988) My friend and colleague, Deepak Kumar, passed away all of a sudden late Monday (25th January) night. I had seen him that day, sharing a cup of tea with another member of the faculty in the afternoon sun on the lawns of the School of Physical Sciences at JNU. The spot where he sat was directly visible from my office window- Deepak often sat there and had his lunch. I hadn’t spoken to him that particular day, but that was not unusual – there were many days like that. But it was not just another day, not like any other.

Deepak was one of the first to join the School as Professor when it was formed, and he brought a decade or more of experience at the University of Roorkee. As it happened that greatly helped the School in its early, formative years, and set the mark for how it developed subsequently, defined what it’s core values were, and the sense of purpose and commitment that it has had since.

Colleague for almost 30 years, Deepak has been a friend for a little over that, and if I were to have to characterize him, the title of this post says it as well as anything. Deepak was a scholar in the true sense of the word, and one for whom the world of physics was all absorbing. Although his professional interests were in condensed matter physics, he was both knowledgeable about, and was interested in a huge range of topics. One could go to him for just about any doubt, count on him to give the right bit of advice, and if the matter happened to be something that he knew well, his intellectual generosity was limitless.

This is not exaggeration. Not for nothing was Deepak the most collaborative colleague that we have at the SPS: of the 20 or so faculty that we have in physics, Deepak has actually written papers with no less than seven of us. And with something like twice that many students, either as their formal or informal supervisor, as a mentor in the best tradition. Indeed, he mentored the first Ph. D. that was awarded from the SPS, and both directly and indirectly showed many of us the way in which one could bring out the very best in our students.

There is so much to say about Deepak- his academic contributions in condensed matter and statistical physics, the several awards, the recognition. But this above all: This was too soon and too sudden. There were many many good years of physics one could have had from him, and many years of physics that he would have enjoyed. Even the last day, on Monday, he gave a lecture, there was another scheduled this week. And last semester he taught a course for the MSc Physics seniors. He was working to the end, and he went with his academic boots on…

I know his ethos will continue to guide us, and I can only hope that we will not forget his calming spirit that often brought hot tempers down, his somewhat other-worldly smile, and his gentle sense of humour that helped us all see that there were many ways of reaching conclusions. We all will miss him deeply, the community that he helped build at JNU, and the larger community of physicists in the country that knew and admired him.

Letting go

In the end it was both difficult and not very difficult to bid farewell to the UoH chapter of my life.

Truisms apart, it will always be an integral component of my academic career, and as I said at a small function at the DST auditorium on campus a few days ago, I truly value the various opportunities that I have had to try out some ideas in academic administration, to try out some ideas in academic management, and the opportunities to try something different. Of course, given the sizes of the relative entities, getting an organization as large as a forty year old University to budge is much more difficult than to make the corresponding move oneself. Also given the fact that my personal motto is not (even if it does occasionally seem that way) “As my whimsy takes me“, I found it easier to adapt and change. And of course, change I did. The avoirdupois part is visible enough, as is the difference between the before and after photographs of my receding hairline, but the real changes are hidden elsewhere.

When writing to a colleague, I chose to call this segment of my life Schubertian. Not so much in the vision romantic or grand, but to echo the alternate title of his Symphony No. 8, The Unfinished. In the mid 1960’s there was also the wonderful(ly funny!) P D Q Bach’s take on Schubert in his Unbegun Symphony. In the days before the internet, the staples of graduate student evenings included Richard Schickele, Monty Python’s Traveling Circus and Tom Lehrer, but these have all not aged nearly as well as one’s memories of them… So some of it nods to the unbegun, and some of it to the unfinished. But this is not a time to take stock, and time alone will tell.

I was most apprehensive that the emotion of the moment would be too much- I am bad at goodbyes, and unrelated memories often have a way of intruding inappropriately, but in the end, I was glad that it all turned out to be fairly matter of fact. People spoke, I like to think factually, and said some nice things. And there were some who did not, but not in the way of the AIB roast (I wish!) or other such, but some irrelevant and very tangential remarks. But the moments pass. And in the end the drama of the last few minutes made it much easier to let go, what with the florid display of emotion over a matter that was, again, irrelevant to the moment. And again, the moments pass. I don’t particularly hold these instances to be characteristic of the UoH. There were enough messages that I got that were more in keeping with the ethos of the University and the values that we hold dear. Or having seen so many of these displays over the past several months, perhaps I should say that there are values that we should hold dear… One cannot but help noticing that as the national mood swings to a state where there is zero tolerance for petty corruption, the local expression of support that evening was for an act of simple and outright fraud. But let the courts decide that.

One of the more difficult things about letting go is that one returns to a life less variegated, a more monotone existence where the mornings pass into afternoons and evenings of a sameness. Having worn the trappings of office somewhat lightly, or so I thought, I felt that it would be simple to be back in my office at the JNU. But… the diverse nature of a typical working day at the UoH cannot be matched by the texture of my typical working days at JNU, given that I’m not even teaching this semester. Its far too early to tell whether it is just that I miss the bustle of it all. These initial moments are all too self-conscious…

Anyhow, what I hope to do on this blog is to write on stuff that I care about. Mostly education related, I suppose, but also other things. Travel maybe. My blog of the past three plus years was too focused on matters central to the UoH, so its time to let that go. And simply to move on.