Zeal & Zealotry

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By now it must be clear that I am a crazy old coot:


Proof: Shamik from Lyon, France, writes:

"I keep a count of the days in a year that have gone by from your blog post number."

gps: Just now I toted it up and got 218 for the number of days that have gone by in 2012 so far...but the blogpost number shows 224...so I must have more than made up...that, for sure, is ZEAL!

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They say, "Child is the father of man"

When I was seven years old and a meter tall, my Father got his promotion as HM and was posted for a year to Kurichedu, a village far far away from civilization in an arid tract of land...the Government then (as now) believed in ordeal by fire. About four miles away from Kurichedu there was a famous kali temple in an even more miserable place called Potlapadu that could be reached only by a double-bullock-cart track. One morning a party consisting of our family and neighbors decided to visit the temple; women and infants in the cart and men walking by. And I was invited by my Father to join the walkers, now that I was no more a 'woman or babe'. And I took up the challenge and completed the walk triumphantly. And we returned next morning.

A few days later, late one evening, I suddenly had this 'idea' of re-visiting the kali temple by walk. And without telling anyone I started walking. And as I reached the outskirts of Kurichedu, it was getting dark but I didn't bother. I then saw a group of five or six high school students strolling along the village tank bund. They saw me and stopped, recognizing me as their HM's kid-son. And asked:

"Where are you going?"

"To Potlapadu"

"Why?"

"To visit the kali temple"

Before I could take any more steps, the tallest guy of the lot lifted me up, my legs astride his neck, and the whole group started walking back to our home ceremonially much to the clapping and merriment of bystanders of both sexes along the Main Road. And reached me at their HM's place and dumped me and fled...

I was reminded of this childish bravado of mine a good 40 years later. Russi Mody was then the Chairman, BOG, IIT KGP, as well as the top boss of Tata Steel. To earn back the goodwill of his employees at IIT (many of whom he had suspended), he instituted a 'silver jubilee memento' for such folks as I who completed 25 glorious years of service. It was a Titan watch of the Tata Group. And we were asked to assemble at the Netaji Auditorium and receive the gift from the very hands of our Director, one  by one, without jumping the queue and coming to blows. As I said many times, I am a mild claustrophobic and generally avoided such functions and took my degree etc in absentia later. But I learned that the Director was on leave that day and the DD, Professor M N Faruqi, was doing the honors. Since MNF was one of us (he was a B Tech from KGP) and much admired, I went there and took my gift-box in person and returned home. And opened it and found it was a Day-Date thing which was completely new to me. The watch I then had on my wrist was a second-hand tiny Favre-Leuba of 30 years vintage and still going strong. It had a knob which when you pulled out let you turn its hands. 

And so, I pulled the knob of my brand new Titan and started turning it. The hands turned alright, but the day and date were not matching the present data...if the date got matched, the day wouldn't, and vice versa. And I went on turning it and turning it and noticed that they had Days written in French too...for a while. And my dear wife was pestering me to stop it and come down for lunch...which I didn't. At about six in the evening, after a good six hours of trial and ghastly error, I ultimately gave up and took it to Misal Watch Co at the Tech Market and the young one there adjusted the day-date-time in 30 seconds flat....

Don't think I am alone in this glorious business of obstinate foolhardiness.

There is this Purohit, MKS, in my village whom I saw as a lad. His father was as strict a brahmin as they came half a century ago. And he trained his son meticulously in his family business. MKS was precocious and quickly learned the sanskrit mumbo-jumbo required for all events...from namakaranam, upanayanam, marriage to funeral...womb to tomb. And his name and fame spread by and by. His father who never left our village never ate anywhere anything other than food prepared in his home by his mother or wife or himself, saying that this strict observance keeps the body, mind and tongue shipshape. And MKS inherited this code of honor to the letter from his father.

So, whenever he was invited for performing rituals, MKS wouldn't touch food prepared by the cooks since it was 'impure'. And however late it was, he would return home and eat home-made food. But his fame spread so far and wide that he was once invited to Hyderabad city, 500 km away, for performing the marriage of a wealthy family. And MKS kept his vow and didn't eat anything at all during the ceremony. And the folks here were so much charmed by him and his purity that he was asked to continue for a couple more days and perform a couple more pujas like Satyanarayan Vrat, Griha Pravesh etc during the next couple of days. And his well-wishers urged him to break his vow and eat something like bananas or curd, but he steadfastly refused.

The story goes that on the fourth night, he slyly visited the famed roadside stalls selling hot hot mirchi-bhaja and devoured a dozen or more of them...and landed in the Govt Hospital where he had to stay for a week...eating the equally famed Hyderabad Govt Hospital Food...

Talking of zeal, I am reminded of this lovely passage from RKN:

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"What I suffered in the class as a non-Christian was nothing compared to what a Christian missionary suffered when he came to preach at our street corner. If Christian salvation came out of suffering, here was one who must have attained it. A European missionary with a long beard, escorted by a group of Indian converts carrying violins and harmoniums, would station himself modestly at the junction between Vellala Street and Purasawalkam High Road. A gentle concert would begin unobtrusively. A few onlookers stopped by, the priest nodded to everyone in a friendly manner, casting a genial look around, while the musicians rendered a full-throated Biblical hymn over the babble of the street, with its hawkers' cries and the jutka-drivers' urging of their lean horses. Urchins sat down in the front row on the ground, and all sorts of men and women assembled. When the preacher was satisfied that he had gathered a good audience, he made a sign to the musicians to stop. His speech, breaking into the abrupt silence that ensued, was delivered in an absolutely literary Tamil, stiff and formal, culled out of a dictionary, as far from normal speech as it could be. It was obvious that he had taken a lot of trouble to learn the local language so that he could communicate his message to the heathen masses successfully. But Tamil is a tongue-twister and a demanding language even for Indians from other provinces, the difficulty being that the phonetic value and the orhthography are different, and it cannot be successfully uttered by mere learning; it has to be inherited by the ear. I am saying this to explain why the preacher was at first listened to with apparent attention, without any mishap to him. This seemed to encourage him to go on with greater fervour, flourishing his arms and raising his tone to a delirious pitch, his phrases punctuated with "Amen" from his followers.

Suddenly the audience woke up to the fact that the preacher was addressing them as "sinners" ("Pavigal" in Tamil) and that he was calling our gods names. He was suggesting that they fling all the stone gods into the moss-covered green tanks in our temples, repent their sins, and seek baptism. For God would forgive all sinners and the Son of God would take on the load of their sins. When the public realized what he was saying, pandemonium broke out. People shouted, commanded him to shut up, moved in on his followers -- who fled to save their limbs and instruments. The audience now rained mud and stone on the preacher and smothered him under bundles of wet green grass. Actually, every evening a temporary grass market sprang upon his piece of ground for the benefit of jutka-drivers, and all through the evening hot exchanges went on over the price of each bundle, the grass-selling women shrieking at their customers and trying to match their ribaldry while transacting business. It was impolitic of the preacher to have chosen this spot, but he had his own reasons apparently. Now people snatched up handfuls of grass and flung them on him, but his voice went on unceasingly through all this travail; lamps lit up by his assistants earlier were snatched away and smashed. The preacher, bedraggled and almost camouflaged with damp grass and water, went through his programme to the last minute as scheduled. Then he suddenly disappeared in the night. One would have thought that the man would never come again. But he did, exactly on the same day a week hence, at the next street corner."   

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gps: Whenever I read this charming description of missionary zeal, I always wonder what happened to our RKN's roadside preacher...like Holden Caulfield wondered what happened to the ducks in winter when the lake froze.

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