Several years ago, my good friend Sunil “Tiger” Gulati and I met for dinner in Mumbai. After the irrigatory preliminaries of tasting and ordering our beers, we went on to chat about what’s next in our lives (Tiger having finally succeeded in extricating from the corporate world and my impending retirement which finally happened soon thereafter), we went on to chat about our kids. That’s when the conversation took an interesting turn with our 2 elder ones being at interesting stages in their life – his (Saanya), an inveterate blogger and having completed her masters was looking to work in the non-profit sector while mine (Avani) was interning with a start-up publisher and blogging and writing furiously before she goes back to college to do an MBA. And our younger ones – Esha and Aman – at various stages of completing their undergrad studies in the US while being quite different from the elder ones but being quite similar in their world view – of being comfortable with the “other” and perhaps well on the way to being, to use the loaded word, liberal!
We went on to then discussing whether we should give ourselves credit for our kids turning out that way (which we agreed would be an exaggeration), and it inevitably led us to interrogating what made us as liberal as we think we are. Funnily, we both came to similar conclusions – funnily because we went to the same school and college, though several years apart! And this is something I have discussed with my siblings Meenu and Sriram. So, here is my story.
A big influencer for me was my school – St. Columba’s High School – which was Tiger’s too. In my days, it was certainly the school to go to and though it seems to have lost some of its sheen now, it continues to cause traffic jams at Gol Dak Khana every afternoon when school gives out, suggesting it is still doing alright! The school had one of the most diversified bunch of students representing all religions, regions, economic categories and (as I was to discover later), castes. One of my closest friends was someone whose father was a “Class IV” government employee (mine was Class I!) but I was blissfully unaware of and I remember spending many afternoons at his place doing this and that. My class topper was Catholic and while he and other Catholics attended Catechism, we studied a subject called Moral Science and I attribute much of my (few) positive behaviours to that. Our teachers were equally strict or lenient to everyone in class (the one exception was the Hindi teacher who hated us South Indians, but more because the nuances of the language escaped us, I suspect!) and I never heard even the faintest word of Christianity from our Irish Christian Brothers! We were simply friends and Columbans. And it was there that I read one of the most profound but hard-to-implement pronouncements – “When you get what you like, it is success; when you like what you get, it is happiness”!
Another big influencer was IIT. Mind you, I joined IIT at a very impressionable age – I turned 16 in my first year! And this was a time when the FIITJEEs and the Narayanas of this world didn’t exist and Kota was just a small, anonymous, plastics-producing town in Rajasthan. There were Sangal’s classes in Delhi where I was enrolled for the summer but preferred to play hooky and hockey instead! The playing field was quite level and so one didn’t have to spend the last years in school preparing for the JEE and foregoing life. The result was the incredible diversity of people you ran into there. I was considered one of the bright sparks in my school but I was overwhelmed by the sheer geniuses that I ran into at IIT – every one of them was so much brighter than I. Every one of them was extremely competent at a whole range of things be it sport, theatre, debate, music…you name it. What this did was to build a culture of respect of the other because you knew that they were extremely good at something or the other. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from and – perhaps more importantly – who your father was! We did have reservations for SCs and STs but I didn’t know who in my class belonged to those categories simply because it just didn’t matter!
A third influencer was the Indian armed forces. My father was a fauji and as a result a big chunk of my formative years was spent at what is called an “officers’ hostel”. I consider the armed forces one of the most secular institutions in the country, as it attracts Indian of all shapes, sizes and beliefs around the idea of India and does its bit to promote this secular culture – a typical establishment will have a temple, a church, a Gurudwara and so on. The hostel mirrored this culture and us kids had a blast playing the games of the season, including cricket and football matches against the “chokras”, an extremely derogative term to describe the children of the help, but one that was used with no feeling of superiority or paternalism and where our team also included Eril, the meat man’s son! Ranks may have mattered to our fathers but it certainly did not to us! Of course, we never really tested the limits of tolerance by, say, inviting Eril home for a meal but I can say with a hand on my heart that I would have been fine with it. And I can remember spending hours with our ever-smiling local mechanic Shamim chatting about god-knows-what simply as people who knew each other!
So, how did my family contribute to my liberalism? I must admit that this is an area that is still a bit grey. My father was a fauji as I said and so there was some secularism built into him, despite being a Tambrahm. He was a strict and righteous man and I can trace a lot of my sense of righteousness – which I believe is a huge contributor to my liberalism – to him. He was an intuitive liberal I believe when it came to issues like gender and my mother studied and became a teacher once us 3 kids were old enough to fend for ourselves. My mother, who is now steeped into Hindu scriptures and is quite conservative – she still doesn’t allow meat into the kitchen – clearly didn’t interfere with choice of friends or my reading or anything that moulded me. Though she was not exactly in seventh heaven when I announced that I was going to marry someone who was neither Tam nor Brahm, she very quickly adjusted to that reality and, to the best of my knowledge, was fine with it.
My brother Sriram put it very well when he said our parents created a space for our minds to wander and explore and we seized the opportunity. Can I say that about myself as a parent? And more importantly, at a time which is poisoned (my bias is clearly showing) by growing intolerance, is creating the space to wander and explore enough?