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In 1958 when I entered the portals of the Andhra University, Waltair, it hardly had any non-Andhras.
The one exception was Dr. Ila Sen, Reader of English, turned Ila Rao after marrying an Andhra Brahmin colleague. Oh, well, there was Sarojini Naidu anyway, before her!
Her younger brother, Tathagata Sen was our classmate. Fair, spectacled, lisping Telugu words in an alien accent, and reminding me forever of Ukridge. Really funny character. Very jovial. He became one of my close friends...simply because we two were the 'Day Scholars' living in the city and commuting by the University Bus. We used to visit each others' houses. Me living in a two-room humble tenement with two of my sisters studying in Colleges; and he in a sprawling Bungalow named sweetly 'Kunj Kuteer'.
He was the first flesh-and-blood Bengali in my life, that was destined 7 years later to be full of Bengal and Bengalis. Till then all the Bengalis I came across were in books and huge portraits adorning our HM's Office: one with a flowing snow-white beard, another with a saffron gown and a saffron headgear, one more with a prominent head and piercing eyes, another salt-pepper bearded sitting in the weak Lotus Posture lost to this mundane world but with a rainbow halo..etc
Tathagata had problem with his name. The native Telugu teachers were simply unable to pronounce it in their Roll Call: the three t's were pronounced damn hard. They could have just called him: 'T. Sen'; but that would have been escapism: most Telugu names were having at least four initials before their proper names; and to bless him with a lone initial T would be hurting. All of us his 12 classmates knew how his name should be pronounced, but we would only smirk; and the joker Tathagato would only grin. It went on for 5 years!
That reminds me: we had a shy cute girl in our Class named 'Laxmi Tanya'. Her father was a Telugu Communist MLA and mother a seeker of good-old Wealth. Remember there was only CPI then and it swore allegiance to Russia. No Maoists. Our cussed Telugu teachers figured that it was a typo and used to call her 'Laxmi Tanaya' of all things! She was too shy to protest and had to swallow. I don't know if there is any Tanaya (daughter) of Goddess Laxmi; but it is none of my business!
This reminds me: Tathagato is Buddha right! I am sorry for Buddha. He was the founder of a major religion born and brought up here but his religion came to be exiled. This is the problem all other religions face with the non-prophet Hindu thing. Hinduism is truly devious. It has no Ten-Commandments, no Eight-Fold way, no Guru-Grandh, no nothing enforced on it; Advani or Sushmani! Hindus are not meant to be made in the image of their Gods, nor are His Servants, nor His sword-wielding Warriors. They have taken all possible trouble to invent their Gods in as many non-human figures as they could fancy, so that they are not bound to be in their images. Four or Eight hands, three or a thousand eyes, four or five or even ten heads, or just Holy Phallus; name it and you have it. Edwin Taylor called them Cartoon Characters.I asked him what is the shape of his God. He was nonplussed and speechless. All that the Holy Bible allows is that someone somewhere has seen a glimpse of His feet (am I right?) or as a Bush Fire. Well, since their Gods are unlike them, Hindus are free to be mere humans with all their weaknesses. Indeed they transplanted all their human weaknesses onto their Gods: they are married, lecherous, drunkards, debauchees, pot-addicts; name a vice and you have it in one or more of their Gods.
Free for all!
As I was saying, I am sorry for Buddha. But we are too devious to let him vanish and go East, where they eat snakes, frogs and cats although we imagine Buddha is synonymous with Ahimsa. We revel in Buddhist names, statues, relics etc without following the Eight-Fold Way. One Buddha is currently the CM of WB. One Maya is the CM of UP. The one smokes and swears by atheism as his Party-Religion, while the other revels in Currency Garlands and life-size statues of not Buddha, but herself and her mentor. Oh, well they too have imbibed Hinduism's Laissez-faire!
Sometime in the early half of the last Century, archaeologists dug out a huge Buddhist site in a Hill in AP called Nagarjuna Konda. That's it! All politicians went wild that Buddhism is not the sole Intellectual Property of our Bihar, Bengal and Orissa. We too have to have a slice of that cake.
So, the Founding Fathers of Andhra University named all their Hostel Buildings in exotic names: Siddhardha, Harsha Vardhana, Vinaya Vihara, Viveka Vinyasa, Asoka and what not. The Film-actor- turned politician NTR took upon himself the popularization of Buddhism as almost a State Religion, just to be different from the Cow and Calf and Bullock-Cart Congress-wallahs. He took to wearing saffron robes all the time. He commanded (like Kubla in Xenadu) that the tallest and heaviest bronze Buddha Statue be foundried. And installed right in the middle of the sprawling Hussain Sagar Lake in the heart of Hyderabad. The curse of Nizam's must have been on him. The weird statue toppled and fell sideways and half-drowned in the placid lake. It took quite a few years to fork-lift it and engineer its re-installation. But I guess by then he was on his way to lose his job following family disputes and intrigues reminiscent of the Mughals....an apt ending to the usurper of the Nizam-Buddha Culture!
If you happen to be born an ass, don't stripe yourself like a zebra.
I have so digressed from the theme of this blog that I have to call it: Part I
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