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Yesterday I was talking about Pandit Nehru and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
When I was in school, my Father told me that Nehru was a prolific writer and wrote about 200 letters from his prison to his kid daughter and they were published as Glimpses of World History (I bought and read large parts of this 1000-page book 40 years later).
This story fascinated me no end and I asked the name of this darling daughter. And when he said "Indira Priyadarshini" it was a moment of romance to me...I was into my teens just then.
And Father told me that the name of this daughter became Indira Gandhi after her marriage. And I at once concluded that she must have married one of Gandhijee's sons. And my joy knew no bounds.
A couple of years later, when I went to live with my Shakespeare Uncle for my college studies, I learned that this particular Gandhi was no kin of the Mahatma and that rumors had it that he was Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi born as Feroze Khan, a muslim. And he was in the news as the parliamentarian who troubled Nehrujee most by unearthing various scams in his Congress Govt. And that his marriage to Indira Priyadarshini was a 'love marriage' not appreciated much by Nehrujee, and it was not altogether a sublime one.
These tidbits were a great disillusionment to me...early teens are like that.
During my time kids in AP used to be named for various illustrious Indians...the Freedom Spirit. We had schoolmates with names like Nakka (fox) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Enugu (elephant) Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Chinta (tamarind) Gopalakrishna Gokhale et al. And the kids were rather proud of their names.
I wonder if anyone in AP nowadays gets named as Vepa (neem) Atal Behari Vajpayee, or, Munagala (drumsticks) Narendra Modi. Yes, there is still a possibility that kids in the new state carved out of AP may be named Gurram (horse...my surname) Sonia Gandhi...
Coming to Pundits, there was no innuendo about them during my childhood. Later on the term acquired the nuance of one who is learned but not very wise. Like Panditya (learning) is different than Gnana (wisdom). I am told that this negativity on Pundits is prevalent in the UK even now...they are called Talking Heads, on TV:
And asked them to tell me the meaning of this verse.
They looked at one another and slipped away in no time...one by one.
There is this cute story about how brahmins (like me) ought to behave:
Once Sage Naarada (a brahmin on his fathers'side) wanted to visit King Janaka of Mithila. Janaka was by then such an illumined soul, having been taught by sages like Ashtaavakra and Yaagnyavalkya, that his wisdom percolated to his subjects.
On the outskirts of Mithila, Naarada felt exhausted and wanted to take rest under a banyan tree. And he was readying to lie down and drowse, using his elbow as the pillow.
And a dozen odd maids of Mithila were on their way to the rivulet to fetch water in their pails. And one of them laughed on seeing Naarada and said to her friends:
"Look, this chap is dressed as a brahmin but can't sleep without the comfort of a pillow!"
On overhearing this remark, Naarada felt rebuked, and removed his elbow from under his head.
Upon which the other maid laughed aloud said:
"This guy pretending to be a brahmin not only needs comforts but has an ego too!"
Upon which Naarada felt so dressed down by Mithila's maids that he got up and retreated, abandoning his proposed visit to their King Janaka...
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Yesterday I was talking about Pandit Nehru and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
When I was in school, my Father told me that Nehru was a prolific writer and wrote about 200 letters from his prison to his kid daughter and they were published as Glimpses of World History (I bought and read large parts of this 1000-page book 40 years later).
This story fascinated me no end and I asked the name of this darling daughter. And when he said "Indira Priyadarshini" it was a moment of romance to me...I was into my teens just then.
And Father told me that the name of this daughter became Indira Gandhi after her marriage. And I at once concluded that she must have married one of Gandhijee's sons. And my joy knew no bounds.
A couple of years later, when I went to live with my Shakespeare Uncle for my college studies, I learned that this particular Gandhi was no kin of the Mahatma and that rumors had it that he was Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi born as Feroze Khan, a muslim. And he was in the news as the parliamentarian who troubled Nehrujee most by unearthing various scams in his Congress Govt. And that his marriage to Indira Priyadarshini was a 'love marriage' not appreciated much by Nehrujee, and it was not altogether a sublime one.
These tidbits were a great disillusionment to me...early teens are like that.
During my time kids in AP used to be named for various illustrious Indians...the Freedom Spirit. We had schoolmates with names like Nakka (fox) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Enugu (elephant) Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Chinta (tamarind) Gopalakrishna Gokhale et al. And the kids were rather proud of their names.
I wonder if anyone in AP nowadays gets named as Vepa (neem) Atal Behari Vajpayee, or, Munagala (drumsticks) Narendra Modi. Yes, there is still a possibility that kids in the new state carved out of AP may be named Gurram (horse...my surname) Sonia Gandhi...
Coming to Pundits, there was no innuendo about them during my childhood. Later on the term acquired the nuance of one who is learned but not very wise. Like Panditya (learning) is different than Gnana (wisdom). I am told that this negativity on Pundits is prevalent in the UK even now...they are called Talking Heads, on TV:
"...In a BBC television interview following the murder of John Lennon, former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson insisted that in selecting the Beatles for the Order of the British Empire, a British honour, he was acting on his belief that the pop group
was doing something new that 'the pundits' (by which he presumably
meant people such as newspaper music critics) had not recognised. This
derogatory use of the word is an indication of the low esteem in which
commentators (particularly cultural commentators) are held in Britain
(particularly by politicians)..."
...wiki
There is no such derogatory nuance in the Gita at least. We have the line:
Gataasun agataasuncha naanusochanti pundita:
meaning:
The wise don't grieve for the dead or the living
Again:
Shuni chaiva shwapaakesha pundtaa: samadarshina:
meaning:
The wise look upon the dog and its eater as equals
(in creation)
I never had any formal training in Sanskrit. But, in the words of Supratim in a different context, I find Sanskrit verses 'strangely uplifting'.
I had two (and only two occasions) to use my feeble Punditry to silence professional brahmins...'well-fed' in the cute phrase of KK:
1. In the spring of 1981, I was forlorn at KGP. My wife had been long away at her mom's place in Jalgaon, a 1000 km away, for her delivery. And I had only a brief look at my newborn son. And was pining for them. There were no telephones at KGP then and letters used to take a month on their round trip...my wife was too busy with her infant son to write.
So I took up, as a pastime, the task of transcribing select verses from the Principal Upanishads of S. Radhakrishnan's 1000 page tome into Telugu script for my future reading. I bought a 100-page bound note book for the task...it got filled up in those 5 months of waiting till my 'family' joined me at KGP (the book is still with me in a well-worn condition).
One noon during those months, there was a knock on my door and I found 4 bare-torsoed Telugu brahmins who introduced themselves as pundits hailing from the Godavari District of AP, famous for its punditry. They flaunted their sacred threads and chotis and were looking rather forbidding.
I asked them what I could do for them. And they replied that they were on their pilgrimage to Kashi and were collecting funds for the trip from devout brahmins of the campus. I wanted to get back to my frugal lunch and so I gave their leader one Rs 10 note ( = Rs 1000 now in my reckoning). But they were not pleased and asked for more.
I then brought out the note book I was writing in and opened its first page and told them that I would give them Rs 100 if they could explain to me the meaning of the first verse of the first Upanishad, the Ishopanishad.
They looked at it, looked at one another and retreated like Tom confronted by Spike, the dog in Tom & Jerry.
This verse was special. I had read that Maharshi Debendranath Tagore (father of Rabindranath) was one day fed up with the competing tasks of looking after his vast estates, and his religious leanings. And was walking to the river Ganges (Hooghly) to drown himself and end it all.
And then there was a brisk breeze and a wayside piece of paper used up as cover for singaras flew up and got entangled with his chest. And, reading the paper, he found in it the first verse from the Ishopanishad:
Ishaavasyamidam sarvam yatkincha jagatyam jagat
Tena tyaktena bhunjeetha maa gridha: kasyavid dhanam
And he returned home and took up the study of Upanishads...and inculcated fondness for them in his kid-son Rabindranath.
Dr Chitnis, a visiting professor at IIT KGP, once told me that Tagore's Gitanjali was influenced by the Upanishadic thought.
Gandhi (the Mahatma, who said: "Mother Earth has enough to satisfy everyone's need but not everyone's greed") was also influenced by this particular verse quoted above:
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi thought so highly of this text that he remarked, "If all the Upanishads
and all the other scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to
ashes, and if only the first verse in the Ishopanishad were left in the
memory of the Hindus, Hinduism would live for ever."
...wiki
2. About 4 years ago we were renting in an Apartment Complex near Banjara Hills, a walking distance to my son's office. And I was told that there was this regular business of 4 brahmin pundits in their professional attire walking in and knocking on the doors of the residents and soliciting custom for their living, viz. performing various types of pujas and blessing the devotees. At first the residents were happy (Hyderabadis are a religious lot, seeking various impossible favors from their gods and goddesses).
But after a couple of months this flock of pundits became an intrusive nuisance and instructions were given to the watchman (who was no brahmin) to not allow these holies into the Complex.
And one day when I was going out, there stood these 4 hefty brahmins on the outside of our main gate confronting our puny watchman (rendered punier by constant intake of ethyl spirits) on the inside. And the 4 brah-goons were trying to elbow the watchman out and push themselves in. And I was no Bheem either.
So I chided them that they were not behaving like brahmins; and they asked me how. And I recited this shlok from the Shanti Parv of Vyasa Mahabharat (quoted as a footnote in my copy of the Gita):
Enakenachid aachanyo enakenachid aashita:
Yatra kvachana shyayi syaaththam devaa: brahmanam vidu:
They looked at one another and slipped away in no time...one by one.
There is this cute story about how brahmins (like me) ought to behave:
Once Sage Naarada (a brahmin on his fathers'side) wanted to visit King Janaka of Mithila. Janaka was by then such an illumined soul, having been taught by sages like Ashtaavakra and Yaagnyavalkya, that his wisdom percolated to his subjects.
On the outskirts of Mithila, Naarada felt exhausted and wanted to take rest under a banyan tree. And he was readying to lie down and drowse, using his elbow as the pillow.
And a dozen odd maids of Mithila were on their way to the rivulet to fetch water in their pails. And one of them laughed on seeing Naarada and said to her friends:
"Look, this chap is dressed as a brahmin but can't sleep without the comfort of a pillow!"
On overhearing this remark, Naarada felt rebuked, and removed his elbow from under his head.
Upon which the other maid laughed aloud said:
"This guy pretending to be a brahmin not only needs comforts but has an ego too!"
Upon which Naarada felt so dressed down by Mithila's maids that he got up and retreated, abandoning his proposed visit to their King Janaka...
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