THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ABSOLUTIST

CONTENTS

 

1.  My Earliest Memories  1
2.  Trinity College, Kandy  12
3.  Adolescent Ideals and Hero Worship  24  
4.  Glimpses of Guruhood  37
5.  Academic Life in Colonial Style  48
6.  Sex and Ideals  59
7.  The Tao and My Destiny  68
8.  Finding my Svadharma  77
9.  Ultimate Surrender to the Guru  90
10. Trials of Discipleship  100
11. Weaning from Relativism  112
12. From Home to Homelessness  121
13. The Birth of the Gurukula  129
14. Fernhill: The Hard Years  139
15. A Hungry Man's "Love Affair"  151
16. Reaffirming My Svadharma  163
17. Passage to Europe  175
18. Chance Brings Me To Geneva  185
19. The Criminal Conscience of an Honest Man  192  
20. I Settle in a Swiss Lakeside School  199  
21. Walking the Corridors of the University  211  
22. In Europe Between the Wars  219  
23. Holidays on the Continent  227  
24. European Winter Tours  235  
25. The Close of my First Chapter in Europe  243  
26. Homecoming and After  254  
27. Adventures in Job-Hunting  263  
28. Chequered Patterns of Indifferent Fortune  275  
29. Occupational Vacuity Gets Filled  285  
30. The End of the Second World War and After  294  
31. Geneva Once More  301  
32. Atlantic Crossing And After  311
33. After the World Conference of Religions at New York  321
34. I Make up for My Neglected Education  331
35. Second Visits to Europe and America before Returning to India  341
36. I Return to India to be Recognized as a Guru  351
37. The Guru Centenary Coincides with My Sixtieth Birthday  361
38. Dialectical Dragons and Near Murder  367
39. Wanderings and Encounters with Providence  373
40. A Holiday Cruise to Europe  381
41. Art Reflections and Happy Hobos  388
42. European Contacts Old and New  399
43. Searching for a Gurukula in the South of France  407
44. Summer Dreams in Italy  418
45. Eventful Escapades Across Europe  428
46. In Good Old England Again  439
47. Rare Gifts From the Tao  448
48. In India Again  459
49. The Magnum Opus and Call of the Island  468
50. Festivals and Forewarnings  474
51. Autumnal Depressions and After  480
52. Hospital Life Without Tears  486
53. Still to Turn the Corner  494
54. Turning to the Prospective  504
55. Bolder Flights into the Unknown  512
56. Prophets, Idols and Hippies  520
57. The Role of Protolinguism in Unifying Science  534
58. More thoughts on Hippiedom  544
59. Intimate Meditations  548
60. A Visit to Moscow  556
61. Time and Spring Time in Belgium  564
62. Contacts with Hippies and Highbrows  572
63. Hippie Adventures in England  580
64. Iceland, the Nordic Paradise  589
65. At the New Jersey Gurukula  598
66. With Professors and Drop-outs in Chicago  605
67. The Benares of the Drop-outs  612
68. Trips in Inner and Outer Space  620
69. Californian Midsummer Orgy  628
70. Strange Meetings in Honolulu  634
71. Crossing the Date Line  641
72. Globe-circling  648
73. Busy Days in Malaysia 652  
74. Midnight Cheese and other Problems  658                 
75. Problems Solved and Unsolved  664                      
76. Mysticism and Travel Twilights  670                         
77. Two kinds of Resources and Initiatives  676

EPILOGUE  681

INDEX  687


PRELUDE

WHY I WRITE THIS BOOK  
Nothing is so precious to one as one's own self and no one else can judge it better than oneself, provided one is truthful and fair. Essential human nature is the same in all, and to reveal it without damage to its intrinsic dignity is, or ought to be, the legitimate aim of all biographies, especially autobiographies. The latter can take the form of confessions and may fall into the error of revealing more than what is consistent with the nobility and dignity of human nature by under- or over-estimation. When others write a biography, the personal Boswell-Johnson intimacy counts, so that commercial banalities and distortions may be avoided. There are aspects in one's private life that one would rather speak of for oneself than trust such matters of importance and delicacy to others who might, often by misplaced admiration, damage the values involved. There are sidelights that one could throw on many seemingly insignificant subjects which one can treat better when one tells his own story than in the form of formal essays or articles, by way of anecdotes or intimate incidental remarks casually made in relation to the living experience of oneself in life.

Although reminiscent moods, except when they refer to a clear spiritual content, are detrimental to the course of life of an absolutist speaker of truth - all memories being forms of regret - I have long nourished the idea of writing my own story so as to save my disciples the trouble of interpreting me. I see signs already of some disciples about to take up their pens for the purpose, and one of them, as Editor of Values at present, actually prompts me in telling my story, merely saying, 'We disciples really won't find anything more interesting than that'. These are some of the remarks and excuses with which I wish to kick off the ball, as it were, as Robinson Crusoe did, simply by the sentence, 'I was born in the city of Bangalore in the month of February in the year 1895'.

 

Bangalore in the 1890s.

The long reign of the good Queen Victoria had not ended; and India had lived through the days of the mutiny against foreign domination for about four decades already; and the memories of the Delhi Durbar of the early seventies were ushering in a period of very settled rule that prevailed in the country, punctuated later by the second Delhi Durbar of 1911.

Mysore itself, of which Bangalore was the de facto capital, was ruled by an Indian Maharajah, although under the paramount power of the British. With its clean roads and attractive avenues, flower gardens and elevation on a plateau almost three thousand feet above sea level, Bangalore City had many features not shared by many other similar cities in India.

February mornings could be quite chilly and August mists could still hide the faces of passers-by on the same road on certain misty mornings. Vasanta is the name in Sanskrit for the season when spring meets summer, when nature abounds in flowers and the messenger of the season, the Vasantaduta (the Indian Cuckoo) plays hide and seek among the tall trees of the countryside with its long-drawn and modulated musical note, giving that Kalidasa touch to the lazy hours of the noontide. The generosity of the fruit season attracts plumed and other visitors including monkeys from neighbouring parts. It is true that rainfall is sparse and the village tanks are parched for many months; but welcome rains bring out the hut-dwellers with their ploughs, season after season, eagerly blessing the Rain-Giver, themselves being blessed in turn. There is the kite-flying season too, when grownups forget to be serious and join the urchins of the village in high spirits when the high winds prevail. Dust-storms and whirlwinds sometimes on very dry days drag their ghostly trail, crossing the parched grassy plains. Bamboos can catch fire and spread circling smoke on the hillsides. The bats clustering on hoary banyan trees near the village wells and the kites flying high reveal the jungle India that Kipling's Mowgli knew well. A deer or two might leap across the field of vision and be gone in a trice while elephants could also not uncommonly be sighted in their unconcerned majesty round this countryside. The tiger and the peacock too added glory or a note of fear in thick forests, with stripes or spots. What particular planetary or natural forces conspired to make me born, as I was, in the middle of February in such surroundings, I do not hope to know in any wakefully precise terms. Just as the rainbow is a marginal effect, a sort of epi-phenomenon, forces from the farthest corners of the cosmos must have come to a sort of focal point in me to vivify my being and make me grow as a local fixed entity, both as a lump of protoplasm and a bit of consciousness.


1

CHAPTER ONE

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES
From the date of my birth to 1898, about three years, I have no memories of my life at all. I did hear, and took for true, that I had a father who was said to be in England and that I was born in the lunatic asylum quarters where he had medical charge under the Mysore Government before he went abroad. The great plague that carried away hundreds of thousands of lives in the Bombay and Mysore areas needed qualified doctors and, having bravely served in fighting the scourge in the thick of the epidemic at the risk of his own life, when hundreds were dying round him, he was selected for higher medical bacteriological specialisation and studies in tropical diseases generally, which he completed in a couple of years at Cambridge; at the Pasteur Institute in Paris; and in Lille and Rome.

When he returned the plague had not yet abated taking its abnormal toll of human life. One English doctor died of it while engaged in inoculating - a hero not of war but of peacetime. During the years of oblivion in which I must take it that I was living, I must have travelled to Trivandrum where, near the sand-dunes washed by the Arabian sea, on a bit of land which divided the dunes from the paddy-fields and coconut groves, the humble homestead stood where a delicate and fair young woman, who was to give birth to me, had passed her days with her parents and four brothers as the second-born. She had a complete Sanskrit education together with her elder brother who later became famous as a poet and playwright, having himself often acted in his own plays. He died early and the news reached Bangalore sometime during the years of the oblivion of my own earliest childhood years. It was thus to a house of mourning that I had come during the years that my father was abroad and when my psychological self began to prevail over the physical aspect of itself - I began, as it were, to sit up and take notice. The buffaloes, the ducks that swam in the puddles and swamps and the white paddy-birds which took wing suddenly as men passed with palm-leaf umbrellas along the banked-up boundaries; the minnows in the streamlets that fed the paddy-fields from the pond; the water-lilies, and hotter days which were more humid than in my birthplace in the Deccan - all go to complete the picture of my world of childhood.

2
Malabar, where humans flourished and multiplied more easily on rice, fish and coconut, presented a different picture to me about the age of three or four. I began to attend a vernacular school with my sister. It was a one-teacher affair in a palm-leaf shed, where twenty or thirty of us wrote letters in the sand with our index fingers and said them aloud so as to fix them firmly in the mind both by impression as well as expression. Paper was just beginning to be known, but I had my first lessons written for me on a palm-leaf with an iron needle (stylus). We were allowed, during intervals, to search for a special herb with which to make the needle scratches visible by rubbing the juice with charcoal on the palm leaves. Thus it was that my literacy had its start in the ways of a bygone India that we can see no more. The elder boys and girls sat on benches and had a printed book - a rare object in those days - to read from. Going to and coming back from school I had to beware of the leeches that were found in the streamlets that we had to pass in the middle of the paddy-field - sometimes there would be horned buffaloes that had to traverse a narrow lane in the opposite direction. The chameleons were thought by boys to suck human blood from a distance because of their clubbed tongues with which they caught insects. Other fears of childhood were about the vaccinator, newly introduced at that time, who was dreaded by one and all. The cop was not known in the villages at all, and was a mighty man when he actually appeared. There was also a vague rumour about 'man-catchers', who must have been agents supplying indentured labour for the new estates in Ceylon or India - which added to the insecurity of the countryside about which children could only fear without any full understanding. There were also mendicants who carried the mask of the monkey-god, Hanuman, who came round and were employed to frighten children into good ways with their macabre voices and foreboding, besides the usual wandering minstrels, fortune-tellers, snake charmers and acrobats. I did not make much headway in my so-called education, and my familiarity even with the Malayalam alphabet was of a dubious nature indeed when another page in my life was soon turned with the return of my father from his distant travels.

 

Palm leaf book.

 

3
Travancore of those days was synonymous with the farthermost corner of India. Trains were unknown and reached only as far as Ernakulam in the then neighbouring state of Cochin, and one had to go from Trivandrum by heavy postal bullock carts as far as the town of Tinnevelly for two days and nights through robber-infested areas to reach the nearest railway station. Six or seven days had to be passed in canoes with thatch roofs along the backwaters before one reached Ernakulam. One embarked in such house-boats with provisions, propelled as they were sometimes with oars but mostly by punting all the way with bamboo poles. Mat sails were unfurled too, sometimes, when favourable breezes blew - especially when the ten- or twelve-mile-long backwaters of coastal Malabar that intercepted the canals had to be passed. The steamboat came into vogue only a decade or two later, and then it was the talk of all who wondered how it could overtake the country craft and disappear from sight within less than an hour, leaving only its trace of smoke behind for the admiring fishermen to watch in wonder, muttering words about the white man's intelligence.

 

Boats in the Travancore backwaters.

A man who returned after a Western education was still a rare person in those days, and except for one other there was no one heard of who had actually done so. The family house of Dr. Palpu (a contraction of Padmanabhan) - who was no other than my father - had at this time plenty of visitors who came to look at the curios, pictures and gifts he had brought from Victorian England and from the continent of Europe. There was general excitement about everything, and all seemed strange and unbelievable. Top-hats, kid-gloves, binoculars, and serial pictures of famous sights like the Eifel Tower, not omitting the feeding of pigeons near St Mark's Square in Venice and the Vatican in Rome; stereoscopic miniature binoculars with the Houses of Parliament within - all figured side by side with coins and articles of dress as presents for each. I was particularly excited about a box of gold and silver coins which when peeled proved to be bits of chocolate, which no sooner had the women tasted than they spat them out, saying they tasted like moist bran. The general excitement took several days before the wonder was over. In the confusion my Fez cap was gone and the printed silk handkerchief which I had kept on a window, to be able to look at the picture on it in the morning, had been torn and used as wick-cloth at night by some of the servant women of the house.

4   
My own sense of property was not strongly developed at that time and thus I withstood these initial disasters of my life quite stoically. Of the two routes to Bangalore, we chose the bullock-cart route, and two of these carts started from father's house at dusk, carrying the family and some other relations who came half-way to the limits of the State to see the party off. I remember a breach in the railway line somewhere en route and crossing a ferry in large round tubs to continue our journey to Madras and thence to Bangalore.

Queen Victoria's reign ended in 1901. I must have been six years old at that time and I can still well remember hearing the salute of 101 minute guns that were fired in mourning for her death at the Civil and Military Station of Bangalore, where the family had then taken residence. There was a horse which was being fed with gram at that time while I stood at the inner courtyard of the Anglo-Indian style residence, with a portico and drive and a garden of fruits and flowers around. The horse drew a dogcart in which, as Health Officer in the City, my father drove five miles each day to his office at the other end of the City. I had become by now a conscious individual, though not a person in any social sense. I remember too once sitting beside my father with a bugle in my hand as he held the reins and drove through the streets, and my bugle went now and then by way of warning to pedestrians crossing the path. Regular lessons, which were broken off on leaving Trivandrum, were not properly resumed during the days in the Bangalore Cantonment. Some penmanship and spelling of simple English words from the New Orient Primer, which had a rising sun on its cover and the story of Ganga Ram who was a cart driver inside, was my first book. I remember to have thrown away three or four copies of it, dog-eared and torn in my efforts to master their contents, before I could claim even the first step of literacy in English. I preferred to play in the garden under the spreading mango tree where I made a little compound with bricks lying there, and planted French marigolds in rows for trees along the drive with its two gates for entry and exit. This incident is specially interesting because already it contained in germ what became my main hobby in more mature life when building up four or five Gurukulas, which happened to be only a serious-scale replica of what I did in miniature when at play in childhood. This cryptic prototype behaviour pattern persisted through life in a strange and wilful way with me.

5  
Vedanta refers to such archetypal psychophysical tendencies as vasanas, with their persistent patterns of behaviour implied in them in intentional terms. The acorn virtually contains the oak and the child is the father of man - in this sense only.  

MORE REGULAR SCHOOLING BEGINS
There was a new extension of the City of Bangalore to relieve the congestion of the centre of the City where plague had become endemic. In the year 1902 the family moved into a newly-built house in that place which was a suburb which was then just getting built up. The architecture and taste in which the house and the acre of garden were laid out and built were modified adaptations of ancient Indian style to suit middle-class Indians of that time. The light rains allowed for open terraces and there was an inevitable courtyard at the back of the house where the womenfolk could cook or eat or wash clothes away from the public gaze. By no means streamlined or modern, there were gingerbread decorations and multicoloured window panes which did violence to good taste in their own way. It was named Padmalayam, and each shrub and tree in the place was familiar to me and formed part and parcel of the intimate world of childhood days. One can get related with places almost as intimately as with persons. The death of a pet dog can sometimes affect one more keenly than that of relatives. The law of bipolar relationship with persons, places or things - or with ideologies, as in the case of martyrdom in the name of religious values - is so familiar that no experimental proof is called for, as some scientifically minded people might want. Common experience in such matters is a better basis for belief than experiment, whose scope of yielding certitude in matters of human import is much more limited. Examples are as good as experiment when probabilities and possibilities are viewed together and not compartmentally, as departmentalization of knowledge would alone justify.

The familiar Champak tree, which was big enough to support two or three of us at a time on its branches; the favourite mulberry bush; the fountain in which we bathed on hot days; the tennis court rolled and made ready by common effort; the stables and the vegetable garden in which tomatoes grew wild and beans could be raised easily; the grape-vines which attracted a stray monkey visitor - at times a pet and most times a nuisance - afforded much fun that made for a happy childhood.

6    
I was innocent yet of the horrid school bell and - except for a private tutor who would invariably turn up just when the play was most absorbing and who broke into the life now and then with abruptness to take us to task for sums undone and copy-writing forgotten - the earliest years of my life were spent more or less like a long holiday. I was not particularly good at lessons; and grammar, both English and Sanskrit, which I was asked to study, was as difficult for me then as it is even now, as I cannot even today readily tell the difference between a gerund and a verbal noun nor that between atmanepada and parasmaipada, nor why or how the first conjugation was different from the second, although the very first lessons of the very first book of Bhandarkar's Sanskrit Grammar, then in use, began with such distinctions. In fact I ignore them more now than in those days when I would imitate my fellow students and teachers who pretended to know all about them in a rough attitude of collective make-believe. Later, in my thirties, when I went into the syntax of French grammar, I found that there were subtle discrepancies between parts of speech as understood in French and in English.

Latin and Sanskrit interrelations were more complex still. In fact, syntax is a mystery; it is a sort of horizontalized version of pure thought which takes place in verticality within the minds of all men, independently of the language which gives it publicly-accepted form by often arbitrary structure. Until we get a syntax that is common to all languages it could not be said to be conceived scientifically. Arithmetic was no less puzzling because, in making up a bill for groceries bought, I had to abstract the problem from the actual articles to do the sum correctly. The tutor, instead of helping me in the abstraction, tried to place before me samples of the articles involved. All numbers are abstractions which do not belong to the visible world. Empirical intelligence had to be put away before one could be good at sums, but my boyish tendencies dragged me to the visible rather than to the intelligible aspects of the problem. I do not think even now that if I was dull in sums it was wholly my fault as, in the natural order of development of the faculties in the child, the visible precedes the intelligible. Sickly boys, often with bad eyesight, could be seen sometimes to show themselves as prodigies in calculations - which did not prove to be wholly advantageous to them in the long run.

7

TRIALS AND CONFUSIONS OF EARLY SCHOOLING
With little English and less Sanskrit and torn between Malayalam and Kanarese for vernaculars, it was as a mistrusting rebel to the whole show of what passed for education in those days that I entered regular school, located as it was in Tippu Sultan's palace in the old fort of Bangalore City. The building itself was a historical relic which was renovated and adapted in a rough and ready way for the purpose of a lower secondary school under the City Municipality. There was a musty smell in some of the rooms which were ill-ventilated and, with the group of thirty children of about eight or nine years in my class, which was the second year of my primary education, I was confused and lost. The textbooks were ill-adapted. The typical village schoolmasters and the boys, who dressed and behaved in no decently regulated way, lacking accepted standards or methods, made me more confounded still. I just could not enter into the spirit of the situation. All seemed artificial and unreal. An orthodox Sanskrit teacher, who must have passed seventy years, gave us lessons in that language and, besides conjugations and declensions, long poems had to be recited, which I was not ready by previous preparation to do justice to.

As I was the youngest of the class I was also subject to constant bullying and teasing by the other boys. As I had a haircut instead of a tuft on my head, the boys enjoyed pulling my forelocks, calling me a horse. Once when they found that there was in the Reader the story with a picture of the Silly Lamb that got lost in the forest when all the flock returned to their pen, they could not resist the temptation to nickname me by that appellation and, what was more preposterous, two of them went to the extent of calling me aloud by that nickname when I was going for a walk with my mother, and that within her hearing! This last extreme step upset me seriously as the limit and I wanted to have it out with the rude fellows. I promptly went up the steps to the headmaster's room and reported it to him the next morning, but the elderly, turbaned, bespectacled and long-check-coated headmaster genially smiled the matter off, to my great disconcert. I could not understand how he could treat so lightly such a serious matter to me which touched my good repute, but now when I remember that, on becoming myself a headmaster of a high school several decades later, I behaved almost in similar way when a boy came and said that a classmate had called him 'enampechi' (which meant something like Jack-O'Lantern), I advised him to retaliate with another name invented by him. He went away satisfied.

8
Christian morality would not perhaps approve of this; but between the rule of a tooth for a tooth and showing the other cheek there must be gradations which growing children could understandably live through in everyday terms which should be considered normally permissible. The boys were not wholly to blame as I can say now that something in my character too must have justified the nickname conferred on me by fellow students. I can remember that all through my school career I had similar nicknames sticking to me.

When, later in the fourth form, the teacher once spoke of nitrogen as an inert gas, the boys with one voice decided that it applied to me and called me either Inert or by the name of the gas itself which  euphonically resembled my own. Later in the Matriculation Class there was the character of Athelstane in Scott's 'Ivanhoe' as an indifferent and inactive hero whose goodness verged on the silly. This name stuck to me also for some time by common approval of my schoolfellows. When I reflect on it now, although I resented these at the time strongly, I can admit without damage to my self-respect that there was much truth in the innocent and spontaneous judgements. I thank my dear fellow-students of that time, now from this distance of time, for the unconscious compliment that they must have implied. I find that this trait has continued through my life, as I take a backward glance now, and must admit it is a kind of key to my own personality which I can recognize more clearly, now that I am nearing sixty-eight, than when I was in the thick of life's battle just beginning for me. From the second year of primary school to the second year of the lower secondary, which made three years in all, I thus spent my time as a half-dazed, confused and ignorant pupil with perhaps a touch of the innocence implied in the nickname with which my fellow students, with an unerring instinct, honoured me.

 

Trivandrum in 1900.

VICISSITUDES AND UNFAVOURABLE ELEMENTS
The school bell, the recesses, the examinations, promotions or failures; with changes in school between Trivandrum and Bangalore; with different languages as media of instruction; with occasional troubles with fellow-students, one of whom once lost his book and blamed it on me; with the bug-bears of grammar and arithmetic - my early school life was a period of not much directed effort nor of any tangible progress beyond the just average level.

9    
I repeated the first form in the Maharajah's High School in Trivandrum, where I had to recite Malayalam poetry instead of Kanarese, and then again after one year I was admitted into the second form of the secondary stage in St. Joseph's College, Bangalore Cantonment, where both Malayalam and Kanarese could be omitted in favour of Sanskrit for a second language. In Trivandrum as I sat in the first form one of the strange happenings worth recording took place. Occasionally the headmaster entered the class and asked all the Brahmin boys to stand up and gave them each a silver coin as a ceremonial religious gift coming from the government. In the water-shed where thirsty children went during intervals there used to be caste discrimination too, by which the free right to quench their thirst was denied to some boys. In the St. Joseph's High School there was another imported type of caste as distinction as between black and white or mixed boys. Free fights were frequent between the two sections until the authorities separated them. Strange again to say that in one's own country there was unfavourable discrimination in many matters for the native-born subject of the country. It is nothing strange that apartheid persists in South Africa now and fights take place in India because the so-called low castes touch the drinking-water of a village well, as reported even in today's papers. Progress in these matters seems ever marking time. Such discriminations that came to my notice even in early childhood must have had some stultifying and vitiating effect on my general attitude in life. While walking to and from school in Trivandrum I could not help hearing that certain of the roads were reserved for high castes only. These matters did not make me bitter at the time, as I took them mostly for granted. I did not at that time understand fully, as I only realised later, its character as one of the major blemishes that seriously tarnished the fair name of India as a land of inequality between one human and another. True education could not thrive on such a soil.

10

UPPER SECONDARY EDUCATION AT ST. JOSEPH'S.
From the Bull Temple Extension in the City, where we lived, to St. Joseph's College in the Cantonment, the distance was about five miles. The four children of the Municipal Health Officer could be seen to cover the distance, sometimes in a victoria - myself often sitting beside the coachman with the reins and whip in hand. More often it was in a spacious double-bullock cart, which the Health Officer had to use when he had to make his rounds in the outlying districts of Mysore to prevent the plague, that we jolted along. This cart could be stationed like a gypsy caravan on the roadside when breaking journey, but in the City we progressed onward slowly, revising our lessons while seated within, past the toll-gate to the Cantonment area, which was directly under British rule at that time. We passed through the Lal Bagh Gardens, a remnant of a Moghul-style garden started at the time of Tippu, and along the Residency Road and the Convent to St. Joseph's where bearded Fathers of the Society of Jesus from Europe and clean-shaven Brothers of the same Order from England taught the different subjects in their own ways. Sometimes one bearded Father paid a short visit to another in the classroom and it was a sight to see them speaking in French or Italian, shrugging and gesticulating, guttural sounds predominating. French seemed harsh and ugly but I had a different opinion about it and thought it a sweet language when I had more intimate acquaintance with it in later years. When a French-speaking Swiss gentleman once told me that he had heard people speaking Tamil in South India and that it resembled spitting or vomiting, I could understand how the strangeness of a language could be directly responsible for the ugly initial impression it could make, which toned into mellowness as intimacy grew. To understand a tongue well is to like it also. Tamil, when spoken by a genuine Tamilian, could be one of the sweetest languages to hear. The French Father who taught us English History in the fourth form had his own version of English History when it came to the differences between the Pope and Henry VIII. All the boys in the class had to kneel and cross themselves as the midday triple peals of chiming bells came from the adjoining Convent tower or nearby Church steeple. Education here had a better shape than the miscellaneous and confused programme that was obtained in the Municipal school. It conformed at least to one set of definite values, though somewhat limited and dominated by the Catholic context.

11
The continuity of this education, however, was again soon to be interrupted when we were admitted again for one year in the fifth form of the Maharajah's School, Trivandrum; and before I could come to the Matriculation class it was decided that the two brothers should go to Ceylon to appear for the London Matriculation, which was the equivalent of graduation in the matter of admission into professional courses in England, where it was planned to send us for higher studies later on. Another kind of education awaited us in Ceylon.



12

CHAPTER TWO

TRINITY COLLEGE - KANDY
FIRST NOSTALGIC EXPERIENCE
My early schooling in India itself had a miscellaneous character with a multiplicity of media of teaching as between the various regions within which it had to take shape - if it had any shape at all. The transition from this education into a regular English Public School outside India was more abrupt and implied a harder note in the gentle weaning - which the process of education was supposed to be by those who understood its secrets.

It was with a lump in my throat and a mist in my eyes that I saw the ground receding behind as the horse and cart took me to the Bangalore Railway Station after I had said goodbye to all at the house where my early years were spent in security and happiness. I was to cross the seas and go to Ceylon after a few days in Madras to prepare for the life in the Trinity College at Kandy on the Island of Ceylon. As I progressed in the cart, I recognised for the first time that strange feeling within that overwhelms the spirit of man, however brave or mature he might otherwise be, of a certain attachment to one's country. Whether called love of native land or understood in harsher terms as patriotism calling sometimes for sacrifices or penalties - there is deep down in the heart of all some feeling that one must have experienced at one time or another in one's life, which comes under the name of nostalgia which, like its kindred maladies like love-sickness or sea-sickness, is part of the human makeup and given to none of us to escape altogether. One is said to love 'the ashes of his fathers or the temples of his gods' when patriotism gets mixed with religious sentiment, and nationalism can contain a blend of both. To emancipate man gently from the trammels and obligations of the voice of such a 'stern daughter of the voice of God' which can induce even noble minds to suicidal fanaticisms in extreme cases, is perhaps the greatest humanizing influence of a good education. Kalidasa makes Kanva Rishi, in his Sakuntala, describe similar sentiments when he is overwhelmed by thoughts of the impending departure of his adopted daughter, and wonders justly that no one, however detached, could be wholly devoid of such feelings.

 

13  

To be fully human and yet remain above instinctive sentimentality involves a normalization which it is the task of a good education to accomplish.

The cool breeze of Bangalore which waved the trees; the favourite playgrounds, pets and mates; not to mention parents and sisters - were to be left behind for years, and the prospect seemed bleak and colourless as we arrived at Madras among a group of Ceylonese students who were studying medicine in Madras. The vaporous sultry days and listlessness that induced lack of taste for food and disinterested lassitude towards persons had the same nostalgic touch implied, and spoiled all zest in living. Life seemed for a time empty of purpose and thus without any value. Something dear has to regulate life both from inside as well as outside or both. Loneliness and worry from which people suffer could be traced back to varieties of the same nostalgia in a general sense. Much poetry and music too are basically nostalgic in character. Counteracted however much by the opposite sentiment of love of adventure or wanderlust, it was the negative feeling that scored over the positive one while I passed through Madras and, after a short halt with friends, took train for Tuticorin where a good ship of the British India Steam Navigation Company plied on certain weekdays as ferryboat between Colombo and that port.

FIRST CROSSING OF THE SEA
From the world of the backwaters of Malabar to the experience of crossing the sea for a whole night in bad weather was an experience in itself. The contact with ships opened up for me the vista of a mercantile world of which I was innocent till then. If I had not made this contact sufficiently early I would have remained a stranger to a great part of what is interesting in English literature itself. Seafaring and adventure are part and parcel of English life and - bad as I was in respect of sea-legs, and prone to sea-sickness - the first contacts with this world of the civilized West had a strange effect on me. Before embarking we had to stay in a hotel at Tuticorin run by an Indian Christian with a Portuguese name, where we got a room for the night. This was because there was one more day for the ship to sail to Colombo by its schedule, which we did not carefully scrutinize before starting from Madras.

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The only hotel which was available was in a big colonial-style building and was in reality not meant for catering any food that was edible, for it specialized in drinks, for the sale of which the boarding department seemed only an excuse. While we were served next to the dining room with a meal that was only fit for a dog, I could see two Europeans having drinks at the proper dining table. One of them resembled a character in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, or a crook portrayed in Victor Hugo's 'Toilers of the Sea'. His mate was pouring out some drink for him. The man who poured out the drink took only two or three glasses while the other proceeded in geometrical progression and both walked off after an hour or so of drinking. When we were at the pier at ten the next morning there was a drunken sailor lying as if dead on a chest in the hot sun, his face all red and with a dripping from his nose which dropped continually on the ground. I could recognize the same victim of the generosity of the previous scene. I took some time to piece the two pictures together as related through cause and effect and even today the full significance of this peep into 'civilization' that I was given so early in my life remains to be fully elaborated in all its bearings in my mind. My recent reading of Voltaire's Candide has helped me very much in this matter. I am glad to say that the innocence with which I first looked upon that - which surely must had a subtle subconscious effect on me - has not been totally wiped off from my nature, in spite of two visits to America and about four visits to Europe with a duration of stay of about a decade, exposed to what is called 'Western Civilization'.

Life in a medium-sized British ship as it went full steam ahead over the Indian Ocean, where the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal mixed their waters and strange winds winged across the endless expanses of the waters, with league-long wings outstretched in which my soul must have participated through actual contact or by mental representation, put me in a strange mood unfelt before. I looked round the ship's inside and stood on the deck; but before we were many hours away from shore the sun fell and all was dark. The cabin and the closed porthole left a security from Nature in whose arms we rocked, trusting to the intelligence of those who made the ship and to that of the Captain, who must have been sitting at its helm guiding it from rocks and shoals. There was no other go but to trust to these powers. After a dinner served in Western style without rice unless asked for, I tucked myself into the well-made bed with just a foretaste of sea-sickness coming on me.

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While denying it, I had to press my lips together to swallow saliva now and then, as the pitching and rolling developed more and more. Soon sleep, that gentlest of all nurses, came to my consolation and all was effaced for me till the sunlight streamed through the porthole and land was announced to be sighted next morning.

I politely said 'Good Morning' to the fellow passengers and hastened to peep through the porthole - and there was Colombo revealed to view before me as it was in the days before the first World War. Although modern Colombo has lost much of its character of old colonialism with its victorias and rickshaws; and although new streamlined buildings are now seen here and there breaking the monotony of the skyline; the musty smell of Western mercantilism still lingers here, giving to the chief city of the ancient island of Lanka a touch that is not altogether its own. The smell of fish and the waving of coconut palms, with the warm seas and beaches, are not unlike the shores of Malabar - but Colombo is more open to the highways of trade routes, both ancient and modern, and the people represent a timeless civilization in which many currents and cross-currents have made their contribution through the ages. A lighthearted lively people live here side by side with outcrops of deep strata of races bound to the land and a mixture of seafaring adventurers from the Western world who themselves become evident as sub-stratifications, with Burgher, Sinhalese, Tamil and Moor. The harbour with its breakwaters with palm beaches all round; a city with tall hotels and commercial buildings and shrines both Buddhist and Hindu interspersed, where tram-lines and bullock carts crossed or overtook rickshaws, and some cars - that was Colombo of nearly fifty years ago. After staying at Cinnamon Gardens and in the city itself, we soon found our way to Kandy.  

 

Trinity College, Kandy.

TRINITY COLLEGE, KANDY
Nestling in the hilly central part of Ceylon amidst the greenery of the vegetation with its lawns and sumptuous parks is that ancient capital of the Kandyan kings who, like highland clans of the Scottish lake district, once exercised their regime. The sunlit lake that gleamed in the very centre of this pretty hill-station with its neat hotels and the famous Temple of the Sacred Tooth where the relic of Buddha is believed to have been preserved through two millenia or more, gave to this picturesque little town a setting and an atmosphere all its own.

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Round the lake there persist some of the viharas where Buddhist priests, young and old, live by daily rounds of begging as they did at least a thousand years ago. This very depth in time gave a dimension to the setting which few towns elsewhere in the Orient enjoy. The yellow robe clinging gracefully to slim bodies; the shaven head and the begging bowl with the palmyra fan with which the glare of the sun as well as the curiosity of the onlookers might have been meant to be warded off; Buddhist Bhikshus went about here in spite of the vulgar mercantilism that was corroding into the life of this little paradise from the coastal periphery of the island. Adam's Peak, which is the highest point on the central massive crags of Lanka, was associated with Shiva as well as Buddha and drew pilgrims from those of Islamic faith also once a year.

Trinity College, Kandy, was a fully-fledged public school that was started by the Church Missionary Society, not far from the lake and the Temple of the Tooth. It represented the zeal of some Englishmen under the leadership of Rev. A.G. Fraser, the Principal, to combine in one institution what was best in the message of Jesus and what Western civilization had to offer to far-flung parts of the Empire for the glory of that Empire and that of God at the same time. The intentions were perfectly genuine but some of the means and shapes that this zeal took were not altogether free from certain elements that cut at the root of the notion of true civilization in a human and universally valid sense. As H.G. Wells has strikingly revealed in his book called 'The Great Schoolmaster', referring to the life of Sanderson of Oundle, who was a headmaster who fell martyr to the inner conflict implied in the two slogans by which his own school inspired itself which were: to 'love one's neighbour as oneself', and 'Rule Britannia' - the great teacher falling dead when presiding over the School Day, as the author describes while he was a witness. The headmaster was referring to the above conflict in so many words, with some visible emotion. At the core of the double-sided value that his zeal represented there was hiding a conflict which modern education has not even today succeeded in resolving.

When we find that certain church services allow soldiers fully armed to the teeth to offer their prayers of a Sunday in some of the most important churches of capitals such as New Delhi, even now, it is not difficult to see how a sensitive teacher who took his educational role seriously as a life-mission should have paid the ultimate possible penalty in the name of the conflict left unsolved by educationalists even today.

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HARDIHOOD IN THE NAME OF THE LAMB OF GOD
Alison House was a big dormitory in which a hundred students, all boarders, with their master in charge were lodged. I had my bed fixed at the corner of the main entrance to this spacious hall, and had hardly settled down with all my belongings on the very first day of my admission when in the afternoon a cross-country run of four or five miles in drizzling rain was announced by a bell in the dining hall. I had not yet had time to read the notice about this but was roughly ushered out of the hall by the prefects who followed like hounds behind the hares. The whole school was out and the first excuses which I made saying that I was running a temperature were pooh-poohed away by the teacher in charge. My temperature was not unconnected with my state of mind because the travel sickness and homesickness still weighed heavily on my spirit. Bodily and physical indispositions had to be adjusted to the need of the hour and off I went, though reluctantly, following the lead of the six hundred others who went before me. Some prefects and teachers brought up the rear end and we made for the first time the full round of the hillock behind the college. The winding road through thick wood and vistas of fine scenery here and there was called Lady Norton's walk, if I remember right. Wet and tired, we returned to the dormitory just before the evening dinner bell and had very little time to wash and change into dry clothes.

One item on the timetable followed thus after another, making public-school life a busy one caught in the rigid routine of which contemplation or the negative aspects of education got hardly any chance to assert themselves. The harsh game of rugby; the ragging that went on in the dormitories; occasional bullying by big brothers of less tough guys who were at their mercy most of the time; the Latin lessons which were compulsory; the rising bell which had to be obeyed rigorously; the hasty dinners in which - instead of learning polite table manners of 'give and take' - 'first come, first served' conditions prevailed to the detriment of the less assertive younger brothers brought up in gentle ways at home; the lessons that were given by six or seven European teachers direct from Oxford or from Cambridge who had the exacting ways with lessons understood in the European tradition which was mostly beyond the reach of children brought up with other vernaculars than English in other parts of Asia; the debates and speech days with the exams and tests that came quite often; home tasks and vacations - made life in the public school full of outside events meant for making a hardy gentleman as understood on the English soil.

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The far-flung Empire needed talents for domination and administration of people who did not have the gun with them.  They had also to be civilised in another inner sense so as to integrate them into one solid body within which give and take would build up a larger commonwealth for the mutual benefit of all its members. Education for citizenship had to be blended with education for making a moral and spiritual man whose life was at one with the great human family. One needed generosity and gentleness; and the other a certain harsh attitude of the colonial adventurer. The conflict implied in these two ideals treated together has not been faced in educational theory except by Rousseau - but even well-informed Englishmen like H.G. Wells (as he states outright in his World History) considered Rousseau a sentimental hypochondriac whose educational theories were worth nothing.

THE SUNDAY AND THE WEEK DAY DUALITY
Sundays were fully observed as Sabbath days at Trinity College. We brushed our shoes and polished them in advance and were lined up in our Sunday best to be marched off to the school chapel at about ten in the morning. A long church litany with hymns sung and refrains, responses and prayers interspersed, ending with benedictions and a sermon from the pulpit, were all regularly gone through.

On certain Sunday evenings Christianity was presented as a rival religion to that of the Buddha; and then one heard cheap religious propaganda that brought down the dignity of both the great names involved, as they had to be treated as belonging to the cheap competitive level of mere marketable commodities or patent medicines.

The vulgar spirit of the salesman prevailed over any attitude that could be called spiritual. Expert proselytizing techniques were sometimes employed that did little credit to the high subject. Odious comparisons were established to bring discredit to one as against the other. The unjustness of these claims hurt the sensitive souls of many persons, both among the propagandists and those whom these were meant to prejudice in the name of one religious group or the other.

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Duality - which implies one standard of truth or justice for one and another for someone else - always hurts the collective consciousness of man which cannot divide man into any strict compartments of sheep or of goats.

There was another still cruder conflict which tore the soul more drastically, which implied a duality too between the ideals held up on Sundays as against those that were presented on weekdays. The school cadet corps had to carry its rifles and go for its practices of skirmishes and shooting exercises in which the very persons who preached with robes from the pulpit taught, in another uniform, man to kill brother man. There was no philosophy which bridged the gulf between the blatant duality involved here. It is true that even on weekdays there were some minutes devoted before each morning in which reference was made to 'the tremendous personality' of Jesus Christ. Christ was the only saviour of men who could absolve mankind of sins, but to transform the first commandment was normal. There was only one door between two rooms: one that was for sinners and the other for those who were to be saved or were already saved - and Christ kept that door, it was taught. Prophetic religions, as opposed to those in the Orient which pinned their faith as much on values here as well as  hereafter had a certain zeal for the sublime which sometimes made them fall from the heights of sublimity to something so ridiculous that they often left a poor impression on the hearers. Sometimes the effect was the opposite of what was intended, and I can remember that I myself indulged in some anti-Christian talk now and then and secretly read books and pamphlets then distributed from England by the Rationalist Press Association, and avidly read Ingersoll and Spenser, thus representing anti-Christ in my own way, though unconsciously then.  

MUDDLING THROUGH SECONDARY SCHOOL
In spite of the dualisms involved in the education to which I had to submit, the days I spent at the Trinity College were those that made the greatest impression on my personality. The English have a way, as they say themselves, of 'muddling through' situations without much logic or system. The Americans go one step further in the same direction and what they look to is whether something will work or not.

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Between the English and the American methods of education which were coming into vogue at that time, pragmatic ideals in education were sometimes mixed with naturalistic and even negative ones; and the overall aim of making a good citizen for the Empire and a good Christian fit for the Kingdom of God made of the educational programme a hodgepodge through which one had to muddle so as to be licked into some sort of shape. No single educational theory guided education. Unitive education transcending mere paradox was unknown. To love India is not necessarily to hate Pakistan, and this neutral attitude is a patriotism that belongs to the non-relativistic context of the Absolute. Patriotism and Nationalism - just as idolatry or any other closed or static loyalty within a group - have to be given an open and dynamic character by any education worth the name. In the light of such an outlook the education that I received at Trinity College had many drawbacks, but for this reason I cannot generalize and say that it was not good at all. It raked up many problems that burnt within me as doubts which I had to solve for myself, independently of what my teachers taught me in the classroom. Trinity College successfully knocked out of me over-sensitiveness and a general introversion with which I was affected in early adolescence. It put me in touch with a proper English-speaking world, which must have done a lot of good to my language. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'The Tempest', which we were taught in the Junior and Senior Cambridge examinations, were taught by graduates recruited direct from Oxford and Cambridge. This had greater value than what was obtained in India, where a kind of Babu English often replaced the vernacularised substitute sometimes called Pidgin English. There are, however, various kinds of Pidgin English, some peculiar to Ceylon and others to Malaya - each flinging the name at the other with a superior air. Thus the Bengali would readily laugh at the Madrasi while both of them only talked their own jargon. Where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise. Ceylon boys of those days had a high opinion of the progress of Ceylon in what they considered modern developments and were proud that there were electric lights in the chapel and asked me innocently if India had electric lights too. Coming as I did from Mysore State where hydro-electric schemes came into operation quite early in the history of Asia, I could laugh at the ignorance of the boys with real superiority in this matter, though not in all such items.

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The Madras University Matriculation was a hurdle that the best students from Ceylon of those days alone could cross. Although Indians seemed slow in adopting European dress they had an easy walkover in matters where studiousness and intellect counted. I was myself considered only a mediocre student while in the fifth and sixth forms in India. I was allowed to sit in the Junior Cambridge class when first admitted, but when the first terminal examinations were over, I had scored first class, first marks (to my own surprise), even in Mathematics, which was my weakest subject. I received congratulations all round and was conducted to the Senior Cambridge class by the Principal, A.G. Fraser himself, straightaway without further formalities - to the surprise of the whole class. I prepared for the London Matriculation Examination and no more considered myself a dullard. The London Matric needed a good standard of English which I tried to acquire; and in Mathematics and Physics too my efforts were not in vain. The classical subject that I had chosen was Sanskrit, in which I could get no guidance at all; and textbooks like Bhandarkar's series, on which I had to rely, with their Latinized nomenclature side by side with Sanskrit ones, confused me further. The syntax was a bugbear and the Sanskrit names for tenses and the irregular declensions and conjugations had no rival in any language except perhaps German, which I tried a hand at many decades later and gave up in despair. I could translate from Sanskrit into English quite easily, although the reverse exercise was more of an uphill task. When it came to grammatical questions involving rules with a series of exceptions, my patience often gave way. One has to learn a language by actually using it as children do at first, and then enter the intricacies of grammar. If the latter is taken up first, with all brains except the best-gifted for theoretical studies, failure has to be taken to be normal.

BREAK IN STUDIES AND RETURN TO INDIA
After more than two terms done at the Trinity College, in which preparatory work was done in view of the London Matriculation, it was decided that a correspondence course done from the family home at Trivandrum, where the family had moved from Bangalore because of the transfer of the father and other reasons - would be more satisfactory than a public school life with so many diversions.

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Traditional house in Trivandrum.

The Bogambra Green where the boys went for rugger matches and cricket, which figured prominently in the formation of the young gentleman of England, as in Eton or in Harrow, had their exacting demands on health and energy. The humidity of Ceylon told on the health and every time that we played a match, some horse leeches were sure to creep under the stockings and be discovered much later bloated with precious blood that they had silently sucked. To pull them out was bad in that the salivary secretion meant for keeping the blood from coagulating while the leech sucked could not get extracted from the blood and often left a festering sore hard to cure through many weeks. The class lessons did not directly cover the portions required for the examination that was to be taken in one year. At the end of the second term, I therefore returned to Trivandrum and lived in a newly-purchased bungalow overlooking the lake in the public park there, which was duly named 'Park View'. Correspondence lessons from the University Tutorial College, London, came there and thus studies were continued without regular schooling. To master Physics or Chemistry without laboratory work or regular class lessons was not easy work and I did not have sufficient willpower to cope with the demands of the situation.

I loved literature and even secretly indulged in composing poems. First it was a simple poem about a boy who grazed a buffalo on the slopes of Adam's Peak where we happened to go on an excursion. He was called Girbir Gulab, at least in my poem, and with my scanty knowledge of scanning and metre I adopted the iambic tetrameter for the poem that consisted of about twenty-five verses. It told the simple story of the buffalo boy and how he rode on the back of animals while he grazed them in a pastoral paradise. The style of William Wordsworth had influenced me subconsciously. Even previously to this I had tried my hand at a fully-fledged sonnet which described sunrise as seen from Adam's Peak which we had climbed just before my coming to India. I had a big bound notebook with the ambitious title of 'The Complete Poetical Works of P. Natarajan' written in flowery handwriting on its first page. After a few years of this secret hobby which I was hiding away from elders in the house who might have wished me to take to more serious studies, in which many more sonnets and poems accumulated in due course, I consigned this precious volume to the flames, saying to myself that I did not after all want to be a poet. To change one's mind is the privilege of youth characterised by erratic enthusiasms.

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This was the beginning and end of my career as a poet, but exercises with phrase-making and with rhyme have stood me in good stead all my life, although my ambitious poet-hood itself was shut out. Physics and Mathematics demanded my attention but the willpower to master these comparatively dry subjects was not in me. I trudged along, however, as best as I could manage and returned to Trinity College again for a further period of schooling. This time I was not a boarder but stayed in the main street of Kandy with the family of a man from Jaffna of the name of Saravanamuttu, who was a lawyer. In spite of the difference of the actual subjects taught at school and the requirements of the London Matriculation, I was preparing for the examination to be held at the end of the year. I was thrown on my own resources in mastering many items of the programme of studies. In the matter of Sanskrit I had no help at all. No wonder, therefore, that when I sat for the examination and the actual paper in Sanskrit, composed and printed in London, happened to be an elaborate and stiff one, printed in a different script than the one I was familiar with, I failed in that subject, having answered but a few of the questions properly. Rumblings of the war-clouds of the first World War were already beginning to be heard when, after sitting for the examination in Colombo, we sailed back to India. My early education was thus a miscellaneous and amorphous one and left me confused and very little confident about my own powers with many changes and set-backs.



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CHAPTER THREE

ADOLESCENT IDEALS AND HERO WORSHIP
As I pen these lines in mid-October 1962 at the mature age of 68 years I hear again the rumblings of the war clouds as the Indian President, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and Prime Minister Nehru call to the nation to 'gird their loins' for what might culminate in what is being known in history since 1914 as a series of World Wars, of which this is likely to be the third. International wars can implicate the whole world, as interplanetary feuds of the future may jeopardize the universe itself. To think that such contingencies are impossible or altogether improbable is becoming old-fashioned, whether reasonable or not.  

THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WARS
While on the one hand all kinds of absolutisms in thinking are getting discredited in the modern world, on the other side of the picture, necessities are growing into global, wholesale or absolutist proportions calling for total rather than piecemeal solutions. There is thus a lag, gap or hiatus between contingent thought and the necessary aspect of life which can spell disasters, large or small, to humanity. Unless humanity can bridge this dangerous hiatus that is ever widening between thought and action, these World Wars must continue their series, inevitably. Unitive absolutist thinking is the ancient time-honoured solution of the wisdom of the East which is, unfortunately for mankind, getting more and more discredited in the modern context.         

Empiricism; analysis; operationism depending on demonstrability; trial-and-error methods based on probabilities rather than the possible; mechanistic approaches seeking piecemeal rather than wholesale solutions; practicality - of which the Bomb is the supreme example that 'works' with one hundred percent destructive certitude; split-second correctness and speed that would rival the velocity of light itself - such are some of the attitudes implied in the modern outlook. These attitudes are cultivated lopsidedly without the corrective normative goal or value of the absolutist approach.

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Relativism itself can be unconsciously treated as if it belongs to the absolutist context. We are living in times of intellectual decadence, in spite of the rich mine of Wisdom for which the East has been reputed. The echo of the rumblings of the clouds of the First World War seems of feebler negative import than what we are beginning to hear now which might take its place as the Third World War.

PRE-UNIVERSITY 'TEEN YEARS'
From the end of the year 1912 to the eve of the First World War - or more roughly from the Delhi Durbar of 1911 when king George succeeded Edward VIII to the eventful date of 1914 - the world was moving fast towards the great events of the century. The steamship and motor car were beginning to be taken for granted and the Victorian era gave place to the Georgian through the gradations of the Edwardian, when I found myself back in the Civil and Military Station of Bangalore, trying to do my matriculation over again, browbeaten and discouraged by failure in the London Matriculation.

I was about sixteen, yet I can definitely remember the beginnings of a social and political sense (with some touch of sensitiveness to religious values too) marginally awakening in my consciousness. My love of poetry-writing had already asserted itself, and I tried my hand also at drawing and painting when the holidays were long enough for such luxuries. A broken violin in the house afforded me the pastime of music which I was able to produce, though of an indifferent quality, being able by my own efforts to follow kirtans (musical compositions) in accompaniment of any who sang them. I made enlargements of portraits of Swami Vivekananda, Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Gaekwar of Baroda, whose personalities seemed to have begun to have some meaning or significance for me, however indirect.

The cry of 'Vande Mataram', which later became the full-throated political slogan of the people of India thirsting for freedom from foreign domination, was beginning to be raised to the annoyance and irritation of the British whose rule was perhaps at its best - at least for themselves - at this period. Indian students, even of the college classes, at that time were innocent of any sense of political rights, being steeped in tradition and the dreamy idealisms that marked a decadent era.  

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Idealisms were exaggerated beyond all proportion, as seen in the suttee which only recently had been abolished by Lord Bentinck, the rigours of untouchability and the caste system still prevailing. India may be said to have been asleep or still unawakened yet.

I can remember how the sentence of transportation for life pronounced on Lala Lajpat Rai made a deep impression on me. It was hard enough in those days to be a 'moderate' in respect of the natural rights of the people. The brilliant English oratory and eloquence of Surendranath Bannerjee and Bepin Chandra Pal made equally their impression on me side by side with those of Burke, Bradlaugh, Besant and Macaulay. English education itself was the first stimulus for the political interest that awakened in me at this time, and slogans such as 'Taxation without representation is robbery' stuck in my mind tenaciously even in my teens.

As for religious awakening, it was due to the personality of Vivekananda. He was the most interesting hero of my youth, and I could repeat by heart the whole of his Chicago address before the Parliament of Religions even when I was scarcely twelve years old. I used to visit the Ramakrishna Mutt at Basavangudi in Bangalore even before my schooling in Ceylon. I was acquainted with the Bhagavad Gita and could repeat some of the more familiar verses. Again I frequented the Ramakrishna Mutt regularly at Bangalore on my second return to this interesting, clean and park-like city, walking five miles from 'Barne Park' in the High Ground to the Bull Temple extension five miles off to listen to discourses by the Swamis. I had also started social service a little later and used to carry with me to school a box in which I collected coins. When it filled up to some extent I organized a feeding of the indigent to whom I delivered tickets in advance, inviting them to come to an appointed place where they were to be fed.

Side by side with these awakenings to social, political, religious and aesthetic values, I could feel within me the pressures of adolescence which first exerted itself and became evident in a tendency to idealize certain of my schoolfellows. While still in the St. Joseph's College I had my favourite boy, a white-clad Anglo-Indian whom I had mentally idealized and was secretly in love with. This first wave of sentimentality which was of the nature of love at first sight and which acted as it were from a distance telepathically, without my ever talking to the person of my dreams gave way to other waves of adolescent sentimentalism, the second of which was sharper or keener in the arrow wound it inflicted on me than the first one and was this time directed towards a classmate to whom I brought roses from the garden each Saturday when we had morning classes. I remember walking through the August morning mists of Bangalore with the rose in my hand to give to my favourite friend.

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At times also my tendency to idealize friendship of this kind went so far as to make me sit and compose a poem idealizing friendship. Hero-worship too found expression when exaggerated praise and admiration was showered on some teachers who happened to retire or get transferred. Love affairs with girlfriends, so common in the West, especially in the United States where schoolchildren during and before adolescence had each their girl- or boyfriends, did not figure in my life as far as I remember, except in one or two instances in which some such veil passed, as it were, and ruffled the silken sail of adolescent personal preferences for one person or another.

This does not however mean that adolescence in the normal sexual sense was in anyway weak in asserting itself in me. The full force of adolescence in the form of inner pressures and infatuations was true in my case if not more so than usual. Brute sex in most cases did not come into overt evidence because of the tendency to idealize, which seemed to form part of my character even from my earliest years. A prince among dreamers of dreams, imaginative and shy - representation from inside was always more powerful with me than any need for outer adventure in the actual sense. Eroticism in literature and in art, especially in Sanskrit, was a kind of shock-absorber by virtue of which actual outlets for sex were always driven inwards and often sublimated. I can only generalize and say that the stresses and strains of adolescence, generally speaking, were stronger in me than usual but that a rich inner life was able to pulse away the tides of instinct, emotion or passion; and the need for actual sex satisfaction scarcely asserted itself in me as a necessity. I might have to say more on this subject when I come to more more mature youth, when love becomes more real and matter-of-fact.

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EXTRA-CURRICULAR STUDIES AND ACTIVITIES
All education is not derived from schooling. In fact much of it results in spite of even wrong schooling, just as Nature can save patients from the ill-effects of wrong drugs that might often be administered by doctors. The habit of voracious reading that I began to cultivate attained its maximum, both qualitatively and quantitatively, at this period. After books like 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'The Vicar of Wakefield' which I finished early, I was steeped in Scott, Dickens and Thackeray for many months. Although London slang predominated in the writings of Charles Dickens, I devoured the jokes - sometimes understanding them, at least roughly, but more often believing that I did so.

I read one hundred pages a day, which I had heard from fellow schoolmates was the respectable speed of a good reader, although I know one or two of my mates who far exceeded it. Many phrases and expressions must have tumbled into a sort of shape in the subconscious repository, to remain there inarticulate before they could be available to use overtly in speech or writing - in the same way as many cement blocks have to go into the sea before a harbour breakwater can be walled up above the water level. Each type of person has a subconscious capacity which must be different in this respect because I have found that some pass more quickly than others from impression to expression in language. But often what is lost in time is gained in the larger capacity of content, justifying the dictum that the slow is sure. The dull student often makes up at the last round of the race, although starting slowly, and a hare-and-tortoise paradox is often implied here.      

Various forms of indeterminisms, ambivalent polarities, compensating synergic sets, antinomies and dichotomies - enter into the psychophysical or somatic life of individuals to make characterology or type-psychology a very intricate science indeed. All I can say about myself is that I was more of an introvert than an extrovert and that over-sensitiveness and richness of inner 'daivi' rather than 'asuri sampat' (spiritual rather than active endowment) distinguished the type to which I might have been said to belong. Arjuna and Rousseau may be mentioned as instances of this type, which is full of reservations and hesitations, with inhibitive factors stronger than the over-active ones.

Although I read some detective stories and knew all about Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, I soon gave them up in favour of the Three Kings of English Literature whose names I have already mentioned. Not knowing French at that time I did not read that great masterpiece of fiction of all time, 'Les Misèrables' of Victor Hugo, which must have influenced English authors, contemporary or later, to write the novels they did.

29  
Oliver Twist and David Copperfield made a deep impression on me and, after the fat volume of the latter, which I read with great attention and interest, was laid aside after reading it from beginning to end non-stop with absorbing interest, I said to myself that its pages contained a veritable education by themselves. This I felt again in respect of Hugo's great work, 'Les Misèrables', which I read more than a decade later, and which left me with the same feeling of wonder and gratification. A whole lifetime of education could sometimes be contained within the covers of some great books written by kings of literature.

It was at this period again that I was introduced to Shakespeare and Kalidasa. The minute criticisms to which 'Sakuntala' was subjected both by Sanskrit critics and Westerners, and the same for Shakespeare's plays which were beginning to be critically understood, contributed considerably to my intellectual formation of that period. The 'Raghuvamsa' and Milton's 'Paradise Lost' were equally familiar to me, although at that time I could not see behind the latter the classical influence of Greek tragedy which shows the context of the Gods of Olympus or Dionysos through the threadbare Christian context of the 'fruit of the forbidden tree'. Even Shakespeare's King Theseus of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was a mixture of an Athenian and a London background promiscuously mixed up. At that time I could not see this subtle influence, in the light of which much of the originality of these authors became compromised for me at a later period.

Some verses of Sakuntala stuck to my automatic subconscious mechanism so intimately that there were days on end when I repeated one of the grandest verses in it incessantly. It referred to the King who relaxes at midday after a morning's 'mrigayavinoda' consisting of disturbing the peace of the animals of the forest, which has its English counterpart in 'John Peel with his hounds and his horns and his coat so gay in the morning' of the popular ditty. The King, Dushyanta, loosens here his bowstring and then the wild boars are free to drabble their snouts in the quagmire, and the wild water-buffalo can enjoy beating the pond with their horns again and again while drinking too of the limpid waters at will, while the group of frightened deer fixed under the tree-shade can continue to chew their cud in peace. The bow itself, according to the king, was to have a much deserved rest after the tension of the forenoon.

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All nature thus went into another vectorial space, as it were, in its life-aspect. Two worlds were contrasted here which had as it were a 'one-to-one' correspondence, one inner and the other outer, just in the same way as Shakespeare himself envisaged in the subtle technique of the famous knocking at the gate after the midnight murder of Macbeth.

Literature thus began for me to open and leave ajar its portals to let me have just a peep into its secrets. Shakespeare's genius was deep enough for me at that time but the deeper and all-inclusive genius of the scheme of reality kept in mind by Kalidasa was yet to be unravelled in its full glory to me. I was thus fully awakened to the beauties of literature at this period and was able to look for interesting poems or paragraphs anywhere.  

LEADERSHIP COMES TO ME UNSOUGHT
I have already mentioned that I was nicknamed Nitrogen by my dear classmates by way of a sarcasm mixed with attention comparable to the brine on the seashore, bitter and watery at the same time, the product of over-activity of the temperament natural to adolescent youth. Boys of that age can be extremely nasty, though with an undercurrent of generosity. When Ivanhoe was studied in the sixth form as a detailed textbook in English they could not resist in their mischief to nickname me cruelly Athelstane, the lazy unprepared one whose counterparts are the various characters like Caliban in 'The Tempest' and Kumbhakarna in the 'Ramayana' or other Falstaffs or fat boys of literature as in Dickens. Exactly what impression I made on those fellows to draw on to me this kind of calumny I ignore even today. When I know now that the same was waiting for me even in Switzerland where I was a teacher many years later and the boys and girls took all sorts of liberties with me as they do even now wherever I go at sixty-eight, there must be something the keen eye of youth discovered which I could not keep a secret from them.

I could not act seriously and pretend to be firm or rigid, although on the other side some of my college-mates thought I was a very reserved and unsocial student. There must have been something peculiarly complex which eludes analysis, which all the same must have been interesting as even bad qualities could be. I have remained an enigma unto myself.

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It was strange therefore that when the literary union of the High School met for elections and all the higher classes were gathered, I was unanimously elected its general secretary. I never dreamed that such an honour could come to me, but the verdict was wholehearted and serious and I set about devising methods by which I could do justice to the expectations that my comrades placed on me so generously.

Retiring as I was in my ways, I remember that I was also affected by some love of showing off or exhibitionism. I began to part my hair in the middle and took many months to decide the most smart fashionable way of signing my name, and to wear some of the gaudy silk neckties stolen from my father's wardrobe. Even some of the oversize coats that only fitted me roughly were thus dishonestly appropriated. I remember wearing a black coat and stiff collar with a purple silk hand-spun tie to go to the stand which was set apart for the High School students to greet the then Viceroy of India, Viscount Hardinge, on his visit to Bangalore near the racecourse at seven in the morning.

The School Day of the year 1916 was celebrated with the full co-operation of all my schoolmates because I adopted the device of distributing portfolios, as it were, to all those whom I thought were my rivals and wanted to be important themselves. For the first time I learnt the great lesson of organisation which consisted in just sinking your own personality and neutralizing it to such an extent that everyone who wanted to be important got a full chance, in spite of your importance in principle. Suppress your agency in action, called 'kartrtva' in Vedanta, and the magic is done and all co-operate fully. All you have to do then is to sit as it were informally on the table that your rival is using, leaving your own official chair, and make suggestions - not from on high but as one among the many, without letting your personality obtrude into the situation at all.

Leadership seeks men out in this way and makes them do impossible things, not by specific abilities of birth but by what is imposed on them by dint of extraneous circumstances.

HERO WORSHIP AND SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT MAN
A certain tendency to exaggerate and distort human values characterizes youth, which is often fired by idealisms, though often misplaced. The appeal of the superman, implied in every man, gets at this time of rich life an added impetus which when frustrated and
misdirected could end in 'shallows and in miseries' when the full tide is missed.

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The impetuosity of youth can either make a young man a madcap or a desperado or else, when the surging vital forces are properly canalized and directed by good education, the buds of real genius might begin to sprout in him. In all this development the model man or the superman has his place to guide and fire the imagination of youth.

When such a model is not available, there is a desperate sense of frustration, especially in sensitive youth. This urge is like a hunger or thirst, which is both a moral, intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasm for truth. Man does not live by bread alone, and love and freedom or other values exist in the higher reaches of the axiological scale in which man is to trace his spiritual progress upwards to his goal. There is both an ascent in the scale of values and a descent implied here. The hero has to be both a man and a God at once, and in his conduct he has to be the embodiment of goodness and the God manifest on earth with enough of earthiness too. There is thus a subtle dialectical interplay of values which is the same as worship. Reverence is the word that Tennyson would perhaps prefer. In any case the model which occupies the mantlepiece for the time being always has an interchange and interaction like that of osmosis between two solutions. There is a purificatory process which is bipolar, and this process is best guaranteed when a man accepts a Guru who represents the highest that can be thought of in the context of spiritual progress.

 

Gandhi.

GANDHI AS A RAJYA GURU
It was a memorable day in Bangalore when M.K. Gandhi returned to India after his days of struggle in the name of indentured labour when he was in South Africa as a practising barrister. How he entered my own life, and how he became one of the earliest models of a hero of my adolescent years, is a long story in itself. To tell this in any complete form would take me back two or three years from this early period when I first saw the name Gandhi printed in a green paperback book that was handed to me by a fellow passenger on a ship when I was returning for the last time to India after my studies in Ceylon.

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The passenger in question was a vegetarian and told me that he was from the Island of Mauritius where he practised law, often pleading for the Indian labourers who had legal troubles. Our point of contact was that we were both together in the ship's kitchen pleading with the chef for the omission of beef or meat or both from the menu which was intended for us. He turned to me in the dining room and asked me if I had heard of the name Gandhi. Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi was his full name and through articles in the Indian Review of Madras he thought all Indians knew about him. In fact I was aware that none of my schoolmates had heard of him yet. This gentleman came all the way with his family who were seasick, and in the cabin he politely handed me a visiting card with the name Manilal M. Doctor BA, LLB etc. printed on it.

I was elated by the recognition that this middle-aged, gold-rim-spectacled, well-dressed and sleek man of India gave me. We sat and talked about Indian politics on a deck seat and became good friends for the time being, but it was as late as half a century later that I could even meet a man who at least knew him. This was at a party in Geneva when a man called Doctor was introduced to me who was a businessman in, I think, Port Said, who was the nephew of the original Doctor I had met and lost contact with forever afterwards. Crossing the Atlantic several times back and forth I have lost in the same manner several valuable friends with whose contacts, if I had kept them up, I should have been very rich in friendship indeed in this world which is becoming smaller and smaller by developing communications.

After seeing the name of Gandhi for the first time in this manner, I found his name more often in magazines and newspapers . After the days of the Boer War in South Africa when Gandhi had played his part in passive resistance, and after some correspondence with Tolstoy while yet in London, Gandhi developed the technique and philosophy of Satyagraha in India; and when the names of Gokhale and Mrs. Annie Besant were at the height of popularity this enigmatic little man returned to India to take over the reins of politics, and steered the ship of the Indian Independence Movement till it was welcomed into the haven of Independent India.

Gandhi's name thus became more than a household word and, my own hunger for hero-worship also being at its zenith, I took to Gandhi with more fervour at that time than perhaps any other person of my age in that part of the country. There was a reception accorded to Gandhi at the Glass House in the Lal Bagh public gardens at Bangalore in which the future leader of politics in India was first seen with a Marwari turban and white cotton clothes sitting beside his humble-looking wife and a black boy sitting on the ground near him.

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The boy was one adopted from those who suffered in the Passive Resistance struggle in South Africa. The complete humility of the man was evident to anyone, for a part of his turban was coming unwound but he sat unconscious of it while the multitude of thousands of all religions and groups of India watched him, including a smattering of Europeans - many praising him one after another on the platform while the crowd itself sat in silent admiration.

India seemed to be becoming a nation and not merely a country presenting a mosaic pattern of different peoples. This was what inspired youth and brought India together at least to such a degree of integration of sentiments as to be able to oust the typically shy, sensitive and self-conscious English. Whether the Chinese, who are at the door of India while I write these lines (28th October 1962) can be made to give up occupied territory by sentimental negative warfare, is a matter for doubt. Yet the triumph of the negative way applied to politics was in itself a surprising phenomenon, and any victory (if a lasting victory it can be called) must give credit to this earnest, humble and enigmatic little man with lean legs and a hungry look, who proved to the world that negative force, under given conditions, could be as effective as, and prove itself mightier than, the sword. I had again a closer look at the couple and the black clean-shaven-headed boy on the platform of my High School itself where he came to unveil the portrait of Gokhale, and I clearly remember Gandhi folding his hands humbly and reverently before the garlanded picture of Gokhale and calling him his Rajya Guru (leader in political wisdom).

Reserving for the present time the rest of the story of my worship of Gandhi, I just now refer to the other personality besides Vivekananda and Gandhi who entered into my adolescent life, as it were, with a bang.  

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TAGORE AWARDED NOBEL PRIZE FOR ENGLISH POETRY
That an uncivilized and backward people could produce a poet in the English language who excelled in it to such an extent as to obtain the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an event that enhanced the self-respect of the people of India, and made them hold their heads high in the view of outsiders who had succeeded in making them believe that they were an inferior race. To the question 'Is India civilized?' the thundering answer came from Swami Vivekananda. To the question 'Is India intelligent enough to shake off the foreign yoke in a manner in keeping with its own best traditions?' the intense answer came from the shrill, small voice of Gandhi. To the question 'Does India understand cultural refinement and can it rise to heights of creative imagination?' Tagore gave the answer. In the fields of science and even in sport, such as cricket, Indians showed they were the equal of any others and thus gave to the youth of that generation a fresh hope for the future, and opened up new vistas for their spirit of adventure and triumph.

 

Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore was a name, high sounding in itself and suggestive of the best aspirations of the youth of my generation. Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Bose and Ranjit Singh each added feathers to the cap that young India wore with just pride at that time. Tagore's 'Gitanjali' did not make any meaning at first to most English-educated Indians brought up in the tradition of Addison and Steele. The language was too laden with fable and allegory and many mixed metaphors blended their subtle suggestions together to give a kind of Upanishadic flavour and taste to his writings which were strange to the English genius. The pure literary dignity and value of the compositions however stood head and shoulders above the ordinary run of drab poetry that English taste considered respectable. The bold flights of fancy brought up in the shadow of Upanishadic imagination, so free and easy, was a new feature which a critic like W.B. Yeats was able to recommend in his Foreword introducing the 'Song Offerings'. They were quickly compared to the Gita Govinda on one side and to the Song of Songs of the Bible on the other.

In the High School itself I heard these prose poems read out by a Tagore admirer. I became fired by the idea of possessing a copy of this book but as the first edition was sold at too high a price for an average Indian student's pocket in those days, I decided to copy the whole of the book into notebooks and read and reread them many times.

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I was familiar with Vivekananda literature from the age of twelve when, as I have said, I could recite by heart the Chicago Address. The life of the Swami had been read from cover to cover and the 'Works', which were four or five quarto volumes as published in those days, were beginning to be studied from end to end by me. Now came this transparent crystalline flow of prose-poetry or free verse which was like a confection, highly flavoured and sweet, reminiscent of the Upanishads themselves. It was certain that India was thus slowly and steadily coming to its own.


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CHAPTER FOUR

GLIMPSES OF GURUHOOD
The transition from puberty through adolescence to the stage of a youth - the period of storms and stresses alternating with smooth-sailing periods through which every man passes - is perhaps one of the most interesting parts of anyone's life, especially as seen in retrospect. Childhood has its fears and helplessness, but the journey to vigorous manhood, when both the body and mind survive through tribulations and trials, big and small, inner and outer, with its hesitations and bold resolves, passions and emotions - demands harsher fibre than what the silken sail of infancy needs for its texture. The twilight period between adulthood and adolescence was still lingering on with me through the years of the last stages of the First World War.  

THE ENIGMATIC GURU FIGURE
It is true that religious, aesthetic and political appetites were getting shaped and nourished within me by corresponding Gurus or model supermen who influenced my life as heroes. While I was still worshipping them, pouring out my innocent loyalties of adolescent youthful admiration as libations at the feet of such idols as Vivekananda, Tagore and Gandhi respectively, an enigmatic figure began to take its place step by step within me and not with a bang, as in the case of the last as already mentioned.

I hardly suspected, when as early as 1899 or so, as an infant, I was pushed into the presence of a strange man past forty who lived in a riverside hermitage twelve miles south of Trivandrum, that he would influence me most in my life in later years. He was surrounded by a multitude of admirers and worshippers at that time, as I visualize him now, while he himself sat amidst the crowd in a sedate and silent attitude, sparing in speech, blessing with his unmoved eyes the people who, one by one, took the dust off his feet in adoration. I was asked to do the same, but I remember to have protested in my own infantile way, saying to myself that my ego, though small, was greater than that of any other man, especially of a stranger.

38               
The Guru himself noticed this self-assertion and remarked that as the son of a doctor I was not willing to prostrate to anybody. Perhaps a touch of absolutism was there from the very beginning, of which I was not conscious. Beyond feeling in the atmosphere that this man was being considered someone very important, I did not see what was the matter with the populace which constantly followed and seemed to fuss about him. Such was the first contact or lack of contact that I established with a mysterious Guru, who was to mean so much to me in later life.

 

Narayana Guru.

I remember the second occasion on which the same thing happened to me, which must have been at least three or four years later. This time this Guru-figure was seen coming to the family house of my father in Trivandrum. The way in which all the relations stood in reverence before this enigmatic man intrigued me, but the situation itself was opaque to me in its significance. On being told that I was going to school in Bangalore and knew Kanarese, the Guru asked me to read a lesson from my Kanarese primer which I did very shabbily, being hesitant and shy. I could understand nothing of holiness or of religious feeling. Many religious parents force their children when they are too young to show devotion and reverence when the feeling is still utterly strange to them. Rousseau was right here when he said that religious instruction, if given to children at all, must come very late. A sense of mystery about the world into which the child might be born is about all that can be expected by way of spiritual development before the child attains adulthood.

STRANGENESS PERSISTS
When I visited this enigmatic figure of a Guru about the age of ten or fifteen the mystery was still thick, but had begun to be a little more transparent. I remember at least two occasions on which I was in his presence. The first was when I went to the ashram at Varkala when it was in its stage of being just established. The Guru lived under a tree near a clear brook and there was merely a parnasala (leaf hut) where living arrangements were made. He spent most of his time on a hill-top just acquired about a quarter of a mile away where, in another leaf-hut, he used to meditate while the sea breezes greeted him and the gurgling springs formed themselves into brooks round the hill that he had chosen for his abode.

39
A part of ancient or perennial India was thus visible to me, a veritable rishi's abode of whose whole association and significance I was still ignorant at that time.

On the first of the two occasions I was in the company of my parents, brothers and sisters and the youngest born, the fifth boy who was to be named in the presence of the Guru. This was done at a simple ceremony and afterwards there was a plain meal in which I participated with all the others. Even this I could call rustic and in keeping with the utter simplicity of life in the forest which was the natural setting in which Gurus have always lived. All this made but a vague and passing impression on me at that time, although at the time of writing these lines more than fifty years later, the meaning has changed for me considerably. Early youth lives in a world of its own, which is, vectorially speaking, the opposite space of the one in which one finds oneself in more mature years. In that world, the Guru-presence was only taken for granted as if in the background among other things, some of which might have deserved less of my attention. Values in life change over from one side to the other in a strange way.

There was a deer and a peacock which were ashram pets, but which were nuisances by the damage they did to the neighbouring cultivators who cursed them, in spite of their contribution of beauty to the atmosphere of the ashram by their moving about in the place with such otherworldly grace. Here again conflicting values were evident. These impressed me more than the Guru himself, although he was the centre of the piece, and only taken for granted in a subconscious manner. Three or four years later when I went to the same ashram, fresh contact was memorable in that the Guru gave me recognition by speaking to me. Someone had reported to him that I had said that a lion or tiger could scare cattle away but the Guru added the first remark which he ever made to me, by saying that when wild buffaloes ganged together against a tiger they could be more ferocious. However, in spite of these contacts of pre-adolescent days, the Guru-figure still remained an enigma to me.

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A CLOSER GLIMPSE INTO GURUHOOD
About the year 1915, when my High School days were being completed and I was waiting for my School Leaving Certificate and the summer holidays were on, one day in Bangalore there arrived the Guru to whom I would not bow in my infancy. With just a water pot (kamandalu) carried by an elderly, darker-complexioned man who followed him like a shadow, the clean-shaven-headed, white-robed, slim and tall figure turned into the side gate of Barne Park High Ground, Bangalore, where I happened to live with my parents at that time before going to College in Madras.

He had arrived by the morning train from Madras and was walking without any specified destination in mind but arrived by chance, as it were, as I gathered later from the attendant who was with him. In Madras Central Station, where he had entrained the previous night, he had left all his followers - who were at least half a dozen in number - with the bedding and cooking vessels which he constantly said he wanted to rid himself of, but which the insistence of his devotees inflicted on him all the time, in spite of his protests. As it actually transpired, the story was told to me that when the first bell had rung for the mail train to start, a man in the Guru's compartment occupying the lower berth (for sleeping only after ten PM according to the railway rules) objected by mistake to the Guru sitting on it when it was still only eight or so. On this the Guru left the train altogether, on seeing which, the disciples with their baggage also got down from a compartment at a distance, but on the stroke of the second bell and the whistle, the man who had objected to the Guru apologised and the Guru was in again; and thus it was that the Guru arrived with one man only with him, leaving the others bag and baggage behind.

This interesting side event in the Guru's life helps to show what kind of informal, free and easy unburdened life belonged to him. Contact as between individual persons had not been established between me and the Guru at this time and, except that he was respected by all in the house - onto which my respect was added naturally - there was no bipolarity or mutual adoption between us as in a regular Guru-Sisya relationship. A disciple of the Guru who had stayed with us some time prior to the visit of the Guru had given me some insight into the way in which a Guru is respected in India. To think of a Guru in terms of a God was natural to the Indian mind. It was part and parcel, as it were, of the very spiritual climate of India. How exactly this kind of glorification was to be understood was still to me a mystery. How much of such respect was just traditional or social habit and how much original and genuine I could not make out.

41
During the four or five days of his stay under the same roof, however, some kind of intimacy that was natural and living became established, although the contact was a feeble one in the matter of any spiritual exchange between us. Traditional background respect however changed over into conscious and bipolar adoption in the proper sense by slow degrees in later years. How the sense of Guruhood grew up with my life itself is one of the peculiarities of my discipleship, making it superior in certain respects and inferior in others, is a matter to be borne in mind by anyone interested in how this rare spiritual affiliation takes place so naturally in certain cases as in my own.

FIRST GLIMPSES OF GURUHOOD
To live with a veritable Guru under the same roof just when adolescence was translating itself into manhood within was a rare and precious advantage. The lion comes to your den. If the Ganges flowed through the basement of your house, as in Hardwar, or you had wild beasts for neighbours or had a full view of Mont Blanc from your kitchen window, you could feel no more cause for elation. An actual Guru to speak with you intimately and whom you could watch in his own ways and habits is as stimulating as when an untamed deer drinks water from your hand or birds peck grains off your palm. I was all attention and interest, although I did not understand the Guru any more than on the previous occasions when I was privileged to contact him. A well-bred pet dog could not be more all eyes and ears to the voice of the master. The world that Guruhood represented was still mostly a closed book to me; but there was an instinctive curiosity mixed with genuine desire to know more about it. Hero-worship, pent up within me to find a normal outlet was, as it were, lying in wait for its prey. The strange man was so sedate and taciturn that a glimpse into his person was not easy, because he was in this respect like a high-born maiden, avoiding all prying into her grace. The hints that he threw out for me to bite seemed of a delicate and flimsy order indeed, but the baits thus dangled - judged by their effect as seen only in later years - were of consequence, though not of any antecedent importance at all.

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He did not teach me philosophy as such directly but stimulated my curiosity in his own insinuating way. To give an instance, he came into my study where I had hung up certain pencil drawings that I had made. There was among them one of Vivekananda, in which he was seated in meditation, which I had enlarged from a book illustration. I thought that the Guru would compliment me on my artistic ability - he looked at it intently an instant and asked why there were certain patches on the face. He seemed to question the method of pencil shading and did not approve of it. This kept me guessing about the intelligence of this strange man who did not know perhaps that shading was normal to pencil drawings. Line, light and shade were to be employed according to him perhaps with more severe rules than modern art of the ordinary type now recognized. The severe lines of ancient Indian art did not favour this easy use of shading and had purer norms and standards here. Shading was a kind of falsehood and should not be resorted to too easily. A subtle dig and a gentle snub were anyhow implied in the remark, though incidental and seemingly trivial.

This was followed on another occasion when the Guru cut my complacent pride in modern education by asking me if I knew of a certain spirit of which people in Kerala talked about a lot which was wont to cause stones to drop from the roof. 'If one should pick up such stones, they were not any that could be seen as missing from anywhere nearby and one could put them, say, under a coconut tree and they could be seen day after day to be in the place where they were put'. Such were the given data from the mouth of a Guru. After a certain pause the Guru asked me pointedly whether modern science had anything to say about such phenomena. Of course I had heard of such stories as the Park Lane ghost and water diviners, negative hallucinations and even vaguely of materializations. But the question of the Guru was too much for me at that time, although fifty years later I found myself on better ground, though still not completely at home in such a world of possibilities or probabilities. What the mind is capable of parapsychologically still remains largely closed to modern science, although psychic research has begun to discuss similar problems. The depth of the mystery of the Guru-figure had by now doubled itself in me.

It was during the same visit that the Guru was heard to make some concession to my ignorance in inner spiritual matters and explain to me the nature of electricity. In the bedroom where the Guru had slept the previous night there was an open electrical socket which had given the Guru a shock as he tried to put on a switch by himself in the dark. Referring to what had happened the Guru said that electricity gives an idea of the absolute Reality that philosophers try to define. Perhaps what he meant was that electricity could be taken to be the operational version of the metaphysical Absolute.

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It was not on the same occasion but at least three years later that a similar topic was raised by the Guru, which equally puzzled me. He referred to a piece of music played from a gramophone record and asked why playing the record many times did not have the effect of fatiguing the original singer whose voice was recorded. I had learnt in Newtonian mechanics that action and reaction were equal and opposite, thus linking cause with effect, but the problem presented by the Guru was confusing to me and at first seemed somewhat absurd. I tried to explain that the record reproduced vibrations etc. The Guru said he knew all that but the point was not that. Even to this day I find I cannot answer the Guru correctly except to say that the record confined itself to the operational plane only, while the living musician was more than an operational entity. Like printer's type and the printer himself there was a fundamental distinction.

On another occasion still, on my mentioning to the Guru that zoology taught me about a certain hermit crab which found protection for its abdomen in a molluscan spiral shell to which it got attached, the Guru abruptly asked me why I should not think that the hermit crab was created as it was and that all the story of the crab occupying a shell was irrelevant or insignificant? I remember also his asking on a still later occasion if the Englishman who spoke of evolution had actually seen a monkey change into a man. It was of course a theory and not a fact directly given to experience. 'The evolutionists would say', the Guru continued, 'the process is so slow that, like the motion of the hour hand of a clock, we fail to see the evolutionary movement'.

Thus, topic after topic touched by the Guru started within me newer and newer doubts till I stood confounded and confused in the presence of his enigmatic personality. The education that I was getting began more and more to count as nothing as new vistas of intellectual adventure opened themselves before me one after another. Thus a new line of education was opened out for me by this enigmatic personality whose significance grew into my life more and more, changing the direction of its aim and giving it new content at every fresh contact. There were thus two different roads, one high and the other low; or one cutting the other at right angles with a common participation point of insertion or articulation, into what might be said to be integrated knowledge or wisdom. Duality, when admitted into the domain of education, gives rise to many harassing situations or conflicts that will spell double gain or double loss.

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TWO ROADS WITHOUT PROPER ARTICULATION
The visit of the Guru described above synchronised with the turning point between High School and College education for me. It was like the meeting of four roads, each with a different background and purpose: Indian education with its own background; and Western education grafted on with a background that was altogether strange and unfamiliar. East and West were proverbially never to meet. The Indian Guru could not find any place in the actual scheme I was submitted to, and on the other side there was no point of contact at all between values represented by Western education as adapted to the needs of Indian youth and the deep-seated inner urge for education coming up, as it were, from the proper soil of India.

Strangely however, at the very time when this conflict was felt keenly in my life there happened to be a sympathetic teacher who was the Headmaster of the High School where I studied. From his way of taking detailed English texts in the matriculation class I had developed a high regard for him as a man capable of great understanding and intelligence. He seemed to have understood me as I expected myself to be understood and there developed a certain mutual adoption and bipolar relation between us resembling, though only distantly, that of a Guru and Sisya of ancient times. He was just a plain schoolmaster but had a family background which belonged to the spiritual heritage of India. The critical mind of the mimamsaka (scholar critic) belonged to him, and his English education had opened up for him the wisdom of the West in which he could at least find spiritual entrance. He was thus one in whom East and West could meet, though not at a high mystical level but on the intellectual and the rational.

After retiring as Registrar of Mysore University this teacher became the companion in spiritual matters of the then ruler of Mysore who sent him as a delegate to the philosophical conference which was held in Paris about the year 1926.

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Though mute and inglorious in most other respects, this man was a remarkable example of how a wisdom tradition could survive the barriers dividing one generation from another vertically and one cultural growth from another horizontally. In a long black coat, short of stature, plain, white-turbaned, bespectacled, dark and unpolished socially as he was - he carried a wise head on his shoulders which gave him a status above other retired schoolmasters of his generation in the India of that time. His name was V. Subramanya Iyer. The respect I had developed for him was reciprocated because he treated me with special favour as his student and remembered me long after with regard and affection.

I was keen therefore that this teacher should know the Guru who was then staying with me. I accordingly arranged for a meeting before the rare possibility passed away. The Guru on his part paid a visit to the High School and took interest in the plan of the buildings and the manual work sections, saying that boys must know how to do as well as to think. I was with the party as they went round the classes, and glad to witness the rare possibility of an Eastern mystic and a Westernised teacher establishing some contact at all. Such was the culminating event of my High School career which was coming to an end.

CLAMOUR FOR A BREAD-AND-BUTTER EDUCATION
On the fifteenth of June 1915 I was officially understood to have completed my secondary education and declared eligible for admission into the University. The jam, jumble and bottlenecks involved in the rush for such an education, if worth the name at all, were happily to be over from this date. But all was not over in reality. Admission into colleges depended on being selected for interviews by each of the principals of the various colleges in South India. Applications were sent at random. There were hurdles of red tape, back-door irregularities, VIP pressures, sheer favouritisms, side by side with high marks and real or pseudo-educational requirements that still stood in the way. Dates of application were important and it was usual to see fathers with their sons and daughters trekking the streets to offices or institutions with sad faces as the fortunes of their protegés were being decided. Sportsmanship and scholarship counted not equally but sometimes preferentially for the former. Tribalistic considerations and rules of selection had to be satisfied.

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The task of an impartial principal sitting in his office was a difficult one because last-minute telephone calls from some MP or VIP or turbaned royalty - of whom there were hundreds - could upset the regular ways. Some professors also walked through the corridors to the room of the principal on the opening day, threatening resignation - at least in one case to my knowledge - if a certain student - or as it happened a lady student - was refused favourable treatment. Before all chances in the different colleges were irretrievably lost after a certain date one had to contact by telegram those out-of-the-way colleges which might still admit the leftover applicants. Much gall and wormwood with clenching of fists and gnashing of teeth by parents or principals was often involved, all in the name of perhaps a ne'er-do-well of a boy. I went through this anxious period calmly, but all was not yet over. Bad as this scramble for seats was in my days it was nothing like what obtains at present in India. Conditions have worsened in geometric proportion.

I was first admitted to the Central College, Bangalore, but then my father, who had to go to Baroda on services lent, could not keep three establishments: one for the boys in Bangalore; another for the two girls who got admission to the Queen Mary's College in Madras; and a third for himself in Baroda. It was thought practicable to take the whole group of five: three boys and two girls - four in the College first year, and the youngest boy in High School - to Madras. Again they had to live in this rumble-tumble growth of a city of distances, in some place from which they could go to their respective institutions. While waiting for father to come back from the office of Dr. Skinner, Principal of the Madras Christian College, sitting in my carriage in the Fort District of Madras, it was made known that the Principal objected to having two brothers in two different colleges. The Christian influence for which the College stood, if good for one had to be good for both or not at all. This was the subtle dialectics. Other statistical considerations made for still greater absurdity  with other academic authorities who based their judgements on probabilities rather than possibilities. These subtle impediments of the world of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest made me sour at heart already in my life while I was yet to see the world of job-hunting in India, about which I might have to give a worse picture later. Nepotism, criss-cross interests and partialities based on group life made such a tangled mess of the principle of equality of opportunity for all that the phrase itself began already to taste bitter in my mouth.

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After all the tribulations a solution came. The four of us got distributed between the Presidency College, Madras, in the Marina, and the Queen Mary's College in the same district. A house, the top floor of a chemist's shop in San Thome, was rented and we settled there for some months or years before going to another house nearby and then to Komaleswarampet in the Mount Road area.

 

Mardas Presidency College.

Life in Madras was very different in many ways from that of Bangalore ruled by a Maharaja. The fuller light of British colonialism played on one in Madras, while Bangalore and Mysore were pieces of Ancient India dropped from high as it were into the changing context of New India. Added to this was the actual and not merely political climate. For months on end the dream of Bangalore persisted within while the sticky heat of Madras made for sweating and sweltering as one sultry morning hour gave room to no less a sultry night. The breezes of the Marina sands were the only relieving feature and all the city came there in the evenings 'to eat air' as the Hindustani idiom would put it, within the hearing of breaking billows and the glimmer of lights in a long row reaching to the harbour end from San Thome, twinkling like distant stars.


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CHAPTER FIVE

ACADEMIC LIFE IN COLONIAL STYLE
Macaulay knew Madras when he had to visit India in connection with the famous dispatch by which English was to be adopted as the medium for public instruction for the 'natives' under British rule. Colonialism in Madras was at its zenith at that time. Indians, however, became aware of what it implied stage by stage. In the days when I was a student in the Presidency College, Madras, the cry for Home Rule by Indians was beginning to be heard in nooks and corners of the country.

Tar roads were scarce and underground drainage was unknown except in European quarters, though trams ran in the city, creaking over the rails from the Beach through Round Thana to Luz Church or Triplicane. Electric light was there in some parts but only mechanically made and not from hydroelectric projects. Dupleix was still remembered in Pondicherry as were Clive or Munro in Madras. The 'Black Town' was just being renamed 'George Town' to efface the stigma that attached itself to the former name. Interpreters, contractors and commission agents mixed with clever 'native' lawyers and a new era with new classes was just coming to be. English professors came all the way from the mother country to fulfil the white man's heavy burden of civilizing the rest of the world. The black man's world consisted of coolies and rickshaw-pullers with half-naked fishermen with their catamarans on the palm beaches. Men and even women often substituted for the bullocks in carts of sand drawn by surprisingly able-bodied humans nourished only by sunlight and salt, supplemented by rice in water with onions and green chillies on which whole families nourished themselves, year in and year out. Modern dietetics was thus challenged. Macaulay mentions the Marina of Madras, even then famous as a heat-relieving lung for the town dwellers during the sunset hours. Madras was the seat of the Governor, and one of the oldest universities of India was established there. The half-naked population were slaves useful for pulling the punkahs (fans) - but there were plenty of liveried servants too, dressed like Nabobs, who hung round the offices and bungalows of the white servants of the Queen or of Edward or George the Emperors, helped by dubashes (interpreters), contractors, clerks and lawyers.

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Old Madras was a well-known state of mind just as Brooklyn or Manhattan is to New Yorkers at present. Drab actualities and the intimate personality of the slum-filled city blended into an interesting confection, with the lazy cries of street vendors, the wilful crows and the other birds like the curlews or gulls with strange cries that strayed occasionally onto the terraces from their natural habitat in the Coromandel Sea. The air of Old Madras had some life-giving elements in spite of its humidity and sultry summers which lay heavily on an ill-clad, half-starved, seething population. Madras still held out chances for the intelligent 'native' youth to shine and have the most alluring attraction of a career as a paid Government servant, as seen from his own world of abundance from where even a little opulence had a magnified interest for him. Job-hunting was the strongest spur to the adventurous spirit of Indian youth in those days, and to pass examinations in English and to hold degrees was the dear dream of every parent who sent his son to school. Matters are much the same even now, with the difference that the bottleneck is narrower and the jam and rush more close-knit. All this involved the transition from the economy of abundance to that of opulence where cash-value left the use-value of things far behind. The agonies of the transition from the one to the other were not over at the time I became a student in an Old Madras that still retained the colonial flavour lingering on after its days in India were beginning to be numbered.  

 

Old Madras.

AT THE PRESIDENCY COLLEGE, MADRAS
Beyond the surf-washed, sandy beach and the broad Marine Drive, which was used illegally by fishermen to mend their nets or spin their twine, as the tarred road surface made for mirage effects to dupe the lazy minded, the noble edifice of the Presidency College raised its pyramidal spire above the expansive vista of the seafront. It was a red brick and sandstone building, a replica of similar public buildings in London, with perhaps the cloakrooms omitted and only otherwise very slightly modified. In the way that this first of educational institutions of the Presidency of Madras functioned too, there was not much of a difference between the original model in England which the institution copied, except for the fact that the lesser members of the staff were turbaned and dark-skinned men instead of regular Englishmen.

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The Indians however, were selected because of their capacity to resemble as nearly as possible the English they were meant to substitute for, rather than because of any intrinsic or native genius. This was all the more evident when oriental learning was professed by pundits who had to keep in mind two different models at the same time - the indigenous one that belonged to the soil itself and another that of some Western orientalists or others who had influenced them as admirable scholars, and whose style of speaking and writing - even when the scholarship belonged to a foreign and not necessarily an English context - was the commodity which had high exchange value in academic life under colonial governments of the time. A turbaned professor with high pundit qualifications but who conformed to far-off models of strange cultural growths while trying to preserve his own orthodox love of his own traditions, resulted more often than not in a caricature model rather than a genuine sample; and only rarely did the genius of a scholar combine the best of both and live through without sacrificing the best of both in favour of some insipid stuff that passed for high learning. More often the compromise which succeeded was the one in which the discipleship to the West was more pronounced than any first-hand substance that was basically valid.

When it came to science subjects the atmosphere was much more refreshing. Shakespeare too was studied under professors who themselves learnt under distinguished scholars of England and could transmit to Indian students something of the enthusiasms which true culture implied. Mark Hunter, Allen, Duncan, Littlehailes - were some of the familiar names of professors of the Presidency College of my time under whose teaching several generations received their intellectual formation - mostly Madrasis with a majority from Mylapore, which supplied the greatest number of recruits for higher offices under the Government, and many astute lawyers. Our rival College in the city was the Christian College, which too had to its credit perhaps an equal number of intellectuals who came out of its portals each year, and which had as many professors at least of equal quality - but who taught under the aegis of Christianity rather than the Empire. The Bible and the gun, with an overall commercial interest of a brand of mercantile colonialism, came into touch with an ancient civilization that had gone to seed and become effete on the soil of India itself; and the resulting combination produced mostly 'natives' with an English mind, and rarely some Englishman with a native mind.

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The latter phenomenon, when it took place, was derided and successfully driven under by the fully colonial elements, both black and white and mixed, who dominated the atmosphere. There were thus Indian authorities on English pronunciation who used a more Oxford accent than Oxonians themselves; the premium put on them being high in the services, and the inducement to imitate them by young professors or their senior disciples was very compelling. Many freaks thus came into being in the main and secondary institutions all over India who slurred their 'r' or lisped or haw-hawed their phrases with many 'rather's' and 'golly's' as they spoke, so as to outdo their counterparts in good old England itself. Their legacy has not vanished still in present-day India, but many Americanisms coming from the film world have been added to the stock of ever-accumulating dross of jargon journalese on which much modernist pretence tries to erect its imposing but false façades and big fronts. Some still say 'yah' for 'yes' and '-kyou' for 'thank you'. As a result, genuine scholarship suffered much and still suffers, as many oriental publications have become mostly unreadable in our days. Publications coming from academic bodies amply bear witness to this. That similar academic bodies existing by their own right in the West secretly laugh at such books that they review or discuss in group studies, is little known here. Outmoded models of punditry die hard. Where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise. Such was the academic context of the Presidency College, Madras, where I was admitted in the year 1915. Shaking oneself free from the stilted ways of such a hybrid education was more important for me than to retain what was learnt.

SCIENCE IN A TURKISH BATH
Besides Shakespeare and English literature and Sanskrit courses for the intermediate classes, the real subjects that I had to study as optionals were physics, chemistry and natural science. One of my sisters took history for optional but the remaining three, consisting of two brothers and one sister, were in the science group. The last, although belonging to the sister institution for women, had common science classes with the men by mutual arrangement.  

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The first disadvantage was present in the change in climate due to transfer from a height of three thousand feet to sea level as between Bangalore and Madras. A coat and cap were compulsory at college as, according to the words in the educational code that was brought into force, 'good manners required a coat and a suitable covering for the head'. The lecturers were to wear pith turbans or plain white ones, mostly starched and put on like thick bandages round the head. Most of them wore black long-coats like Christian priests as laid down for Government House receptions, preferably with stockings, so as not to shock the gentle ladies at banquets. Otherwise it was possible, when Indians were allowed their own ways, that they took off their shoes and sat crossed-legged on the sofas of the Western drawing-rooms. These details of obligatory dress had the nuisable aspect too of making the climate of Madras altogether unbearable.

I remember how in the Chemistry practical work we had to spend a whole afternoon in laboratories with many bunsen burners in a steam-bath-like room with windows too big ever to be opened, after what obtained in London. Here most of the time we were engaged in weighing salts or dealing with acids, minerals or alkalis in which even the vibrations of the needles of the balances had to be recorded. Half the clever boys finished their work, to my surprise, one hour at least before me. I found myself lagging far behind and considered myself inferior in intelligence till I discovered that one could cook the data to be recorded if one knew the theoretical answer roughly in advance. My honesty in this matter made me a fool again as the cleverness of the others only wielded their dishonest ways. Falsehood appeared true. The heat of the laboratories depressed me and the thought that I might really be a dullard added fuel to the state of mind. I remember on many an evening wending my way along the Marina towards Mylapore, unhappy about everything both outer and inner, wet and sticky, with perspiration on the skin relieved only by the land breezes that come in the evenings as I walked near the waves.

 

Fishing Boats in Madras Harbour.

Fishwives were seen waiting weepingly for their men who had to work at sea. Sometimes in stormy weather when the billows showed each a foamy crest, a lone fisherman was seen near his catamaran laden with his net performing a puja with lighted camphor. At first I thought he was praying because he was afraid of the anger of the gods,but a little extra gesture on his part revealed what was uppermost in his mind. While walking round the catamaran with the lighted camphor, he made a special additional waving of the flame round the net meant for a good catch and suggesting no fear at all. Greed had the upper hand over fear in his case.

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I studied the herbs that grew on the beach, such as ipomea biloba, cleome thespesia, the cactus and vinca roseas of the Marina gardens, and watched the butterflies that visited the zinnias and lived a rich inner life promenading peripatetically in contact with nature.

 

Madras Beach.

The waves washed and the sun fell and all the beach passed through twilight into dark as I sat on many an occasion in those days trying to meditate on the seashore. No real meditation would come, however, as I was still ignorant of its technique and went about it the wrong way. But all was not a loss. The effort that I put in at least made me aware that true meditation was different from what many people pretended to know and teach. Every failure paved the way to some kind of success. One has to be clear about what to meditate about and with what inner instrument to do so before any worthwhile meditation can take place. This division between the Self and the non-Self is just that which has puzzled Western philosophers till the time of Fichte, and Indian philosophers till the time of Sankara - although known to the rishis who wrote or uttered the Upanishads. My aspiring spirit went through this form of subtle agency on many twilight evenings. It was only after many such years that some light seemed to come, as it were, from the other end of the tunnel.

SCIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING
More than the humanities that I studied at College, what did me good was the study of science subjects. Once upon a time, during the days of Aristotle, Natural Science was called Natural Philosophy. How and why science and philosophy displaced each other is a mystery. Nature Study is more than the mere cataloguing and describing of animals or plants. Running through the scheme of life one has to see the process of one becoming many through growth and division, and how the process is kept on through time, fitting the immortality of the protozoa and the dignity of man as Homo Sapiens. Laboratory and field studies, both microscopic and megascopic, with attention to details and data are important, but one should not fail to see the forest for the trees. Modern thought prides itself in being analytic rather than synthetic.

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Over-specialisation and stress on the objective has brought us to the brink of compartmentalization, and the philosophical vision which implies an overall knowledge of the implications of a given situation, globally and totally viewed, has largely been shut off in modern Western education. Histology and morphology were all interesting in Botany and Zoology but evolution and the insight one got into the process of creative becoming, as distinct from mere static being, was that part of the study of nature which gave it the philosophical touch - and it was exactly this part which received less attention than static aspects studied objectively in situ. The patience with which data were accumulated in minute detail was admirable, but although frogs and cockroaches were dissected or sometimes even vivisected week after week and year after year for seven or eight long years in my life at college, the genuine weight of true knowledge other than the information these killings yielded was minimal. Even now some like Sir Julian Huxley think that evolution is a fact while it is no more than a hypothesis or at best a theory. Based on it there is even a rival religion coming up in modern times with a doctrine opposed to that of Genesis of the Bible.

As for physics and chemistry, the hardest part of these twin branches of the positive sciences was the calculation involved. 'An elephant rolled down a grass slope and came with an impact of so many units of weight or momentum on a lower level. What was the difference of the levels?' Such were some of the problems in which in order to succeed in solving one had to subtract the actual visible or
observable aspect completely and think abstractly of a world without colour or poetry. Poetic temperaments were thus unfit for applied, though not for higher, mathematics; and if one belonged to a type that contained the poetic and the mathematical in equal proportion, the genius in one tended to be stifled in favour of the other - allowing  only one at a time. In my own case I happened to be a type in which both prevailed in a weak dosage, and both science and humanities offered me equal difficulties. Calculables when too complicated were beyond my reach, and the observable aspects of science were too easy to really hold my interest. As it happened, at the intermediate examination each general scientific question was inevitably followed by a calculation problem carrying more than double the marks. What I gained in the former I lost in the latter - but it so happened that when put together the total was above the average and pushed me over to the next class automatically.

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Thus mediocrity had its advantages when genius was pronounced neither on one side nor the other. Again I muddled through years of the intermediate, and although I fell ill with enteric fever and again once with acute amoebic dysentery, having eaten questionable food from hotels when the family was away and I was left to myself (both of which brought down my weight considerably), I still found myself in the second half of the four year's course an over-sensitive, weak and emaciated young man about to enter manhood and torn between the trials of adolescence and adulthood and the regular sentimental life that all young men in normal spirits are bound to pass through.

The attack of dysentery just before joining College for the BA was so severe that one day I was in a rickshaw going to the General Hospital for admission. On the way a classmate of mine accosted me, not knowing that I was in a low and poor state of health. I did not have strength to return the attention I received and this evidently upset my friend. The grudge was carried over to college days and continued to strain our relations for the rest of college life. As he would not speak to me at all and I could not make any apologies if he did not listen, one friend at least was thus lost for no fault of commission on my part - I could not mend it and thus it ended.

Phonetics was taught by the eminent professor Mark Hunter, and minor poems like Keats' 'Isabella' by a professor newly recruited from England. He invariably came about half an hour late and even on the days when he did make his appearance he took it easy in right Oxonian fashion, taking a full seven or eight minutes to call the attendance in the afternoon. The minor poems were dismissed without even being read in class and all that he did was to get down from the platform without telling us which verse was being taught. He went to the blackboard, wrote a word with its Greek equivalent in beautiful printed letters, returned and took his seat again mumbling something about Boccaccio in a full Oxford accent, punished one or two in the name of strict discipline and went away as the bell rang. Thus hardly half the regular classes were actually  taken, while on most days a slip came from his retiring room with the word 'Indisposed' written in impeccable writing, through the elderly peon of the English Department. As was eagerly expected on most days, after twenty minutes the expected slip came and all dispersed gleefully. If the professor made his appearance at all, we could see that he was all red in the face due to the heat of Madras to which he might not have been used or, as we guessed, due to some unsoft drink that it might have been his practice to imbibe during the lunch hour.

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The high Oxford style of professing English, with all the excuses mentioned, left the students free and happy, and we expected that he would not be exacting in the exams. On the contrary they proved more exacting than usual and we came to understand that students were expected to do most of the work themselves. Good in principle as this undoubtedly was, the possibility of it being carried to an extreme was forgotten.  

WALKING THE CORRIDORS
College life had its other miscellaneous though not minor diversions when we walked the corridors or sat under the Powell statue, our common rendezvous at lunch hour. It was the time for us to get together and make new friends. There were many Malayalam-speaking students from Cochin and Travancore who were fond of moving in groups like their Telugu, Kanarese or Tamil counterparts. Hindu and Muslim were brought together in college life. Linguistic barriers were rubbed off and a nationhood with common values was vaguely dangling before the youth of the generation.

Women too passed from one side of the class to the other and bevies of pretty girls from the women's college had to go past the boys many times in the day when changes of classrooms were involved. Unused to mixed life of this kind there were many annoying situations when there were many secret goings-on, mostly invisible and inaudible. A group of giggling girls was a greater threat at any time than an equal number of boys under similar circumstances; and what most wise young professors did on such an emergency arising in class was to dismiss the class. Unwarranted catcalls and shrieks from unexpected corners were sometimes heard when a specially good-looking girl had to cross the platform in front of the gallery of boy students. In one case in the Central College, Bangalore, a pretty maid had to decide to leave college altogether because there was general excitement when she entered or left the class. In more recent years, it would seem, conditions have eased to such an extent that, as in the USA, it is common now to find Indian students dating and valentining with boy- or girlfriends as the case may be. In my days all was rigid still and co-education had its problems both to the sexes involved and to the parents at home who were on tenterhooks till the grown-up girl, especially, returned home after classes.

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Many girls were caught between the ire of an angry father on one side and the pathetic implorings of an infatuated young man on the other. Dagger-drawn glances were exchanged in the corridors, and once too a Muslim student, of all people, gallantly dropped his silk handkerchief for a Brahmin girl to pick up - which became a general gossip item trumpeted at least for the next seven days. Some of the more chivalrous boys would lie in wait for their prey just at that point of the Marine where the girls of the Queen Mary's College had to cross the sands to the surf beach, timing their walk exactly to that of their counterparts of the fairer sex. How far the fairer and more innocent-looking girls were to be implicated in such affairs. God alone could decide.

As for myself being involved in such activities, I was reputed to be reserved and dignified. After forty years a friend who knew me confirmed this trait in me. I tried to be full of respectability or virtue - but whether I was really so inside is another question which I shall not answer now. My reputation for such had the better of me and I myself trudged behind the ideal that I constantly tried to reach. Once, as I paced up and down the corridors steadily and in my usual dignified manner, I remember that some kind of emotional disaster befell which remains unforgettable to this day. Under the staircase leading to the entrance to the chemistry laboratory on the ground floor of the College were waiting a whole group of girl students, silent together like a shoal of fish. They were hidden from my view as I paced up and down as full as ever of my sense of importance. As I passed a certain point I was all of a sudden face-to-face with this bevy of pretty girls. I was flabbergasted, but as it would have been wounding to my pride to show any overt sign of my confusion, I resolved, mustering all my reserve strength, not to change anything in my demeanour. I kept up the same slow pace and had a hard time getting past the girls. On their part the girls seemed equally affected in the opposing sense, emotionally speaking. They burst all together into laughter. Although again I had committed no overt fault other than to insist wilfully on keeping my own dignity, the circumstances were enough to confuse me and to steep me in deep tribulation. The only other occasion in my life in which anything similar had happened to me was once about five years later when at Alwaye I went to my favourite evening haunt which was a neglected field off the main road round a corner. I had been there many times before but, on a certain day, turning the same corner I found forty wild elephants big and small stabled there.

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I could not believe my eyes for a minute or two. Emotionally speaking and thinking in terms of vectorial psychological space, the herd of wild elephants (which they happened to be) when set upon without notice could be less upsetting than a bevy of pretty girls, more especially at a certain age of the life of a young man, and under certain circumstances. Coming events cast their shadows before.


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CHAPTER SIX

SEX AND IDEALS  
Infancy's silken sail and the vicissitudes of teen and adolescent years are as nothing compared to the stuff implicit in the rough sailing of shy youth passing into full manhood. The personality has to develop through these stages with the sex urge and idealism on either side like two rocks, both of which, when exaggerated, could wreck life and spoil the future irretrievably. My early years at the Presidency College, Madras, were punctuated by an attack of dysentery which had made my health delicate, added to a bad influenza too that took a high toll of life all over the post-war world. I was still adjusting myself to the heat of Madras, consoling myself again and again in my effort to overcome the sense of degradation that the sexual urges asserting themselves more and more strongly in my psycho-physical make-up, called for. I administered different dosages of all available kinds of religious or spiritual palliatives that came my way. This particular period was filled with many silent inner upheavals which I alone knew and had to endure.  

SEX AND IDEALS
Perhaps all men have a similar history to tell or perhaps some are born so pure from the beginning that such trials do not ruffle their sails at all. In my own case the stresses were more innate than overt. Nor did any problems present themselves that others had to solve for me. The dreamy introversion of my type of personality stood me protection here, and all went well on the surface.

I shall not here fall into the error of Rousseau who in his 'Confessions' revealed so much of the inner workings of adolescent impulses as to make respectable men blush and pity him as a lost soul. He himself in the beginning of his confessions challenged any such representation of the conscience of the whole human race to come to the presence of God's throne and if possible to dare to laugh at his own weakness. God could know the weakness of the flesh of all mortals.

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The Christian world especially - which made capital out of the guilt of concupiscence to gain converts in its early days - made sex look completely unnatural. At present there is a revolt of youth which revels in the nausea that a free sex-life must involve. Both excesses, whether in the name of prudery or sin, the profane or the sacred, could present a distorted picture of normal human nature. Austere people in India too talk of celibacy or brahmacharya in highly distorted terms; and persons like Mahatma Gandhi in their autobiographies make out of normal human urges something that has to be confessed with a revenge as it were, to do violence to human nature for which some error is at least normal. Sin should be taken as an exception that proves the normal goodness, dignity and beauty of human nature as created by its Maker.

In spite of these considerations, all cannot be said to have been smooth sailing with me. Sometimes breezes blew strong enough to perturb my tranquillity. I made characteristic errors of omission as well as those of commission which must have made some that knew me intimately at that time smile mildly at least at my expense. I could have been more intelligent and pure but whether all those who dared to blush at my foibles had themselves any inner right to do so is another matter altogether. Like a frail bark tossed about by billows as by wavelets that lapped on its sides, I sailed the high seas of adolescence, past the sensitive shape of youth, to a manhood that held out still more serious trials for me.

Even at this mature age of sixty-seven the tidal ebbs and flows and ground-swells still affect me; but the days of actual bad weather and equally inner disturbances seem now a thing of the past. Life itself seems to be bound up with this question, and to cease to have any movement at all might be identical with loss of all life itself. As death by itself cannot be a meritorious end, the whole problem for man is to be able to look upon sin or concupiscence without distortion or exaggeration. It must be in this sense that Krishna in the Gita tells Arjuna that He, as the Absolute, is himself the representative of kama (the normal life-urge) which finds the third place among the four purusarthas (ends of human life) in Sanskrit lore - the others being dharma (righteousness), artha (wealth) and moksha (release).  

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MY ACADEMIC RECORD
Entering the Presidency College in the year 1915, I continued to live in Madras till the year 1922 when I emerged out of my college career with a first-rank Master's degree in Zoology and Geology. In the early intermediate classes I was by no means a brilliant student but, as I got more and more adjusted to the climatic and inner stresses and strains, I began to shine more, although still overladen with a heavy weight of lethargy. I graduated in the year 1919 with English Literature, which was compulsory for the BA (Pass) Course, and two other science subjects of which Zoology was my main and Geology the secondary subject.

 

The Beach at Presidency College, Madras.

The former subject involved dissections and sometimes vivisection; and although I tried to back out of the choice given to me I was obliged to stick to this subject against my conscience. Many rabbits - not to speak of frogs and cockroaches and one member at least of every important genus or species - came on the dissection table. I remember putting a cobra in a jar with chloroform and cannot forget how it knocked at the glass lid before it was dead. This sin is still lying on my conscience and I do not think I can ever be consoled about it. Once later I had put a pigeon in a cage and forgot that during the holidays that intervened there was no one in the laboratory who could feed it. When I came back it was still alive and I dissected it and found that it had nothing in its gizzard. Even today I am cursing myself for this error of omission and wonder if I deserve to be forgiven at all. I plead guilty before the All-Merciful and supplicate before him for the full punishment I might still deserve if I have not expiated my sin already by any suffering, inner or outer, so far. Absolute self-surrender, I know too, on the other hand, can absolve you of all sin, however grave, as the Gita allows and the Bible recognizes too. It is in such matters that the Absolute becomes the last and the only refuge, although it is true the doctrine is not to be treated as an excuse for error of the same kind to be indulged in in the future. If the surrender is absolute such a contingency would be out of the question anyhow.

After attending the University Convocation in 1919 with cap and gown on passing the Bachelor of Arts degree, I continued in the same Presidency College for one more year preparing for the Master's degree (through the Honours course then open to post-graduates under transitory regulations). Meanwhile my father had retired from the Mysore Government service and had become a pensioner under the Mysore Government. The costly higher education of four of his children began to be talked of as a burden to the family.

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Sensitive as I was to such matters I thought of applying for the place of demonstratorship in Zoology at the Presidency College itself. It brought me a small remuneration of only between sixty or seventy rupees a month. The honours course was completed in one year, but owing to some mistakes in identifying fossils in the practical examination I obtained only pass marks and was given a Bachelor's degree a second time at the end of 1920. I continued next year in the Teachers College, Saidapet, on the outskirts of the city, and sat for the MA and the LT Examinations by special exemption to do so and in the year 1922 passed both examinations together with a rank in the MA and just a scrape through in the LT, to the preparation for which I had not given any special attention, being more concerned in doing well for the Master's examination. If I add here that in the year 1932, ten years later, I got a Doctorate at the University of Paris (after nearly a decade of life as a wanderer) with a 'très honorable' mention, I would have roughly said all I have to say in respect of my academic record.  

 

Saidapet College.

ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE COLLEGE LIFE
The period of my study in the higher grades of university life coincided with developments and activities which were to become significant stepping-stones to my later successes. Elements of altruism and religious sentiment, with some patriotism and dreams of an India free from poverty and ignorance and a strong resentment of the foreign yoke - some of the vagaries of which rule were blended in my imagination and upset my life then rather more than they legitimately ought to have done - as I view my life in calmer retrospection now.

Youth is more alive to values of group life, while the mellowness that age brings turns the spirit on itself, and interests shift their ground from the outer to the inner zone of the person. As it actually happened in my case, before any actual religious feeling was ever felt within me, even vaguely, an extreme compassion or pity for the poor was the first keynote to my inner life. This was felt even from the days at Trinity College, Kandy, Ceylon, as early as 1910, where I was elected a member of the Committee for Social Service under the guidance of one Mr. Campbell, who taught chemistry there.

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Later in the School Final classes of Bangalore the same interest, once awakened at Trinity College, continued to influence my thoughts and activities. I remember how in the environs of the beautiful town of Kandy in Ceylon I used to wander with other schoolmates into the villages distributing epsom salts and quinine. Altruism as an instinct got a chance to be awakened in me at that time and took a stronger hold on me as the years went by. To help the poor out of sheer kindness of fellow-feeling was natural and was perhaps the first step to other spiritual factors or values that entered my life one after another. While later, as I remember, in Bangalore, there being no Social Service Union in the School, I was obliged to organise such a service on my own initiative. I accordingly bought a box with a slot for coins and carried it at school with an appeal for small contributions from fellow-students and teachers, one of which latter, I clearly remember, put a coin in it with an understanding twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face such as made me think that I was, if not a too naive, at least an out-of-the-way fellow.

My ignorance of the fact that one cannot afford to be too good in this harsh world where mere goodness had little chance to withstand the blighting winds that usually prevailed, was all my protection for my innocence at that time. When the box was fairly full, I arranged with the mother of one of my friends in school to cook enough rice and vegetables for about two hundred poor people. Disorganized or promiscuous charity was distasteful to me even then, and for this reason I devised a method of issuing tickets for a free meal and went all over the town issuing them to beggars, riding on a bicycle to spot them and give them directions to reach the place of feeding. These happenings refer to events separated by a decade each between Kandy and Bangalore. About a decade later still, my own sense of doing good took the shape of running a night-school and a hostel for poor students in Chintadripet, Madras, when I was still an honours student in Presidency College.

ALTRUISM IN PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE
Doing good to others is both a natural sentiment and an article of faith. Religion has a different origin. It is the wonder of the visible world which is its starting point, and the God or its equivalent in any religious formation occupies the centre of its cosmology and then becomes revalued into higher and more subtle notions. Of these two sentiments that a young man might feel within himself, the pity for fellow men arises deep down psychologically rather than cosmologically. Theological religion is still another matter which enters the individual through group loyalties in the social context.

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It is true that all these aspects could meet in one Supreme Person, when presented in revised and rearranged form for the purposes of the faithful in different religious groups. The Isa Upanishad has such a God and the Svetasvatara too presents a global and well-rounded notion of the Absolute to meet the three requirements - cosmological, theological, and psychological. At present we are concerned with the sentiment of altruism which was the uppermost expression of sprituality for me at the time. Like the para-kripa or extreme sense of pity that overwhelmed Arjuna in the battlefield, as depicted in the Gita, this sentiment asserts itself normally and naturally as the first overt expression of spirituality in the life of a normal person as a novice in spiritual adventures.

Altruism by itself, however, when treated apart from the good effects that might accrue to the individual reflexively, is not held in high regard in the context of the higher teaching of the Upanishads. There we read that 'ista' and 'purta' (two kinds of works of public benefaction) are attributed to people who are led by the blind and who are foolish and proud. On the other hand there are proverbs which record the popular conviction that doing good to others is meritorious. Vedantic prayers sometimes end with a prayer for the wellbeing of the whole of humanity. How are philanthropy and social service to be fitted into such a context correctly without violating the over-all normative considerations of that subject when scientifically understood? These were questions that had not yet asserted themselves with any definiteness within me during my post-graduate days at the University. Altruism has thus its own correct first principles and applied aspects. When I graduated I was still innocent of its full and correct implication.  

LIFE AT THE VICTORIA HOSTEL
India had hardly any public schools in my time except perhaps those of a quasi-military character or those meant for the ruling classes of the time, who could be the sons of Rajas or Maharajas or those of high officials or other important persons, among whom were to be counted sometimes the large population of those called Anglo-Indian. They used once to be called Eurasians and the name and such a community still persists unabsorbed into the general population of India even to this day.

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The British rulers were not specially interested, at that time at least, in giving to Indians anything more than a clerk or a lower-officer-making education, although some could compete for the Indian Civil Service, which was once a complete preserve of the Britisher. Social life as between the students of a University was mostly unknown in India.

In such a context, life at the Victoria Hostel, where students of various professional and arts colleges of the City of Madras had a common home where they got together each day and got to know each other in spite of the strict social stratifications that prevailed still, was significant. In the rooms all denominations - whether of the so-called castes or of Hindu, Christian or Muslim - rubbed shoulders, but when it came to eating, problems raised their ugly heads. The brahmin would not sit beside the non-brahmin in the same dining room, and even among the brahmins there were those who objected strongly to the use of certain taboo foods, not as between meat and vegetables only but based on certain further scruples against onions, radishes, and so on.

Once I remember there was almost a skirmish over the question of vengaya sambhar (lentil curry with onions) which a certain section of orthodox brahmins would not permit to be cooked in the brahmin section where Smarthas, Madhwas and Iyengars were meant to dine with a common kitchen. There were two kitchens for non-brahmins, one a vegetarian and the other a non-vegetarian, besides a Muslim and a Christian section which were based more on religion rather than on any difference of menu. Over and above these there was a tacit understanding - written or unwritten - by which none of the so-called lower castes, outside the pale of the four main ones, could be admitted in the hostel at all.

The European wardens of the hostel believed that it would be disastrous to break into these traditional distinctions in any way and, as they did not want to face more problems than what already existed, seemed to support the divisions. Whether they were all so bad as to connive at these distinctions to be able to rule better by dividing the people against themselves is not sure.

Anyway, it was a picture that belonged to a sort of ancien regime that presented itself to me when I myself, without declaring myself as belonging to any caste, became a member of the student community there. It was actually a miniature replica and cross-section of the social conditions that prevailed in the larger society outside in that part of India; only these distinctions were magnified and took a more aggravated form, with many more compartments more watertight than in the hostel.

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Could something be done to efface this blot which the new India could and should not tolerate any more, although it could have been taken for granted by a prior generation? This was a question that cropped up within me. I consulted the then warden, Mr. S.E. Ranganathan, who took some more interest in this question, being the first brown-skinned man to be appointed to the post. The pale-faced wardens before were indifferent, and that suited them also. On the other hand the brown-faced man was not orthodox because he happened to be a thorough Englishman himself inside by his education and discipleship of the English. There were many turbaned and black alpaca-coated members of the same generation who were similarly brown-faced but fully westernised inside like the palefaces themselves.

I made a proposition to the warden by which a new section called the cosmopolitan section could be formed in which all students, irrespective of diet or religious scruples, could get the food that suited them. It is not certain if orthodoxies would not enter again by the back door to take their place in institutions of this kind when the common enmity that was a factor that ushered in a spirit of integration or cosmopolitanism was removed, as in present-day India. As it happened the scheme found favour with a warden who happened to be a cultured Indian Christian. He liked the idea at once and wanted me to collect signatures for it. If there was a sufficient number from the two non-brahmin and the Christian and the Muslim sections, the new combined section would be started. Some became scared of the idea and kept aloof and some thought it was not feasible. All was hopeful when, to my surprise, all agreed, and one cosmopolitan section with vegetarianism as optional could bring together for the first time the students who had before to sit at separate tables, though fellow students in modern India. The very first combined meal was to take place in the evening and the success or failure of the project was still hanging in the balance because there were whispers among the cooks and servants, who raised objections at the last moment, saying that some of them would not remove the banana leaves (on which food in India is served) of the non-Hindus who were going to be admitted.

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As the chief organizer I was again in distress when one of the servants was reported to be weeping in a corner at about eight at night because he thought he would lose his caste forever if he removed the leaves of the Muslims and Christians. The situation was critical and all was going to be lost again after victory had actually been sighted! If the leaves remained unremoved for any length of time a major problem would have been created. There was no use arguing with a poor man caught in the adverse logic of superstitious emotion. To have tried it would have been disastrous. No time was to be lost. I got a new idea. Let me remove the leaves myself the first day. Two or three others were there ready to follow my lead. We quickly started to remove the leaves and the sentimental objection was over. Once faced squarely, the problem lost all momentum and could not present itself any more. All went well from the next day and I hear that this cosmopolitan section is the biggest section in the old Victoria Hostel today. I remember dining there once again several years after, but I sat among the students a perfect stranger, unrecognised as the one who got the idea once upon a time. As Heraclitus said, one cannot enter into the same river twice.


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CHAPTER 7

THE TAO AND MY DESTINY
The days I was to spend in Madras as an undergraduate student were coming to an end by the year 1920. I remember the transition day at the beginning of the term of that year, when I went on a bicycle from the Victoria Hostel in Chepauk to the Saidapet Teachers' College.

My demonstratorship at the zoological laboratories had been artificially terminated by a favouritism exercised by the then officer in charge in favour of his would-be son-in-law; and I could not return to my work there, being cut off from below, as it were.

This was my first foretaste of the stresses and strains that prevailed in the world of jobs in the India of my time, into which netherworld I had just had occasion to peep. The whole story needs to be related with all its horrors and its skeleton closets in a section by itself. This, however, did not disconcert me. My career was just starting and the more the doors at which I knocked at this stage, the brighter and more varied would be the possibilities that opened themselves to me.

In such a spirit of open adventure I trusted to chance more than to any set plan of action. The chance of the Tao had to operate and lead me from one open door to another so that my true nature would have full opportunity to express itself. The doors of chance are open everywhere to man, especially at the inception of his career. Whether called 'fate' or the 'will of God', or 'the tide in the affairs of men', there is, to the keen observer of the unfolding of one's own life, a light that leads or a thread that guides from event to event, as chance flits by occasionalism as if from one tree to another. No button must be pressed before its time and no petal unfolded before the time of full blooming has come. No fruit should be plucked when still immature. Chance must work its delicate way through the maze of possibilities and probabilities. Providence must have a full chance for working out one's salvation without the intervention of one's own egotistic will which, when it enters into the picture, tampers with the natural and overt orientation of overall interests as they develop in a certain living order within.                    

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Such were the thoughts that vaguely worked within me when I set out from the courtyard of the Victoria Hostel, pressing my hands on the bicycle handle, to continue my studies, as it happened, for one more year to finish my education in India.

I must say that the Tao did work and decided for me without my initiating any action myself. I kept myself strictly neutral internally and said to myself that the bicycle itself was free to turn to the Teachers' College or to the Presidency College again. I remember how, on leaving the gate of the hostel it turned towards Triplicane, en route to Saidapet Teachers' College, six or seven miles off, without permitting me for a minute to exercise any preference for one career to dominate the other. A teacher's career was thus selected for me by the will of the Tao or the Absolute, which is not other than the neutral point of life where possibilities and probabilities have full freedom to operate. The word 'God' is going out of fashion in the modern scientific world, but means the same factor of chance in the context of transcendentalism. His will was thus done.

MY PHILANTHROPIC INTERESTS MATURE
Altruistic or philanthropic motives often take the form of works of benefaction ranging from localized charity to the high aim of wishing the true happiness of mankind as a whole. As in the case of the rise and development of the religious instinct in man, this parallel passion for doing good grows and matures in its own way in the life of individuals.

In my own case I have indicated how its first leaves were unfolded in the days when I was wandering among the forests and rivers of the up-country of Ceylon, distributing quinine and Epsom salts as a student in the matriculation classes. By the time I had reached the graduate courses at Madras I had seen what the limitations were in the matter of large-scale feeding of fellow humans. The feedings at the birthdays of great saints like Swami Vivekananda, Narayana Guru or Sri Ramakrishna at which I participated off and on in my school and college career, must have also helped to mature and shape these deep instincts within me in the course of the years.

What I called to myself 'poor-feeding' was a sort of surrogate of religion with me when I was still an undergraduate at the Presidency College. From the mere doing good to others in the relativistic sense to the love of fellow man in a more truly spiritual sense, is a far cry which, in the case of many persons, even educated and fully informed, remains still disjunct in the growth and development of general life-interests and connected activities, without any organic link between them.

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It was again the personality of Narayana Guru that added to the situation thus conceived mechanistically and in a prosaic manner, that little touch which, as it were, leavened the whole lump, transmuting what was dull metal and giving to the tendency that noble lustre which distinguishes true spirituality. I shall take a pace backwards to tell how it happened.

LOVE OF GOD AND GOD'S LOVE OF MAN
Every schoolboy knows Leigh Hunt's poem of Abu Ben Adhem (whose tribe must have increased by now manyfold). His problem was to distinguish between the love of God and the love of fellow man. Dialectically understood they are equally valuable but, taken unilaterally, one works to the detriment of the other. Here again the question of double gain or total loss is involved.

It was in the year 1920, when I had not yet finished college, that I used to go to teach after eight in the night in a certain poor area of the City of Madras which could be called a slum. What makes a slum by outwardly evident signs of poverty or overcrowding is often very misleading in India. Streamlined areas in the suburbs of New York that I have known have some essential slum qualifications. What these exactly are it is very hard to put down, but when neighbours are so close to each other so as to have to speak of their domestic secrets in public when they happen to quarrel - especially in matters of sex - that to me determines whether a place is a slum or not, however apparently affluent in other matters. When people have to queue for bare necessities such as breakfast, or even run for change to put in a slot for opening a room of public convenience, they are competing with fellow man and thus proving themselves to have a very poor slum life indeed. This happens in the heart of very rich cities like London.

An Indian slum which might appear ramshackle might still preserve precious human values intact, and in a South Indian village of the poorest, lowliest and lost people, one often finds preserved the remains of a civilization five thousand years old, where the smell of the cattle refuse and the ashes that people wear on their foreheads in the name of the timeless Shiva, adds a spiritual touch to life which is not in evidence in many mansions of the rich in other parts of the world. In such a holy slum it was that I found myself one night giving language lessons and sometimes writing petitions for the 'poor' who were occasionally beaten up by the police or refused admission into hospitals.

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CASTES AND GANDHI
It was late at night once while I sat in the anteroom of a neglected public building in Chintadripet. The regular students had gone and I was left with some social workers who were members of an association called the Advaita Bhakta Sabha, a socio-religious organization started by one Kalathoor Muniswami Pillay. This gentleman was supposed to be a member of the Adi-Dravida community, which was a name given then to what the English social reformers of a previous generation would have called the 'Depressed Classes of India'. Elsewhere one refers to them as the 'fifth caste' or 'pancamas'.

 

Adi Dravidas.

 

Actually, this stratum of society one day represented the topmost in India before the invading hordes who entered into the fertile Gangetic and other plains of India had added newer and newer strata above them, as it were, submerging this group which represented perhaps the oldest of the proto-Aryan civilization, not far removed from the time of the Indus Valley civilizations now revealed in the Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa excavations.

Great names like that of Saint Tiruvalluvar, author of the Tiru-Kural, perhaps the wisest book of maxims ever written, about the beginning of the Christian Era in South India, were associated with the same stratum. They represented an economically and politically defeated people who retained traditionally the best in the history of India. What corresponded to the dominant section that over-covered this ancient and precious stratum was that of the 'Brahmins', which consisted of tribes who claimed Vedic orthodoxy which was to be traced to the Aryan invaders. The earlier however, though 'depressed' were superior by true spiritual heritage although, due to domination and defeat, they seemed to lack outer social refinements.

The Aryanized group who dominated these ancient peoples, sometimes by better refinements, sometimes by shrewdness - as reflected in the stories such as that of Nala and Damayanti or Harischandra, or even in the story of the Pandavas - were really inferior to them when true spiritual values were put on the balance.

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The Adi-Dravidas were thus custodians of proto-Aryan traditions of a more ancient stratum, but were defeated and derided, although they conserved in their culture the highest of Indian spiritual values. The 'Brahmin' was thus the rival of the 'Pariah', and to this day this distinction and the dialectical challenges and responses involved between these two sections have vitiated the social, economic and political life of India and continue to present problems that are not soluble except by some sort of root-and-branch reform.

 

 

Adi Dravida Housing in Madras.

 

I was then acting as a secretary to this group, who were later named 'Harijans' by Mahatma Gandhi, who came back to India after the Round Table Conference which Ramsay Macdonald, the then British Prime Minister, had called together in London to consider the claims of Indians to rule themselves.

At the time I refer to, even Mahatma Gandhi was not sympathetic to the cause of the poor people, and only after his return from the Round Table Conference did he even consent to treat the problem as deserving any attention at all. During the visit of Gandhi about this time, around 1921, in Madras, I myself remember to have invited him to make a halt of a few minutes when passing through the Chintadripet area to receive a garland from these lowly people. But this request was not granted.

After returning from the London Conference, a sadder and wiser man went far in the opposite direction, and even changed the name of his weekly journal which was called 'Young India' into 'Harijan', which was to support the cause of the 'Harijans' so that they would not prove an impediment to the attainment of independence for India.

Whether he was against the 'varnashrama' theory, on which castes in India largely rested for their theoretical justification and nourishment, is still an open question. Subsequent pronouncements in connection with the Vaikom Satyagraha, and even the one in the 'Harijan' itself during the very week of his tragic assassination, would tend to make this sufficiently clear. I was myself torn between admiration for Gandhian ideologies - of which I tried very earnestly to understand the subtle logic, even with a certain fervour - and confusion about their intricacies. Some of his arguments seemed tortuous to me, but I could not offer any alternative to them myself at that time.

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NANDA AND NANDA'S OWN PEOPLE
While these upheavals were taking place within, the social activities in which I was engaged during out-of-college hours had assumed a still more mature form. Instead of occasional poor-feeding I thought in terms of night-schools; and, not content either with that kind of part-time institution, I became connected with the founding of a hostel for so-called Harijan students in Chintadripet. A temporary shed had been put up, with palm-leaf thatching and side partitions of the same material, on a piece of land which had been recently acquired at the instance of Narayana Guru who came into the scene in his own mysterious way, which I was on the point of describing a moment ago and from where I must continue now, as the incident by itself was a great turning-point in my life.

It happened roughly as follows. As I said, I was one night lingering late after my night-school teaching work. The senior members of the group had just a fortnight before produced a play called 'Nandanar' which referred to the life of a saint who is supposed to have belonged to the untouchable section of the community. The night-school that had been started and the hostel students who were to be looked after needed funds. But I was still thinking in terms of feeding the poor. The play was staged in George Town, Madras, and brought us some surplus amount after the expenses were deducted. This was to be utilized for feeding as many of the poor of the locality as possible on the next Sunday.

While I was discussing these plans in the anteroom rather late, there arrived a tall and slender old man with a muffler round his shaven head and tucked below the chin. The man was about sixty and was not well, appearing to be suffering from some cold. He came straight into the room where I was engaged in the conversation with the social workers. He was the Guru Narayana, whose contact I had made even from my childhood and who was destined to influence my life in that special way only known to the world to which Gurus and Sisyas belong, to the exclusion of all other considerations whatsoever.

The reason why he had made this late appearance and done me the honour of showing such interest in my work remains a mystery to me to this day. He spoke to me very kindly and tried to understand what I was doing. He approved of it but seemed to want to add something more than what I could guess on the subject of doing good to others.

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I could only vaguely imagine at the time that he was not enthusiastic about me in any all-out sense as I myself happened to be, but kept some reserve thoughts to himself on this subject of doing good or being good in this world. More than this I was not able to gather. A few days later however, there was a 'poor-feeding', as I called it, at the same place at which the Guru again took the trouble of doing me the honour of his presence.

A GURU LESSON
This time I felt a sense of elation and goodness within me as the food was being distributed. I said to myself that the Guru would agree with me that I was a good man trying to do good to fellow man, but the Guru made no comments implying any praise for me or for the kind of work I was doing. He asked me what all that was going on was about and I replied that it was 'feeding the poor'. I had in my mind the 'daridra narayanas' (poor gods) that I had heard talked about in such a connection. 'Which poor?' he asked. 'We are all poor in a certain sense', he added.

A new clarification about the very nature of altruism or philanthropy dawned on me when I looked at the silent and sedate face of the Guru who put me a simple question: 'Which poor people?' He seemed to suggest that all of us were poor internally if not externally, or none was poorer than the other. By feeling sympathy for the so-called poor section of society the poverty becomes shared at once in principle at least, and the division between the two sections  becomes or ought to be automatically abolished. This was a subtle difference that one might dismiss as highly dialectical, but all the same it did the trick for me for ever, because I began to realize that the real poverty resided in my heart; and when I came under the influence of a dualistic sense of pity and felt myself to be a benefactor, the very purpose of beneficence in a total or absolute sense was defeated.

One who suffers from extreme pity, like Arjuna on the battlefield, contributes his share of suffering to the total situation of human general happiness and, if each person should follow this example, we have the picture of humanity multiplied by so many individuals, each of whom brought his suffering to bear on the general situation.

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The correct way would be for each to think of bringing his own happiness to bear on the total situation, so that total or general happiness would prevail.

A lesson was thus learnt by me which I was able to confirm and verify in the light of proper dialectics only many years later when I became familiar with the ancient classical dictum of 'All for One and One for All' which gave the correct relational formula which would  spell double gain in such a matter.

The Guru himself on another occasion clarified the matter when he put the delicate question in the form of an arithmetical problem. Supposing there were one hundred hungry people to be fed and  ninety-nine had sat down for the meal, while one remained over to serve the others, remaining hungry when all were happily going through with the feast. The suffering of this last man would reflect on the total situation as a negative element which would detract from the general happiness and compromise it altogether. Philanthrophy has thus its own dialectical laws which do not brook violation.

THE GURU COLLABORATES WITH MY WORK
I looked at the problem of doing good still from the relativistic side; but the same question of doing good was viewed from another standpoint by the Guru. The work in itself might seem the same in content, but the context and approach to the same work were radically different.

In popular maxims such as 'Charity begins at home', and the other that indicates the opposite, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', we have the two different attitudes represented which show two different approaches to doing good to fellow man. Both are true in the context of the overall absolute Value; and how to reconcile one with the other is an art which the absolutist way of life alone could justify. It was the Guru Narayana who, in his own unobtrusive way, put me on the path of the Absolutist approach to this problem, and once the new approach was grasped in its spirit it could be made to apply to other, and in fact every other department of thought or activity. There is always a relative and an absolutist approach to problems, and the former spells tragedy while the latter solves all problems.

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As the secretary of the Adi-Dravida Sabha I tried hard to get a plot of land for the use of the night-school and for the purpose of a place of worship for which the community badly felt the need. One of the office-bearers thought that Narayana Guru could help in the matter. He was staying as the guest of a Dharma-karta (Chief Trustee) of a temple which possessed certain lands in that area which were suitable for the purpose.

The Guru was approached the next day. When the question of the land was mentioned the Guru straightaway gave the assurance that if it was badly needed it would be obtained. 'Which was the land required?' he asked, and before the next twenty-four hours were over, he stood on a piece of land adjoining the river at Chintadripet, pointing out to members of the Sabha the land they could get. All practical arrangements for its transfer were made at once, and I was myself struck with the speed and the spontaneity with which all this was done.

A hostel for four or five students was put up on the plot and a corner of it was set apart for a Ganesh Temple which was put up only later. The funds for maintaining the hostel students free of any charge to be paid by them, was partly obtained through Miss Mrinalini Chattopadhyaya who had come from Hyderabad in those days to settle down in Madras. She was the well-known daughter of Dr. Aghornath Chattopadhyaya who was a high official in Hyderabad, and one of whose other daughters was Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who became famous both as a poet and a leader in the political life of India in later years. The ease and grace with which the Guru thus collaborated in my efforts to help my fellow man was another eye-opener for me. It was surely one of those events that influenced the course of my life activities for many years to come.


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CHAPTER EIGHT

FINDING MY SVADHARMA
The Tao it was that decided for me the teacher's career. The handle of the bicycle that I rode out of the gates of the Victoria Hostel at Chepauk took me past Triplicane and on to Mount Road which went to the Mount of St. Thomas, about a dozen miles or more due east of the city, by a broad and straight highway. Mount Road within the city limits is the shopping centre which is fast changing its earlier colonial and mercantile complexion to wear at present a modernised though not fully streamlined look. I went past the outskirts of the city leaving my mute machine to lead me where it willed, if it had any will at all.

Soon I arrived in full view of the whitewashed, old-fashioned buildings of the Teachers' College through whose portals many a teacher of the southern region of India must have passed to gain admission properly into the teaching profession. This profession was however not a favoured or a glamorous one for those who thought in terms of a career or looked for soft jobs, which was the rage of the period for every university graduate of my time. The round two-storeyed part of the buildings, built in a mixture of Renaissance, Byzantine, Gothic and Mogul styles with arches and columns which were mixed promiscuously, was a specimen of bad standards in architecture, but was good enough for those times when the atmosphere of the days of the East India Company still lingered on in Greater Madras.

Colonialism had to thrive on certain elements for which the educational policy had to pave the way in certain indirect and subtle ways. Although, therefore, this institution that I now entered was to make of me an educator, it did nothing much more than to shape me as a schoolmaster who in turn was to bring out from the machinery called the educational system of the time roughly-finished robot personalities who could be used to fit into gaps, round or square, as they existed actually in the limbs of the Empire. They had to be turned out in mass to supply the demand, whether in India, Burma or Ceylon, and sometimes in South or East Africa too.

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LIFE IN SAIDAPET
By my state of mind, as well as by my outer life occupations, the academic year of 1921-22 which I had to spend at the Teachers' College was a chapter in itself. Rural conditions of the region outside the city suburbs proper prevailed here, and one breathed the clean air free from suspicious gases and fumes, while one drank well-water without suspicion of the chlorination or fluorination which made city waters often suspect. There was a stream too on the outskirts of the grounds of the Teachers' College which was accessible for occasional baths when one felt like it; though the water was somewhat hard and the current rather too sluggish to make it fully interesting. There was plenty of leisure on Saturdays and Sundays and one could take random walks in the flat country around, which was mostly uncultivated and had clusters of trees, grass plots or reeds nearer the water's edge.

The bird life was interesting; and as one lay on the bank of the stream and watched the snails that went gliding by and the millipedes, scorpions and snakes that abounded there, one felt a true naturalist on the prowl. Suddenly a bird took off from a thicket and one saw the hoopoe - the so-called crested woodpecker - as also the true woodpecker. The mango bird and the paradise flycatcher were also in evidence, as also the heavy 'seven sisters' who hopped on the ground under bushes. One heard also the long-drawn voice of the Indian cuckoo to add a touch of mystery to the leisure time which I spent for many hours off and on.

The change from the life at the Victoria Hostel to the life with well-water, bathing sheds and primitive comfort amenities provided was a marked one with me. Adolescence was left behind for ever but the responsibilities of manhood stared me in the face, as it were, from a nearer future more than ever. Some of the intimate friendships that I had cultivated at the Victoria Hostel had attained a fully sentimental coloration by the time I had to leave that institution where I had just begun to have a foretaste of manhood and its normal emotional contents.

To watch the passing clouds as I lay leisurely at the middle of the day under the shady neem trees that grew wild in the area, was also a pastime that I indulged in now and then.

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The villagers themselves represented the Tamils, who had behind them a continuous history, mostly undisturbed, for at least two thousand years; and although these simple, dark, wiry and tall peasant types could not compare with the Bengal Lancer or the Rajputs of North India who robbed all the glory from them, especially in the eyes of a newcomer to India - still half-naked and dirty as they often were - they were a people who endeared themselves to anyone intimate with them for any long period. Gentle and full of a spirit of reverence, they were mostly mute and often in rags just big enough to fully cover their loins. Their language knows no harsh word nor the harsh voice of the Hun which was foreign to the South altogether. Such humble people must be dear to God, and this was one of the items that made life in Saidapet memorable to me.

Star-gazing on certain clear nights, naturalizing and making a special study of the birds of the locality for a model lesson that I was to give; inwardly stricken by certain friendships with fellow-students or those left behind in the City; with many a pining day of languishing love or affection for individuals mainly of the same sex in a way that should have more properly applied to one of the opposite sex, as in keeping with my age which had passed twenty-five at that time; with games with teenage children of the model school attached to the Training College, of which I happened to be in charge for a time; with some picnics with schoolboys, two of whom were discovered to be rarely gifted in vocal music, whom I and another kidnapped into town into the Victoria Hostel one evening, each seated on a bicycle handle, to the consternation of their parents who missed them at night while they entertained a group of elder students in the City Hostel - these are some of the items, memories or associations which made this period a dear one to be remembered all my life.

To love and be loved by all with whom one came into contact, with a whole lifetime's career and opportunities ahead to which one was getting internally and externally adjusted; with many interests, some artistic, some literary, political and economic getting started as days went by; with daily newspaper reading as a regular habit - not taking the eyes off them from front-page headlines almost to the end of the last column - absorbing the information which nourished sometimes merely the outward life, but occasionally the inner springs also where life interests had their origin - these made this period of my life very rich in inner developments almost every day.

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THE FORMATION OF A PEDAGOGUE             
Inside the walls the life in the Teachers' College itself was not of a bright or interesting order. The one-year post-graduate course was both to obtain a Licentiate in teaching from the University and have departmental permission to teach in the High Schools or in the Colleges. Training in the teaching of English was binding on all, but as for other subjects they were divided into groups of Science or Letters - the former having its own groupings of Physics and  Mathematics and another of Physics and the Natural Sciences.

By my previous qualifications I belonged to the last-mentioned grouping and continued my days in the Natural Science Laboratories attached to this group. We had observation lessons to do and  notebooks to fill about the matter and method used in the classrooms and the five formal steps of Herbart. The heuristic method was adopted with the recognized 'apperception mass' by which new learning was grafted onto the old. Rousseau's name came in only rarely and when it came at all he was dismissed as a hypochondriac and a sentimental man of tears who stood for nothing practical, dignified or worthwhile. Montessori was made much of because the experimental material with which she worked with children in the name of what was called 'sense training' - although it did not fit in with any serious educational philosophy - lent itself to be used in the elementary schools. Pestalozzi's was another name that was often mentioned; but not much of his spirit in education was actually introduced in the actual methods used, where Herbartian steps were almost all that were applied.

Most of the lectures given by the government-salaried professors and lecturers were mere repetitions of notes left on some subjects by old incumbents in the office generations ago. Dusty and musty notebooks were repeated ad nauseam and new ideas had hardly any chance to penetrate into the theory or practice of education. The Project Method and the Dalton Plan were found mentioned in textbooks, but I have known some school inspectors of my time dismiss such new-fangled ideas as too fanciful. The schoolmasters who went out of the portals of the Saidapet Teachers' College year after year were thus mere old-fashioned models who continued their humdrum existence in one of the least attractive careers, torn as they were between the needs of departmental red tape on one side and any originality that might have vaguely asserted itself in them on the other in certain rare instances only, even at that.

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THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EDUCATION
Among the batch of trainees to which I myself belonged there was a gentleman of advanced years who had already served in the clerical section of the education departmental offices for quite a number of years. The then principal of the Teachers' College, Mr. R.G. Grieve, was once presiding over a criticism lesson given by this elderly teacher. The man's lesson, as I remember, was excellent and he used the correct methods as laid down in the textbooks. He was dealing with a lesson on how best to teach the parts of speech and he used a special method which some expert educationalist of the Indian Service had himself developed in which the noun was described as a person who occupied a certain house as its owner. When he had to be away there was another man who substituted for him, and this was the status of the pronoun. This kind of personification and analogical allegory was developed so as to bring the adjective and adverb ingeniously into the story. Like the metaphysical poetry of the Shakespearean or Post-Shakespearean period of English literature, this kind of ingenuity was in order and quite respectable in the course conceived for the teachers' formation.

In fact after this lesson the principal who was presiding was all praise for the model lesson. He added also that this elderly trainee was head clerk for many years and had applied for a change from the clerical to the teaching side and had waited many years for his prayer to be granted. This case throws light on how the whole matter was treated as a routine governmental affair without fresh living influences being brought to the problem involved. In applying the heuristic method (eliciting answers through questions) on another occasion, I remember how a teacher wanted to teach trade-winds to the fourth form and began to prepare the students for the subject by asking the question of what they would do if there happened to be a bonfire in the middle of the class room. He pointed at a boy with thick spectacles who had the reputation of being intelligent. The boy stood up readily and answered 'We shall run away from the class, Sir'. It took the teacher much time to get started on his subject properly with other questions and excuses. Sometimes in the fourth form one came up against a boy who knew all about the course that the training teachers had themselves to undergo and anticipated intelligently what the teacher would expect him to answer. He was in the know, not only of what was legitimately required of him as a member of his grade, but over and above that, had understood what the post-graduate teachers under training expected him to answer in view of their educational theory and practice.

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The intelligence of some young homo sapiens is sometimes surprising. Lectures on the 'Theory and Practice of Education' were mostly pet ideas of certain teachers in London who wrote textbooks on the subject for the use of the London County Council or such bodies that functioned as part of Government departments with a heavy machinery that propelled them through recommendations of educational commissions, supplemented or complicated by much red tape.

Textbook committees and university authorities had also to have their say; and modifications came too because of political reasons when parties changed at the helm of affairs. Real education was a living process which could hardly thrive in such an atmosphere. Innate conflict at the core of what is called 'education for citizenship' and 'education to make the man' was not even distantly recognized when policies were outlined and programmes laid down by the authorities.  

METHOD FOR ITS OWN SAKE
The kindergarten and the Montessori Method sections were by far the most interesting part of the Teachers' College. This section was located in the best part of the building, as it deserved to be, and was in charge of a fully-trained lady of European descent. As the name itself suggests, the kindergarten has its origins in the German-speaking world. It is an expression of the New School Movement that started in Europe in recent years and is based on a programme of interest rather than on a programme of subjects. Paedocentricity is its central doctrine by which the child is given the central place and the teacher stands aside and watches and, as it were, only waters the garden as in a nursery of plants. Froebel and Pestalozzi have represented this child-centered free activity school. Creative activities were to be encouraged.

The freedom of the child and respect for his individuality were also principles involved in this kind of education. Here again what Rousseau understood as negative education in his monumental work called 'Emile' was hardly understood in England and consequently ignored by educational authorities in India, who were only disciples of English leaders of educational theory.

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Experimental education had moreover brought into vogue an educational policy based on measurement, mainly with the help of brass instruments. The triumph of science as a subject for students in general overcovered the humanities, and any form of education that was not bookish but had plenty of gadgets or instruments caught the imagination of the authorities more easily than intellectual work. This acted even to the detriment of proficiency in the three R's; and orthographic, etymological and syntactical errors became more and more common with schoolchildren. Calligraphy, which received great attention in old schools, was neglected to such an extent that it collapsed altogether except in the case of a gifted few.

I took my normal share in this youngest section of the Teachers' College and remember that the mistress in charge set the training students the task of making small paintings that would interest the children of the section. This gave me a fresh chance of cultivating further my ability to use the paintbrush after an interval of two or three years, before which, during a summer holiday I applied myself to this alluring hobby of watercolour painting. Starting with pencil drawings, I had tried my hand at watercolours while I was graduating, and this opportunity to do the same with kindergarten children in my mind gave me just that incentive to be a painter again, though for a short time only.

This has given me also an insight into painting as an art. Art is something that takes place at once within and outside the vectorial space of the mind. The colours of the palette as an artist paints indicate, in principle at least, the mirror-image of the inner creative centre where all art originates in the artist. A Picasso or a Goya is admired by a high-born rich lady who pays any price for it, not only because of the line, light or colour, but also because it represents the inside of an artist which the intuitive eye can represent behind the splashes of paint that might have actually been put on the canvas by the artist any old how. Impressionists, cubists and surrealists succeed because they project their own inner vectorial space to the outside, just in the same way as a self-chosen menu can reveal the nature of the hunger or appetite of a person. A still-life representing a dead rabbit or glass of wine with a peculiar check-pattern tablecloth and perhaps a guitar lying beside it, can have no interest other than when viewed as an ensemble that hangs together in the inner mental space of a pavement artist in Montmartre or Westminster. The free-activity programmes of Froebel and Pestalozzi cater to the need for an early cultivation of good taste in the inner life of the growing bambino.

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Montessori sense-training is quite another matter altogether. We know that Madame Montessori started her career in Rome with defective children. Their sense-organs needed some kind of readjustment and she took much pains to invent little toys and other objective devices by which she could help the establishment of normal functioning of the senses. Unfortunately, however, when this method, so laboriously developed in the context of defective children, was applied bodily to normal children of the infant classes, many anomalies traceable to the origin of the method got carried over automatically into the domain of normal child education. As a result we witness sometimes the glorification of a method of teaching for its own sake.  

PENALIZING THE INTELLIGENCE
I remember many years later to have gone to Rome and visited the very school in which Madame Montessori developed her methods. There I was taken round by a nice italian signorina to the class where multiplication in arithmetic was being taught. I was shown how a child was compelled to do multiplication according to the rationalized and experimental method so laboriously devised by Madame Montessori. I was told that this method was superior to any other random method. By being compelled to follow this new method strictly, the child had to erase in its mind and forget about any other method of multiplication than the one recognized by the school and exacted by the teacher.

A clever pupil, by the play of its natural mathematical instincts, might have developed a method by which it could muddle through and arrive at a valid answer. There was the possibility also of it having been already taught a non-Montessori method of multiplication and that it had got the swing of that habit well established. All this had to be scrapped for the glorification of the new method which governments imposed on the child - and this involved an unnecessary painful duplication of learning effort on the part of the child. What was more unjust to the nature of the child was to make it retrace its steps and forget something that had become part and parcel of its intellectual equipment. Like the unfairness of carrying a duck head downwards or making a horse walk backwards when tied to a cart, child-life with its bugbear of drudgery became more unnecessarily burdened still when pedagogues made their methods of teaching ends in themselves, as they often did in educational practice.

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THE END OF UNIVERSITY LIFE
A tall, soft-spoken, shy bachelor past forty-five, R.G. Grieve, as already mentioned, was the principal of the Teachers' College of my time. He took his rounds on horseback every morning and indirectly kept one supervising eye on the drill classes that were compulsory for all teachers, some of them very elderly, who were sent for training from colleges all over South India, sometimes late in their career. The morning mists had not disappeared in September months when one had to obey the commands of an elderly drill sergeant whose shrill orders rent the cool air as we turned right about. The situation had a touch of humour when heavy-turbanned middle-aged professors with a big family at home had to behave like robot toy soldiers on the Teachers' College playfield.

The principal was bound to enforce this on the unwilling grown-ups by governmental rules, and the principal on horseback was only satisfying his conscience in the matter. He did the same sometimes at night to see if the students of the hostel attached to the college were behaving properly, taking them up for noisy behaviour now and then. This shy English bachelor took classes on educational theory and did justice to it conscientiously in his own way, but this did not mean that there was anything original or new in what he contributed to the discussions. He just toed the line of his predecessors in office and much remained bland and uninteresting tripe.

Spending his days in a big bungalow with more than one servant to whom he hardly spoke during the whole day, except lisping certain words from beneath his mustache, he was a silent lonely man who had to look serious to the point of outward grumpiness, mostly put on for administrative reasons. He must have remained fully human inside. He was the last of the Englishmen under whom I studied or got trained for the teacher's calling, although once after the intermediate examination I had tried for admission into the  Medical College, some formality omitted at the time or detail overlooked in my form of application stood in my way then to become a medico like my father, although he had moved heaven and earth, as it were, to make the Principal of the Madras Medical College overlook the slight irregularity to get me admitted - but failed in his efforts, although the then highest officer in the Medical Department recommended my case. The hand of the Tao had worked to make of me a humble schoolmaster rather than one who cut up human bodies and got paid for very dirty though helpful work.

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I was thus saved from living in the harsh world of the dissection-table which had nothing much in common with contemplation, for which I had perhaps been predestined. In the light of a later chapter of austerity that I entered after my life in Teachers' College after 1922, I should have known to have said goodbye forever to a pattern of life in which I grew up from my earliest days of education. The changeover was such that a tragic sadness would have lingered over it, because I did not in actual life avail myself of any of the material benefits that ordinarily accrue to one after passing examinations and completing courses. I was soon to leave this comfortable world of salaried jobs for ever and lapse into the status of a beggar and wanderer which was to continue all my life thereafter.        

BIRD LIFE AND PEACE
I had to give a model lesson about the birds of the countryside round Saidapet to the boys of the fourth form. I worked at the details of this lesson with special care and kept the schoolroom requirements strictly in mind while bringing into the lesson as much originality and fresh air as could be admitted. The plumage, habits and the cries or songs of the main kinds of birds with which the wooded areas were crowded with noisy life came into my lesson. The boys caught the spirit of the open-air lesson quickly; and when I asked them to be silent and orderly because otherwise the birds of the wood would be disturbed they understood and subdued their animal spirits and tuned themselves perfectly to the quiet harmony of natural bird and animal life where every being hunted on its own grounds according to the law of the jungle, sometimes superior to that of the human. The king crow, the kingfisher, the hooded and non-hooded or the real and so-called woodpeckers, the brain-fever bird, the coppersmith and the Indian mynah; the sparrow and koel, known for its voice rather than its plumage, with the corvus splendens and some sea-shore birds that came ashore - together made a subject for study which had a quietly contemplative influence on the mind, almost like that of religions like Quakerism, whose followers are known to have indulged in this kind of hobby for their Sunday afternoon programmes.

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My model lesson in bird study was mentioned many years after by a fellow student who had served Government for three decades and retired and was recorded as a success in the archives of the Teachers' College itself. In spite of this, however, all I got was a third-class pass in the actual examination at the end of the year. Several reasons conspired to make this near-failure in comparison with the academic success which generally attended me otherwise. For one thing I did not take seriously to the studies because I was also appearing for the M.A. the same year by special permission; and the latter naturally took more of my interest and attention than the former, which I did not treat seriously. But this reason was not all, as I shall presently narrate.  

I DABBLE IN GANDHISM AND NEUTRALISM

 

The Prince of Wales visits India.

In the year 1921 the Prince of Wales was to visit India. Mahatma Gandhi had by then returned to India after his passive resistance campaign had succeeded in South Africa. He became the head of the Indian National Congress and began to take over the whole of what was till then called the Home Rule Movement, and which was under the leadership of that remarkable woman, Annie Besant, who became President of the Calcutta Session of the Indian National Congress.

Gandhism caught the imagination of the youth of that generation as no other ideology did. Gandhiji conceived and advised the programme of the boycott of the visit of Prince Edward VIII of Wales. This programme of Satyagraha had its theory and practice developed by Gandhiji himself, and whether it squared with anything known on the Indian soil before or not, or was only a version of a Tolstoian or Thoreauish approach to problems, is an open question. It is true, however, that he was influenced by the former who is said to have, while still living, corresponded with Gandhiji on the subject of Indian liberation. All that we have to remember is that it was a home-made affair into the texture of which the religious attitude of the devotees of Vishnu of the Gujarat area and some touch of Jain asceticism and ahimsa (the non-hurting principle) entered with some elements of his own personal ideology, developed after certain 'Experiments with Truth', as he called them, as seen from the title of the book that he devoted to the subject.

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The whole student population of Madras, as all over India, joined hands in this signal of protest announced by the new leader. The Teachers' College students, however, were in a position of disadvantage in this matter because most of them belonged to the Government Department proper. I too received an annual stipend of about two hundred rupees (divided over eight months) which amount was returnable if I did not serve the Department after my course was over. Most students had a divided loyalty to face. On the one hand there was their loyalty based on bread and butter which demanded of them obedience to the wishes of the Government; and on the other hand there were the demands of the surgings of patriotism within themselves. In most cases they adopted an unstraightforward method. They were expected by circulars from the Head Office to counter the Gandhian campaign by turning out in full force at the pavilions set apart for them in the en route reception that was elaborately arranged for the Prince's visit. Even incumbents of lunatic asylums and prisons were said to have been used departmentally to fill the empty benches and galleries arranged for the Royal Visitor.

The students, most of them, took sick leave to escape the behaviour imposed on them, and others put forward other leave excuses. Although I was myself a Gandhite, generally speaking, there were many doctrines and particular items of his theory and practice which did not square with my own principles of justice and straightforwardness. It is true that I wore khaddar (home-woven cloth of handspun yarn) even when at the Victoria Hostel. The Vaikom Satyagraha had revealed that Gandhiji was not wholely for abolishing caste distinction, and his Vaishnavism included the recognition in some strange form of such distinctions. This was evident already to me and I therefore had certain reservations about all-out Gandhian politics, not to speak of sociology.

On the day after the arrival of the Prince, the gates of the College were decorated with festoons to welcome him as he was to pass along Mount Road to Guindy; and as thousands of horse carriages and motor cars passed up and down the street for hours, most students kept to their rooms and the street sidewalks were almost empty. I too was sensitive to the situation. Bread, loyalty and patriotic duty divided my inside horizontally into two rival factors in conflict with each other, between which, at the neck of my heart, a bold and absolute conscience had to come into existence.

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It did. I decided to be a positive neutralist with a conscience of my own. With firm steps I walked straight up to Principal Grieve's room ready-set to state my case as I actually felt it. I told him in so many words I did not wish to obey the circular because I was a free man who should not be forced against his will to express loyalty to anyone. This I explained further had however nothing to do with Gandhian politics with which I was not actually in full sympathy. I simply must have the freedom to express my loyalty, if any, in my own way without any compulsion coming from one side or the other. Loyalty or hatred could exist detached from outward political and patriotic expression, and in the spirit where freedom was a precious value never to be encroached upon. Mr. Grieve, the shy Englishman, was taken aback by my straightforwardness and determined stand. He noted what I said and let me go, but next day he called the Professor who was the head of the group to which I belonged and asked him about my character and conduct. His report was very favourable to me and I learnt also that my case bothered the correct and sensitive Englishman. He had other longer consultations on the same subject before he finally decided to let me go with a remark in the records of the college which read, 'just satisfactory' and not at least considered 'good' - which was the minimum that was normally to be expected according to me and many that knew me then. Thus it was that I too came for some sort of slur, though not a real punishment, in the name of my outward loyalties between earthy and spiritual interests in which I chose to take the position of absolute neutrality. This was to me a bit of my own Satyagraha that I could understand.



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CHAPTER NINE

ULTIMATE SURRENDER TO THE GURU
Absolutism is a characterological trait embedded or imprinted in the matrix of a man's life-substance itself even from birth. As life unravels, seemingly by the force of outward circumstances, the introspective eye can see, beneath the translucent veil of appearances and accidental events, this overall trait asserting itself, step by step; winning its own battles, major and minor, through the course that life traces on the white paper called our Self.

Absolutism is ever triumphing within us according to its own inexorable law. We recognize it as Chance sometimes, and call it at other times by the more fatalistic name of Providence. When not in heavy-laden retrospective moods but in light ones, we call it good luck or ill luck, both attributed to some God inevitably lurking in the subconscious of every man, however agnostic or sceptical otherwise. When there are premonitions of a man's departure from his earthly existence the perspective in which appearances and realities have their interplay attains to a certain transparency, and then it is that we can see ourselves as we really are, rid of the over-covering dross that life deposits as a kind of debris round the slow glacier-like progression of life treated in itself.

Such are some of the thoughts that pass before my mental eye when I am called upon to continue telling the story of my life as an absolutist, whatever this term might finally mean as we go on as fellow-pilgrims in the life-adventure common to all and each at once.

These general reflections seem called for at this particular stage of my life-history because, after my days at the Teachers' College, I was soon going to find myself thrown, as it were, on the high seas of actual life-adventures without any more protection afforded by the regularities of home or educational institutions, at least within the limits of India itself.

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So, in spite of limitations of time and place, when one abandons oneself, as it were, to the lap of the Tao - which is a Chinese name for the same Absolute Chance that remains ever unseen behind the passing show of life - how the same Tao still prevails is exactly what should interest the reader of these pages, rather than any claim for the subject himself of these backward biographical glances. It would be pretentious to claim for oneself any glory when it really belongs to the subjective Self and the Cosmos treated unitively together.

In other words, no absolutism in the narrow Hitlerian sense is meant to be understood here in these pages. I practised absolutism in my own way and the strictly neutral position I took may be said to have been a kind of Satyagraha, as Gandhiji might call it - only there was no experiment with truth in my case. How I was penalised without any fault of mine during the last days of my academic career in India for just being neutral and open-minded and for remaining true to my own honest inner convictions, and how I came in for error or disagreement by dint of circumstances out of my control, in the process of working out my svadharma or the proper line of right action chalked out for me by the tallying of inner and outer circumstances, has already been narrated.

FAMILY AFFILIATIONS WEAKEN
On leaving college and immediately before, the contact that I had made, however feeble, with a living Guru, was already working like a corrosive to all sorts of relativistic affiliations within me. It is true that during the holidays, between preparations for the Master of Arts and the Licentiate in Teaching degrees of the University, I spent my days with the family, but my inner attachments to it were getting thinner and thinner as the years went by.

I can even remember that, already in my school and college days, I was referred to by my parents as one behaving as if I was a stranger within the family itself. Hemmed in between a brother and sister elder or younger on either side of me, I occupied, by the responsibility I had to take towards the family, a strange neutral middle position. The eldest brother, Gangadharan, was a life-long asthmatic who drew to himself the pity and affection of the family as, once a month or fortnight, he lay hard of breathing, with critical periods and some healthy interludes which put him out of commission, as it were; but on the other hand, as the eldest born, he had his say in all matters which he never relinquished, exercising it in his own weak way, as a favourite ailing boy.

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Even in his later manhood he did not really grow out of a certain touch of infantilism that ran in the family as a whole. The elder sister and the eldest brother, between them, ran the house when mother was often indisposed mentally, off and on, after the days of her third childbirth. The youngest of the brothers, Hariharan, too attracted his own natural share of attention, being about a decade or so younger than the rest of the brothers and sisters. When they were in college he was only reaching the High School classes. Of course he had to bear the bullying authority that the elders constantly exercised over him, but this was more than compensated for by the attention he got all round.

The net result was that I was mostly left alone and I enjoyed the independence and even made capital out of it, retiring into my study where I kept mostly my own counsel, with full freedom to develop as best as I could with the help of my inner resources. I was also something of a Devil's Disciple when I took up an aggressive mood, and my uncompromising nature had already segregated me effectively from my boyish days. It would seem that nature itself conspired to give me these days of segregation and freedom which in a modified sense have continued all my life, as I now look backward from this distance of time. I once overheard my mother telling a lady friend as early as my High School days that I was the only one of her children about whom she felt anxious. More than a decade earlier I had often heard her say that as a babe in arms I was the quietest of her children, going into sound sleep as soon as each feeding-time was over. I had a reputation too of loving steamed rice-flour cakes called puttu with bananas for breakfast. A mother's certificate in such matters of personal dispositions must be of value to oneself to place one's own personality in its proper perspective.

If you have not been good to your parents, that might also affect your absolutism adversely or favourably, but only according to other attendant circumstances. I cannot honestly say that I have been good to my parents, nor have I been bad intentionally. Neutrality was my watchword, though I can also guess how, in spite of my good intentions, I could very often have been a problem to my parents and others around me.

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WATCHING THE TIDES AT COCHIN

Traditional fishing nets in Cochin.

 

I spent one of my holidays between my BA and MA classes at the University with my parents at the quaint little township called British Cochin in those days. The bigger ships that visited this harbour had to stay out beyond the bar several miles away, before the days when the present harbour was made by reclaiming the adjoining backwaters. Ships now come right into the embraces of habitable land in a more friendly way.

Vaguely uncertain about my future career, I was torn between the usual humdrum one open to graduates of my time and a bolder more radical urge which seemed lurking within my semi-tragic nature, which sought for adventure for its own sake.

Often in the afternoons I sat near the seafront on the edge of the harbour-to-be and watched the Chinese fishing nets as they went up and down catching shrimps with a lantern to entice unwary crustacea in large numbers into the net for possible export or just home consumption when dried and cured, with or without condiments. The breezes blew; the sun set in redness while daylight persisted; and tugs and dredgers plied up and down with hefty launches that sometimes pulled behind them a whole flotilla of country craft loaded with Malabar produce like spices or coconuts, for which the region had been reputed for at least four or five centuries and even dating back to the times of the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Arab dugouts and sailboats that avoided the high seas could be seen passing by.

One also watched men and women crossing the flooded straits, one way or the other, at high or low tides - often with children in arms or with their pots, pans, baskets or other necessities - as they came or went from the mainland to buy or sell from the long coastal strip of a palm-beach island that stretched across. The darkness set in when all the glory of sunset was gone, but the hum of common human life went on till late into the dark hours. I myself, seated on the grass lawns or sometimes on the sand, meditated on the days to come or lapsed into vaguer moods still which had no definite content. The outer twilight blended with the dreamy drowsiness that I felt within me, and all I can say now is that the whole situation was more pleasant than unpleasant. It had some strange depth of content, alternating with a touch of anxiety at times, but at other times I felt easy and gay.

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Thus life goes on, ever torn between a sigh and a smile. However, when inner factors are equated with the outer, with the strange mathematics that unitive wisdom alone can teach - then life spells a uniform joy which is given only to rare temperaments to enjoy.

MY FATHER'S MANSIONS ARE MANY

Old Ernakulam.

 

Meanwhile the family had moved to Ernakulam on the other side of the backwaters into an old-fashioned bungalow next to the then railway station. Instead of having a British atmosphere it had a theocratic flavour or ambience about it and was more of a village behind the waterfront where some buildings gave a semblance only of city life. Water was brought from a distance of about ten miles or more from the river that passed through Alwaye. Ernakulam, with its poor drains and lack of an effective municipality at that time, was an eyesore and a nuisance, although the natural setting was all to its advantage. One could watch the sailboats cut on the water, especially when a gala regatta was on and the British Resident patronised it from his island paradise where he had his official residence which was called Bolghatty. The then rulers gathered there and amused themselves as befitting a nation of seafarers born in Nordic climes.

Once again my family established itself in Alwaye after leaving Ernakulam, before returning to Ernakulam again after a year or so, nearer to the waterfront, from where finally they went to Trivandrum and there settled more or less permanently near the park in that city. During all these years of change I was at college, and found the new address only after losing track of my home on several occasions on returning 'home' for the holidays. The word 'home' lost more and more of its meaning for me and I was drifting away from its sentimental moorings more and more, but not without pangs. It still lurked behind in an emotional world like the dream of a father's mansion, each time a new and different one which has repeated itself, faintly colourful at times or in weak outline only at others, persisting throughout my life even to the present day when I am nearly seventy. 'My Father's Mansion' is almost a haunting ideogram that one never wholly succeeds in banishing from one's libidinous ego.

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On the other hand, I have paid taxes for strange plots of land too, on unknown mountain slopes, often in dreams when the complex of being attached subconsciously to a father's mansion has weakened within to yield to fresh atavistic types of fantasy more prospective than retrospective in content. All these homes and happenings would make of my biography too long a story. I shall therefore fix my attention on one or two events of this period which had import in shaping my future as I now know it.  

THE TRANSITION FROM SON TO DISCIPLE
Education can be said to be a long process of weaning. Promotion, even from depending on one's mother's milk to that of hanging on to her apron strings, has itself its inner trials and tribulations which encroach even into the joyful innocence of childhood years. Similar transitions from teen-age to adolescence and from that to full manhood, imply their own trials. Now comes, in its turn, a more drastic form of transition stage in which, from being merely an obedient son in a closed and static family, I was called upon to enter the open and dynamic life of the disciple of a Guru whose family consisted of the whole of humanity without other barriers, in my case at least, of group, nation or civilization.

It was in the days that the family was settled for the time being near the old Railway station at Ernakulam that one day, while waiting for the daily English newspaper in which the MA and LT results were going to be published, I took a walk to the railway bookstall where I usually gathered the paper in the evenings. The results came as expected: the one of the MA I had seen about a fortnight earlier, and the second one just as I happened to pick up the paper on this particular day. I had the highest rank in my group, though placed only in the second class for the MA, and for the LT, as I have already explained, the result was a simple third-class pass. Whatever the rank of class, this result which announced my pass has to be considered as a kind of terminus to my educational career in the normal course for a young man in India of my time and circumstances. I had only to say 'Amen' to my academic career thereafter.

I returned from the railway bookstall with the daily paper in my hand which announced that I had passed my LT examination. There was no feeling of elation except that I was glad to say 'Amen' to my career as a student and thought of future plans vaguely as I entered the family home not far off.

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I remember to have climbed up the staircase to reach a veranda which was so narrow as to allow only one man sat in a chair to effectively block the passage. I saw my father to whom I wanted to show the results and wanted to reach him, but there was an elderly visitor there and his easy chair, as he reclined on it, blocked my access to my Father. My father was standing respectfully behind the visitor, who on further scrutiny, I recognized to be the Guru Narayana, who had come just at a turning point in my life.

It was a further coincidence that my father, on many a previous occasion in casual conversation with the Guru, had declared his wish that all his children should be dedicated to the cause that the Guru represented. Whether the Guru took this promise seriously and whether it was meant to be carried out by my father with an equal kind of seriousness, I ignored then as I do even now. Whatever the circumstances attendant to the situation, when I come to think of it, there was a strange conspiracy of chance-elements that worked together for me and that made the coincidence very meaningful indeed in my life taken as a whole.

The Guru was in between the father and the son, on just the minute when the latter's future was to be decided. Believers in the Unseen would call this a mystery; while sceptics might have a more matter-of fact explanation - as much as to say perhaps that it was a mere coincidence and nothing more. That the situation called for some sort of explanation is all that we have to note here. Such coincidences do exist, on whatever side we might put the cause - whether on the natural or the supernatural. Each man's temperament is the deciding factor here.

It would seem that the original promise of dedication of a son or all children to the cause of the Guru was still valid and I was informed of the same. On my own part I was not without corresponding inclinations to be the disciple of the Guru. My admiration for him had grown through my student days, the first contacts having commenced from early boyhood itself, as I have narrated.  

I TAKE A DECISION
The great step to discipleship of a Guru had consciously and actually to be taken and this involved canalisation of inner tendencies and their one-pointed affiliation which were not without their own exacting demands from me.

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Youth has its inner urges and ambitions which often follow a certain lead given by society. Only when one is a thorough individualist does he escape 'lokanuvartana' (living according to the world). To shine like others in life; to be well-to-do; to gain applause, especially from those near and dear to you; to have a sense of security and have one's gregarious instincts more or less satisfied - and above all to have normal rounds of occupations - these give a certain firmness and shape to life which it is not so easy to gain for oneself by mere individual effort. The mutual obligations and approbations that one has vis-à-vis society prop the personality up in a certain subtle manner to make life easier to live when one conforms than when one has to be heterodox or original and true only to one's inner self at every step that one might have to take.                           

To be a disciple was to accept the life of a Sannyasin, and this pattern of behaviour had its deep implications, which were not altogether fully evident to me at the time.

There were whispers around me too of well-paid jobs that I could get for the asking; and then there was the great question of having to decide if one was able to live single or to take a partner in life - in which matter my mind was not fully made up still. There was however nothing that I felt was definitely obstructing my path to discipleship. I vaguely relied on the Tao again as I did when choosing the teacher's career. That tide in the affairs of men had to make decisions for me without my thinking in terms of individual waves or single items of interest. Thus another momentous decision was taken.

THE BARGAIN IS STRUCK
Like an innocent lamb or an unwilling billy-goat, half-conscious of the consequences and half-hesitant, I conducted myself to the seat of the supreme altar before which I had to renounce all and be virtually sacrificed to some great but unknown cause. How far I was myself definitely prompted to do so and how far there was a sort of conspiracy of circumstances implied, I cannot definitely say.

All I remember was that soon after the Guru figure appeared at the corridor of my father's house, I found myself wending my way to an interior district in a malaria- and mosquito-ridden part of North Travancore where the Guru was then engaged in asking the inhabitants to contribute one coconut from each tree that yielded them well in that area so that he could start an educational institution for their benefit.

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I found him sitting in a palm-leaf hut specially erected for him. The members of important families of the locality were in attendance on him, off and on, to see to his comforts. One had to reach the spot, crossing by canoe or wading through water and crossing in rope-walking fashion over bridges consisting only of coconut trees that were laid across streams that flowed into the paddy fields. It was a self-sufficient world of abundance in itself, closed to opulent outside civilisation's cross-currents.

Everyone complained of the mosquitoes, but the Guru was there in his hut most of the time sitting half-naked and erect and in half-awake meditation, talking gently to anyone who appeared at the entrance in a metallic voice of affection and regard. He remarked that no insect would bite if left alone and that when the attitude of extreme non-hurting was cultivated the corresponding response would be evoked, even in ants and other insects. I did not put the pointed question whether the mosquitoes actually sucked his blood or not. Evidently such a vulgar contingency did not arise at all with him, for he must have been keeping half-awake most of the time as all trained yogis, who had conquered sleep as well as over-wakefulness, are expected to be. It is the common experience of beekeepers that bees do not normally become vicious unless abrupt, aggressive or other movements are made, and when thus rubbed the wrong way they behave in fear when they are vicious. Dead bodies are attacked by natural right by germs and the rest of nature. I have known of an old woman lying in a hut when her daughter, her only companion, was mauled to death by a jackal in broad daylight.

These are to be expected, but a man alert and intelligent, full of sympathy for all life, from the meanest to the biggest, commands a strange respect from the rest of nature which seems to understand and respond to the attitude he represents in his person. The Guru spoke of this subject when I stood in front of the hut. There was a general glow of alertness and fullness of life in the Guru, due perhaps to some mystic, global, or complete state of emotions and intelligence in which he must have lived. Animal magnetism must have been strong round him and therefore it was that he perhaps put up with the mosquito menace when others complained and were depressed.

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After the usual incidental questions and answers the Guru heard from me of my resolution to join his cause as a worker or camp-follower for a lifetime. He did not show any surprise at the news and seemed to accept me without any objections. 'A piece of washing soap', he remarked, as I remember distinctly now, 'is all the extra expense the Ashram has to incur on your behalf'. With my educational qualifications and my simple ways of living, the first remark that came from the Guru was that I was not unwelcome nor unwanted but that the bargain that was struck was a very favourable one, instead of being objectionable. I was further given permission to go and stay at the Advaita Ashram at Alwaye. After the usual worshipful greeting on my part, I returned to Ernakulam and found my way within a week to the Alwaye Ashram where I became an inmate. Thus was the bargain struck and the silent resolve to dedicate myself to the Guru cause accepted without ceremony or fuss made by any one of the parties concerned.



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CHAPTER TEN

TRIALS OF DISCIPLESHIP
Yes, the bargain was struck! What the bargain meant for my life directly or indirectly was still vague and mysterious. One had the feeling of setting sail on seas both uncharted and filled with mists or fogs that dulled any penetrating vision into future events. Yet life was an adventure, and I was fully disposed to treat it as such.

Henceforward I was destined to be homeless and had become, in effect, an orphan in God, with no parents here in the visible world. No one was to call me uncle, cousin or brother-in-law either. These terms of intimacy became repugnant to me and the prizes that the life-interests of man were normally geared to were no more to attract me. No beautiful woman was ever more to enter my life, although she could cross my path as it actually happened several times as I shall have soon to recount. No cushy or comfortable job was to be awaited by me. All men were to be my equals and this meant also that I could look upon none as a servant or my subordinate. The beggar in the street was henceforward to be my equal in the context of general human suffering, and no rich man was to be differently thought of in my mind.

I could not cook good food for myself in a corner and enjoy it selfishly any more but had to share everything good, bad or indifferent with all and sundry. There was to be no stranger for me in any part of the world. The publican or the half-naked fakir could sit on my sofa and I should say nothing. I myself could be turned out of the gates of a rich man as a mere nothing or, worse still, as an unwanted guest, considered a frog in the chamber or a fly in the ointment. I could be in dire need with one shirt only for all I was worth - but that should not matter and had to be put up with.

If I took ill I was not to buy costly medicines, nor consult a regular doctor, but rely on what chance made available without complaint. My source of livelihood had to be one-hundred-percent honest, which is so only in beggary, and should not mean any rivalry or competition with my fellow man. Instead of being a go-getter one had to walk last of all into any advantage that might be available, in all humility as the last in the queue. While all had hot dinners served for them by the so-called loving hands of friends or relations, one might have to go to sleep with cold leftovers, whether salted or even palatable, and try to smile under such strains.

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Some might spurn and spit at you, or else one or two might consider you a great soul and want to worship you. These had to be treated with an inner equanimity. With hair unkempt; health indifferent or neglected; with the possibility of every kind of error or crime that one could directly or indirectly be implicated in; exposed to uncertainty and insecurity; one had to brave good as well as bad weather all alone. Such was the vista before which I found myself standing in full view. At that moment in my life a big zero seemed to fill the whole of what my future held in store for me.

I ENTER THE ADVAITA ASHRAM, ALWAYE

The original Advaita Ashram today.

 

All was favourable and the stage was set for me to become a sannyasin and a disciple of the Guru Narayana. All conspired and there was nothing that my own initiative had to accomplish; no impediment that I had purposefully to move from the way of life that had naturally opened its portals for me, whether for my happiness or suffering, freedom or bondage, which the future alone could decide as it unravelled the scrolls of the unknown and unknowable course of events for anyone's life. That some such vague sailing in the mist was agreeable to me and that I too enjoyed it in the recesses of my heart was all I could claim by way of credit to myself at this stage when I had taken upon myself the severe badge of renunciation.

In principle I had become a sannyasin through the decision to be a tyagi (renouncer of the goods of life here for something of a more absolutist order). It is this tyaga or detachment from the merely glamorous aspect of life that had to mature by degrees into full-fledged conformity with the outwardly recognizable pattern of life which is that of a yogi or a sannyasin as understood in the last chapter of the Gita. I was thus a novice only at this time, although I had taken my decision.

It is the inner decision that counts more than the outward conformity to any pattern of behaviour. Whether the inner disposition would catch up with outer requirements in spirituality would be like asking if water within a tube will find its level with that of the outside when immersed in it.

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When wrongly connected or affiliated to the knowledge-situation no osmosis may take place; but when all conditions are complied with the eventuality is merely a question of time. What is more, this time period might be within the span of this life or some future existence, which everlasting life could always presuppose. I could thus be said to have become a sannyasin in principle as early as August 1922, when I found myself in the Advaita Ashram at Alwaye as an inmate by permission of one of the greatest of living Gurus of that time in that part of India.

THE ROUTINE OF THE ASHRAM
The changeover from the life at a College Hostel to that of a regular Ashram was not an easy one for me in many respects. None of the catering to luxuries and pampering of the palate was to be expected any more. In fact the nourishment at the boarding section of the Sanskrit School of the Advaita Ashram, Alwaye, was below normal standards. The rice gruel was made of improper kinds of rice not even properly dried or parboiled, with husks and burnt grains, due to heating up in pans on rainy days when sun-drying was not possible. Also the precarious vegetables used by the so-called manager of the time for the curries to go with the kanji (gruel) and used for the main rice meals too did not suit me at all.

Where was the clarified butter and the thick curds that were served ad lib in the hostels? Where were the strong coffees and the varied tiffin (lunch snacks) gone? It is true that I had a river bath at sunrise, and once again in the afternoon as a sort of pagan luxury. It is true, too, that I had plenty of free time and went for long walks to a place six miles off where, sitting on a promontory, I could watch the Alwaye river as it wound its way through the rumble-tumble and musty rusty so-called town, undeveloped still in those days. The rumbling of the mail and express trains at regular hours, as each passed the long iron bridge, and the worm-like pace at which the train could be seen moving from that height and distance, lent a strange childish enchantment to the view. Big things could look very small and long things short while continuous lines of the horizon could seem broken up to the open eye. If this kind of error is possible within a range of six miles how can we put any reliance at all on the world we see and have to live in every day of our lives?

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TRIVIALITIES CAN SOMETIMES ANNOY ONE
I missed my morning and evening coffees and teas, a habit to which I became addicted from the earliest of childhood days. I missed, too, the daily newspaper and political and other gossip, which was a pastime of student days. There was no question of any favourite games either. This last item I tried to substitute by trying to do a little bit of vegetable gardening. I got a packet of tomato seeds from Bangalore by post, which I sowed in a window box. These hobbies, however, needed a proper leisurely atmosphere which was not there, and I did not have much success with them after all. In fact, life itself seemed to suggest that it was going to be filled with failures. Having no pocket money or allowance, either from parents or from the Ashram authorities, I found myself, as days went by, a more and more unwanted person. Even for the piece of soap with which I had to wash my clothes I had to depend on someone else's generosity.

Long hours were spent by me sitting on the side of the rail track in the afternoons watching the trains go by once in three or four hours; or else from the riverside Ashram itself one could watch the winding river with country boats and canoes carrying on a mild traffic for the weekly vegetable fair near the centre of the town. All these however fell far short of what my energies at twenty-six or twenty-seven and my tastes cultivated through years demanded. It is true I tried to meditate, but not with much success. Someone told me that one could see a light in the middle of the eyebrows if one concentrated on the spot with closed eyes for long hours. In spite of earnestly practising such at the end of a raised platform of the veranda of the school building at dusk, I did not make much progress. It was not a loss to me, for I thus steadied my mind a little, and beyond the fact that there was some sort of pleasure in continued meditation which lured me more and more, no actual results were sighted. Such were the dreary memories of my first days at the Ashram.

Added to all this was a vague feeling that told me that I was considered a supernumerary in the Ashram by the older inmates who all had their places fixed for them and functions clear-cut - into such preserves a fresh man was not to enter. I offered to give free lessons in English to some Sanskrit students but this work was given to a junior paid teacher and my offer went unheeded.

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The Guru on his part took no initiative to recommend me from his side either. He forced nothing, and between his neutrality and the indifference of those already there, who looked at me with some sort of suspicion as a rival claimant for some place of authority which they held within their tight grasp, I was left severely to keep my own counsel. It was not until years later that some kind of idea of the nature of this cold-shouldering could dawn on my mind. I was too ignorant, not to say innocent, of rival forces within institutions of this nature, of which every man who has held any position of authority anywhere in the world should be sufficiently conscious. 'Here is another foolish idealist'. This I guessed expressed roughly what others thought of me at that time. Some said so in so many words while others just succeeded in hiding this genuine attitude of theirs from me out of politeness. Few took me as seriously as I did myself, and a certain naiveté which was in me cannot be denied.  

RUMOURS, PROGNOSTICATIONS AND ADMONITIONS
All was not easy sailing after joining the Ashram. Uncles and aunts had to have their say. All and sundry had to pronounce judgement. No one bothers about a daring criminal's acts, but when a man is known to want himself to be in the right with two or three, the heavy machinery of what is loosely called public opinion takes charge. One man's private affair becomes the business of all busybodies and campaigners. Rumour has its mysterious ways of working and can by its trumpeting noise upset the equilibrium of many a brave Lancelot. Although in this case no secret love with any Queen was the interest, gossip had to take its course and its toll of victims, driving many sensitive souls mad or almost so.

Advisers came unsought and prognostication was indulged in by those wise ones who claimed to see what was to come. It was foolish to lose the good chances for entering service, as all clever young men of my generation did in India. Who would be there to nurse me when I was dying in my loneliness when I led a celibate's life? Why not spent half one's salary on whatever good one wanted to do to the world and use the other half for oneself? This seemed a practical formula to some, and some relations even offered to manage my affairs so that I could be happy and do service to humanity too. This was like saying that the engine of a train could go one way, while the carriages reach another destination.

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The innate contradictions in plans were not even recognized. I had to sit sometimes for hours listening to some wise interested relative or well-wisher who went on weaving his arguments to and fro, from one relativistic point of view to another. Some accused me of trying to live as from the pages of a book, while others simply concluded that in this wicked world things did not work the way I thought. The varieties of arguments possible on a single subject made me wonder. It looked as if Nature itself protested, but I had decided to live through all possible trials.

I DREAM IN TERMS OF AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
A normal and vocational institute on the lines of the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington was my great dream for India and its regeneration, especially for the uplift of the masses, in those days. I had with me literature on the subject sent from the founders and ruminated on its possibilities for many years. When I had entered the Advaita Ashram, that was still my model of an educational institution suited for Indian conditions. The idea was that there should be a harmonious blending of the bread-and-butter aspect of education with its higher non-utilitarian aims, and both aspects were to be put together in such a way that the boys got trained in a vocation while their spiritual formation was being nurtured at the same time. At the end of the secondary course, they should be capable of hiring themselves out, whether as individuals or teams, ready to earn their living honourably, and be able to lead an intelligent life at the same time.

Being an idealist and dreamer by temperament and rather too wilful to give up any pet idea that had once formed itself within me, I harped on this project and actually decided to start straightaway with founding what was called 'The New College' which was to have a workshop and laboratory besides a library.

There was at the time in the half-finished buildings of the Sanskrit school an upstairs room that was large enough for ten students. Here I brought three young men who had just finished their high school or were about to do so. Being a trained teacher, I was qualified to look after them. One of them came from the Cochin harbour area and another happened to be my younger brother who, under strict orders, was to treat me and call me as a teacher and not as a relative.

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This was understood between us and, with one more young man from Trivandrum whom I coached in Shakespeare's plays for his next intermediate examination, the four of us had managed to get some scientific apparatus as well as some books together.

We walked and talked and had our lessons together and went to the promontory overlooking the river six miles in the interior where the Guru Narayana had forty acres of suitable land on the saddle-like part of a hill which we thought would be ideal. But the dream was too good to be true. Adverse breezes blew and mistrust and pessimism prevailed and, like the mist that vanishes before the sunlight, all was forgotten and branded impossible.

This was my first failure in a series of like stepping-stones; my more utter failures raised their monuments one after another later in my life. At the present moment the only pride that props me up morally is in all the failures of a similar nature in which I fondly believed stage after stage; for they were all glorious ideas which could never strike root on terra firma the way I conceived and went about them. The castles melted away while I looked on frustrated, but behind the cumulative effect of such frustrations, like the sweet uses of adversity, I am now proud to stand as the full absolutist that they made of me.

Though empty in content, these glorious failures made me rich with their emptiness and give me, in my old age, the peace of mind that is all gain in terms of one's own soul. I gained everything thus, while my life was writ large with one failure leading up to a still greater failure, more glorious than the one before.  

WE DECIDE TO INVITE TAGORE

Rabindranath Tagore.

 

The poet Rabindranath Tagore was planning to visit South India. I saw the news in the papers and at once got the idea that it would be good to put the poet in touch with the Guru, as I had admiration for both of them. It is true that the Guru did not have any international fame, but the quality of the fame that he had was intense and had as much value as that of any more widely-known figure of that time in India. A humble lily of the valley has its glory as much as the radiant midday sun. Who was the greater hero was a question hard for me to answer. I wrote to the Rev. C.F. Andrews, enclosing stamps for a telegraphic reply. Instead a long letter came in which Tagore was willing to meet the Guru on the express condition that I would be present at the interview and would act as interpreter.

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At the last moment when Tagore was to come to Alwaye he took ill and changed his course and programme. Waiting crowds at the Alwaye Railway Station greeted me as I came out of the compartment in which the poet was to travel. He went to a doctor in Mangalore and could meet the Guru only a few days later on his visit to Trivandrum, not at Alwaye but at Varkala.

The historic meeting took place on the veranda of the mutt in view of the green hills opposite and the brook that crossed the paddy fields. The Guru said that he was sorry that he was unable to do anything when the poet complemented him on the great service he was rendering to the people. The conversation was listened to by a crowd of admirers who thought the words enigmatic. When the poet said that the eyes of the people had to open, the Guru's rejoinder was that they were well open but that still they did not see. Thus it went on for a few minutes and each greeted the other and separated.

Strangely enough, although I tried to be at the side of the Guru as interpreter, as agreed previously, the surging crowd and rival and senior claimants for the privilege of interpreting on such an important occasion elbowed me aside, and I was sorry I was not able to keep my word, although the reputation involved in the public eye seemed to matter little for me even then.

There is a lot of secret elbowing of one another in most situations involving profit, power or reputation in this world, and milder temperaments like mine stand no chance at all in the rush and the stampedes often really present or implied. I had learnt this lesson early enough, but in public matters this was again a reminder for me to draw a moral for myself which I had already drawn and more or less begun applying to my career all along. I have always been ashamed to get to the ticket window first, although I have been obliged to do it like the rest of the vulgar crowd on many an occasion. Life is not always fully dignified. In the most civilised of countries this kind of scramble is more often seen than in the more underdeveloped countries where there is still left some chance to be dignified. Elbowing one's way forward through a crowd of fellow beings for gaining advantage for oneself, brushing aside the other fellow, is an undignified act, and one would pay any price to be rid of this ignominy. One's life might end in a series of failures but that you did not stand upon the shoulders of a brother man would add glory after glory to each such failure. Such is the negative approach to life that few are chosen to adopt confidently. It requires as much courage as the other, positive way, if not more.   

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TRIALS OF DISCIPLESHIP
Elbowed thus out of any advantage and with failure after failure writ large in the future for a man who wanted to avoid conflict and competition with one's fellow men, I continued my Ashram life, estranged more and more every day from the group of so-called relativistic friends on one side and actual relations on the other. Days seemed more and more empty of hope as each day passed. The future seemed to hold no promise - but my dedication was made once and for all. Such a tragic element of wilfulness was part of my character which I could not change even if I had wanted to do so.

Many an empty tomorrow thus came and went. There was going to be no career for me. I could clearly see this written on the wall. Fellow workers were going to disown me rather than acclaim my renunciation of what must be most valuable to a young man past twenty-five with all educational records favourable to him. Offers of jobs too were whispered about to my hearing, and then too that little bird that spreads the tidings of love between man and woman was not lazy nor without its message like the morning bulbul's voice from the thicket at dawn each day.

All was bleak, but I braved through all these influences till at last I felt a brutal blow which came, this time, as far as I could understand, from the Guru himself, to whose dedication I had given up all. This was too much for me to bear at the moment. How this happened I shall relate as shortly as I can make it.

Gopalan, a cousin of mine, had started to Alwaye from Trivandrum, and on the way had seen the Guru at Varkala. He accosted me one fine morning at Alwaye and told me that the Guru was not at all pleased with me because I was wasting my time in the Ashram. The boarding dues at the Ashram were themselves unpaid, and the manager had put up a notice that defaulters of boarding charges were not to present themselves at the dining table. I did not take any notice of this but went on as usual, thinking that some part of the organization would take care of it because I had myself come at the instance of the Guru. The Guru, as an absolutist unattached to any organisational aspect of the institutional life, left it to me, in relation with the actual Ashram authorities, to find any normal solution that was open in such practical business matters.

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Between the Guru's absolutist attitude and the indifference of the managers, this practical aspect was not attended to at all by any of the three parties concerned, including me who counted myself as an absolutist also. Indifference and independence had to face each other if they cared. The Guru himself would not move a finger in the matter. His position was unassailable, because even from the beginning he never said that I was admitted into the Ashram by his initiative, but rather he welcomed me only impersonally as a possible asset to the Guru-cause if all went well. The net result of these delicate considerations, some spiritual and others of an earthy nature, was that the news that Gopalan brought to me irked me more than it normally should have done.

I lost no time. I decided to take the train to Ernakulam the same day, and from there the motor-launch would take me to Alleppey along the backwaters and thence to Quilon where I was to take train to Varkala where the Guru lived on a hillside Ashram three miles away. My sense of self-respect was stung to the quick and I said to myself, 'Guru or no Guru, I'm going to have it out with him'. I claimed to myself to be equally an absolutist by temperament and would not give in even to God in this respect.

This was verging on a sort of megalomaniac pride, it was true, but when I thought of the circumstances in all honesty I felt more and more convinced of being right. I swallowed my own bitterness all the way, although I could not help thinking of this one subject. How could the Guru himself, for whom I was making the utmost sacrifice I was then capable of, seem to be ranged on the side of the enemies and persecutors? Was he too trying to let me go mad, torn between idealisms which I was determined to live up to and circumstances that conspired to shake my confidence?

 

Vembanad Lake.

The boat engine in the meanwhile made every brave attempt to cross to the other shore of Vembanad Lake, while I sat lost in thoughts near the engine room. The coconut beach went past while I thus remained merged in my own thoughts, wondering whether I was a fool in a world of otherwise wise men, or the contrary. The balance of accounts between the world inside of me, consisting of hopes and fears, and the actual world of hard facts seemed never to be capable of being settled - for the more small change I put into the bargain, the more it seemed to make the compensation Absolute.

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I STAND BEFORE THE GURU FACE TO FACE
Whether I took twenty-four hours or more for the journey in those days of slower travel I do not remember, but I do remember clearly taking the Trivandrum passenger train at Quilon at about three in the morning. Varkala station was announced when it was still an hour or so before dawn. I had no luggage worth speaking of and the only shirt I had was on my back. I picked up the small bundle and went in the dark to the spring near the tunnel for canoes that passed near the Guru's Ashram, scared of any snake on which I might be treading by mistake. All snakes at that time were really within me and none were actually there to be stepped upon on the steps to the spring. I bathed in the tepid spring waters with a ferrous sulphide taste and, with a wet cloth round me and the wet shirt in my hand, I arrived at the little tiled parnasala, as it was called, where the Guru was resting.

The purple fingers of the dawn that day were just making ready to send their light in all directions in about half an hour. The Guru had just got out of his bedroom and was with another elderly follower called Krishnan Asan with whom he talked about the future of the movement he had started. His eyes lighted on me, standing with wet clothes respectfully at a distance.

Within myself I was not calm at all but ready to burst into the words of resentment and protest against the Guru who seemed to suggest to me to go back on my decision already taken. The Guru showed surprise at my appearance before him so early and in such déshabillé, so to say. 'What was the matter?' he asked, after a pause. I was not late in replying and said that I had come to ask him why he had sent word through Gopalan asking me to go away from the Ashram. He burst into a subdued laughter and told the other man, 'He has come out of resentment'. This laughter was to indicate that he knew all about what was in my mind, and he went off without further words on his usual morning walk to bathe in the springs. His attitude was a mild trial of the disciple's determination and the reaction was unmistakable.

It was only the next morning about eight that I approached the Guru again. I told him that I was returning to Alwaye by the next train an hour or so later. Then he put me a pointed question as to whether I was ready to be without a home of my own and without family affiliations for all my life? I responded with a firm 'Yes', on which the Guru's penetrating look seemed to take an X-ray photograph of me.

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I felt the searching penetrations enter into the very recesses of my personality for over a minute. The look was soon relaxed as I felt that the Guru approvingly accepted my word on the subject, and I was duly accorded permission to return to my post.

Before I took leave of him he gave me some plantain fruit as a gracious token gift of his kindness (prasadam), and I walked away after the usual greetings with folded hands. I found to my surprise on eating one of the fruits that it carried to me some sort of suggestion which made all tension and conflict vanish for ever in my mind. The kindness of the Guru and his absolute impersonal justice towards me, in my own interest rather than his, became more and more evident to me as days went by. Thus was the second stroke of the bargain struck for me in the path of absolutism.



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CHAPTER ELEVEN

WEANING FROM RELATIVISM
Relativism and absolutism cannot live together. This verity is what gives the touch of tragedy to human life. We ourselves are our own worst enemy and our own best friend. Herein is a paradox that cannot be solved in any way except through a higher kind of reasoning that can reconcile conflicts. The 'to be or not to be' question that faced Hamlet must face all men at one time or other in a mild or strong tragic way, in one form or another.

Where such a tragic element can hide itself behind the lyrical or comic aspects of life's outward appearances is the mystery into which philosophers try to peep. It is there behind the easy pleasures and luxuries of the colourful or sweet phenomenal aspects of life, ready to pounce unawares on one at a moment's notice from some unexpected quarter, sometimes from outside one's home and sometimes from within it, and often from within one's self too. Your nearest and dearest ones will be ranged against you and, as the forty robbers of Ali Baba or the kith and kin of the prophet Mohammed, there is some gang or other which will persecute you and disown you, leaving you to bitter loneliness with yourself - if you are a thorough-going absolutist.

Such is the rather sombre note on which I have to tune my backward glances this time. Absolutism has to pay its price somewhere and the earlier it is paid in life the better. Hesitations add momentum to the gathering disasters that might come down on one at any later time like an avalanche in the Alps. Beware, 0 man, of compromising with relativism any length of time, for the hesitant steps in a steep gradient will only spell greater danger to you. Why was I a simpleton? My slow-wittedness in the discovery of this verity is what surprises me from this distance of time.

I returned to the Guru's Advaita Ashrama again, less sure of myself than before. I saw no career in front of me and I was as one driving a car in thick mist at night, winding among the hills and forests. My contacts with those who were supposed to be interested in my welfare were dropping off one by one as they found me set on a path that they judged an impossible one.

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Soon I was to become aware that I was an unwanted person, penniless, in rags, and in indifferent resistance to diseases; unshorn, unshod and unwelcome to my fellow men.

IGNOMINY AND SHAME
When by my age and previous preparations for life I should have shone in the eyes of others I could observe that my best friends avoided me and thought I was going to be a failure in life. Their greetings to me became more transparently artificial, as I could not miss noticing. Like the poor relation portrayed in Lamb's essays, I could be recognized by the hesitant way I entered the house of a relative or former friend. I could not help feeling that I had to be tolerated as a guest at many a meal hour. Like a frog in the chamber or a fly in the ointment, I was more of a nuisance and a problem that irritated others than one who brought ease to situations. 'Here goes the dreamer, the idealist who takes life from books literally and wants to live it in practice', thought some surely as they pointed me out to others. This was the gist of the advice my well-wishers gave me directly when they happened to be open with me, but in the majority of such cases I could see that they had a hard time hiding their disapproval of my ways and often left my company without any formal leave-taking after being thrown together by chance when travelling. I even heard some dear aunt say that like the bad penny I turned up at the wrong moment like a mendicant wanting to join the family meal. Those who kept company with me in those days were themselves contemptible by reflected inglory.

Like a Negro knows he is not welcome to enter a fashionable barber's saloon in Washington itself, in spite of all rules to protect his rights; or like the hesitant conscience of a pariah in the brahmin quarters of an Indian town like Trivandrum or Palghat, not to speak of Mylapore or Kumbhakonam - I had to watch my steps and my words both in my house, as I have already said, and in the outer world which I was entering. I did not observe any caste distinctions and often a few years later I had a band of so-called 'untouchable' boys with me, and this brought me a secret ignominy, adding to what they thought I deserved on my personal account.

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My clothes were never washed perfectly white and never did they see the ironing and starching that was important for a well-groomed, presentable man of my status. Even the meals I had to eat were often cold when others had them served hot. Failure was thus written large on my face which none omitted to read.

I could always see myself as others saw me at that time, but there was no self-pity nor persecution complex mixed up with these sentiments, and if I remember and recount them it is to point out the dark clouds of unknowing that will beset one in the adventure of the Absolutist way, which is always an arduous one and not a bed of roses. A cushy job which I could have claimed like many of my college mates was not my lot to occupy - both through indifference to such on my part and to the absence of a rich uncle to support me at that time.

Amidst all these factors, dark and pessimistic, the figure of the Guru alone stood out as approving of my way of life. I met him off and on, once in a fortnight or month, when he came to the Advaita Ashrama, Alwaye; or when I was to meet him occasionally elsewhere in remote interior regions of Malabar where he kept constantly moving about. The tacit understanding between us was that I should remain with him three days whenever I went to meet him, whether at Shivagiri or elsewhere. During this interval he would set apart one sitting for me of about one or two hours duration for conversation on wisdom topics. It was at the end of his life, when he wanted to terminate his talks, that I discovered that these were not random conversations but had an inner unity and sequence. Such was my education in Guru-wisdom extending over a decade. I began to be influenced by him seriously from the day I decided to celebrate his 68th birthday at the Theosophical Hall, Armenian Street, Madras, when Mrs. Besant was living, and when I was still an undergraduate at College in Madras in September 1915 or so, and the admiration had steadily grown in spite of the rival loyalties or hero-worshipping that intervened.

I used to spend some time in the Ashram at Alwaye even earlier, but actual instruction only began about 1920. I have already narrated some of the topics on which he gave me fresh and living ideas, full of originality and characterized by a down-to-earth and robust common sense, with a touch of radicalism, all of which may be said to be absolutist touches to a man's point of view in matters philosophical or otherwise. I can never forget how, when all had abandoned me, the Guru stood by me in the days of my trials and tribulations of noviciate in sannyasa.

115  
THE PATH OF THE ABSOLUTIST NEVER RUNS SMOOTH
Sannyasa means breaking away from purvashrama - in other words, it is a recognized rule that when one dedicates himself whole-heartedly to an absolutist way of life one has to break away from all moorings and affiliations that belong to the relativistic set-up or family life anterior to the dedication. Unlike the joke implied in a man who says that he stopped smoking completely many times in his life, sannyasa implies disconnection with anterior relativistic affiliation once and forever in one's life.

Many people can be heard to say unconsciously that he or she is almost a sannyasin, without realizing the absurdity implied. It would be like saying that I almost jumped the chasm or I almost got the prize-winning bet number in the races. If the father was a great Vedantin, it need not mean that the son be anywhere near to one such. The credit of being almost right cannot apply to absolutism by its very nature. Like the path of true love which is supposed never to run smooth, while a love of convenience can be arranged to be so; behind or below the very resolution to be a thoroughgoing absolutist there are hydra-headed impediments that raise their heads.

I was aware of this rule implied in the transition between home life and sannyasa. I knew that anterior affiliations, whether with father and mother, wife or son, had to be completely buried like a hatchet when a quarrel has been fully patched up. As a symbol of this, sannyasins are made to pass through a ceremony which resembles their own obsequies, in which a man is asked to pour water on the hands of his son, if he has one, and go with him a distance and then make him turn around and go away from him with full quittance of any more relations or dealings with him. As a member of a modern hybrid generation where old ways were being revised, I still had entertained the doubt whether by some kind of common-sense adjustment, both worlds could not be lived in together, as age and youth having common interests together. I was still in such an experimental mood at that time and did not know that disasters could befall one if one tried to mix relativistic interests with absolutist ones. Like putting petrol and water into a car together, this error of jnana-karma-samucchaya (mixing of the wisdom way with ritualistic or relativistic interests, as Sankara would refer to this type of error) was going to be a highly explosive affair, as only my later life experience revealed quite convincingly to me. Meanwhile, while all seemed safe, the volcano was going to erupt or the earth was going to quake under my feet.

116
Against the dictum of the sages I made the grave mistake of going from the Ashram to the house called 'Hill Side', where my parents had moved because of my father's admiration and loyalty to the same Guru as mine. He had retired from Mysore Government service and had ideas of helping in the Guru's work in his own fashion, not quite in keeping with the absolutist way in which the Guru himself saw the future of his movement.

THE FATHER-SON COMPLEX COMES INTO EVIDENCE
In the Katha Upanishad we have the story of a young son who volunteers to offer himself as a sacrificial gift so that his father's vow might be properly fulfilled by him when he, the father, was grudgingly giving away cows that were too old and dry of milk. Such a sacrifice was not wrong according to the relativistic notions of values in the Vedic context - but the son, being young and intelligent, wanted to make his father make gifts more wholeheartedly and generously, according to his youthfully absolutist notions. The father got irritated at the veiled reproof of him by his son and angrily replied to the son who offered himself to be sacrificed, that he the son, would be given to Death.

Death is thus a punctuation mark that we have to understand as placed between relativism and absolutism. The anger is an outcome of what psychoanalysis would call the father-son complex. It is a mild form of the Oedipus complex, and is found all over the world as a kind of rivalry between father and son, producing a certain characteristic straining of relations between the two. Often the son rivals the father in the wrong tendencies of his life which they both recognize in each other; and the good that they represent is taken for granted and fails to produce any impression on the situation because goodness tends to be on the side of the pure and the nothingness of the Absolute. Other cases of such rivalry are found in Greek tragedy, presenting gradations of such possible conflicts, as we have in the case of Theseus and Hippolytus.

Often one hears of a proud father saying that he believes in giving full freedom of opinion to his son except for the opinion that he might be holding at the time; and similarly that in the matter of his love affairs he would not interfere except in his actual love affairs, which he feels strongly against.

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These attitudes are so commonly found in many families and portrayed in novels and plays as to be familiar to readers of books as well as to those who know human life intimately. In my own case, it asserted itself in a very delicate manner in spite of every precaution I took.

ONE CANNOT HAVE TWO LOYALTIES TOGETHER
Sri Rama, the hero of the Ramayana epic, was banished to the forest for fourteen years, and the common peasant population of India are not tired of singing his praise for his motive in doing so, which was to save his father from the charge of breaking one of his promises to one of his wives. From the Himalayas to Cape Comorin tears are shed by simple folk in his name and for his filial loyalty, as one of the family virtues to be cultivated by a good son.

Lakshmana and Bharata, his brothers, were also models of fraternal agreement and concord in the family set-up. As one born in India I could not escape the subtle influence of the ancient models which were ever present in the mental climate of an Indian.

In spite of this, although in my school days I would not think of disrespecting even a schoolmaster when the whole class was up against a new or young teacher in class; I had, by force of circumstances to behave like a regular rebel in breaking away from my family moorings and the sense of relativistic obligations that always goes with it. Let no youngster who reads these lines ever follow my example here, but as the Upanishads declare, let him remain a matr-deva and a pitr-deva (one who considers a mother and father as godly), and let him thus try his best to emancipate himself and succeed in conforming to the highest standards of absolutism without any tragic element creeping into the situation. With full mutual understanding this must be possible - though it did not work that way in my own case. For this I know I shall never be consoled all my life.

Double standards, double loyalties and Janus-like double attitudes have to be resolved one way or another if life is not to end in tragedies. One has to come to one's own and, in this banishment of doubt or duplicity of purpose, loyalty to the goal of the Absolute is the greatest of regulative factors. The Absolute is the norm of all thought or feeling - and of very existence too - which acts as a universal solvent of problems at all levels of life. The circumstances in which I decided to take a bold plunge into it from my relativistic springboard of ordinary life is a story in itself to be narrated at length, but I wish to cut it short and not make a long tale of it with details of conflicting factors that conspired within and without me, culminating in my ultimate decision to run away from home.

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Robinson Crusoe did so before me, and many a prodigal son known to literature the world over. The Mahabhinishkramana of the Buddha (the great leaving of home as mentioned in 'The Light of Asia') is another instance of a king leaving his palace. Whether I could compare myself with the greatest of these or the least is beside the point. That I too left home, not for gaining any instinctive or selfish desire like money or women, is the feature that could be mentioned in my favour. I had no mean motives. It just happened as night follows day and I was not the fully conscious agent in the matter.

While I continued to live in the Advaita Ashrama, Alwaye, conforming to the routine of Ashram life, I mixed with the inmates more than with the family which had come to occupy the 'Hill Side' bungalow not very far from the Ashram - which means that I used to go there off and on to say hello to my sister and brother, and take a meal occasionally in the beginning and more usually later on. This was an apparent casual violation of the rule of the sannyasin to which I have already alluded, but this was enough violation in principle, because in the way of absolutism, principles count more than individual facts. Nala is supposed to have omitted to wash a corner of his heel and with this place as excuse the evil god Kali entered into him, as the Nala legend goes. A small error of omission will be enough to spoil the way of absolutism and fill it with unnecessary and avoidable disasters of negative factors that could spoil happiness treated as a whole.

Partial stimulus produces total reaction in neurology, as a feather put in the nostril of a sleeping giant might make the whole of his mountainous body shake in a sneeze. The lack of a pin, when you want to catch the mail with a letter fastened properly, might upset you as much as the news of the death of a mother which, when you have been previously prepared for it, might not pain you even as much as a pin-prick. Worry knows no big or small, as with happiness too, treated in principle. Othello's passion in killing Desdemona must have filled his whole self at a given moment to blind him to her innocence and virtue.

119  
I AM CONFINED TO BED WITH AN ABSCESS
Meanwhile, while in the enjoyment of full outward health and especially when I felt mentally and physically alert and quite fit, I suddenly developed an abscess under my left armpit. Septic poisoning was suspected and for about a month I was bedridden. I went unshorn too for a longer period than usual and looked like some caveman of ancient times. The father-son complex was simmering inside, and involved the question of how I could be an intermediary representing my father to the Guru to see if some of his plans, which were speculative in my view and unpractical, could be made to succeed with the Guru's full assent. My lukewarmness and indifference to take the side of the father must have made me look superior in his eyes. I myself was caught between, on the one side, being loyal to the Guru to whom my father himself had asked me to dedicate myself; and his own plans, which I know the Guru viewed with disapproval, however much conceived, according to my father, along altruistic lines - being still tainted, as they were, by a relativistic approach.

Added to these complex circumstances, my own indifference to show any enthusiasm for the plans was sufficient one day to make the father-son complex, which was always present potentially, erupt into an open indifference. The angry father was irked to such an extent that he hit me for the first time in my life and against his life-long habit. He was fully generous and kind to me except in this one instance. How circumstances conspired to bring this about remains a mystery and must have been to him also, as I could guess from certain expressions of remorse or regret that were reported to come from his mouth many years later, before he passed away.

A sense of obligation and expectation of obedience goes inevitably with familial relations as between uncle and nephew or father and son, Having grown up for long years under such a relativistic setup it is hard, at a given moment, to change over into one that reflects the different kind of open setup that belongs to the absolutist way of life. It is a subtle form of rivalry which can be discovered existing even between a wisdom-teacher and a favourite disciple. Mothers and grown-up daughters have endless arguments till sometimes such mothers become exasperated with their own daughters whom they might love intensely. These are inner conflicts of life which can be solved only by a thoroughgoing absolutist approach.

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I SUFFER FROM RELATED ASPHYXIA
One could be suffocated mentally because of social or relational causes, feeling a deep sense of frustration amounting to an emotional crisis. I was heading towards such a state. I felt that there was something rotten in the surroundings in which I found myself. I had no outlet for my pent-up ideals or for my energies to translate themselves into overt action. Forces were gathering underground, preparing for an upheaval at any time. I avoided all relations and passed sneakily out of the family house whenever I had to meet them in the course of daily occupations. The moment was drawing near when I was to take the step of leaving home forever. The decision could not be put off anymore.

I even think that the abscess itself and the operation I had to undergo were also somehow connected with my mental state of frustration and the moribund state of the psycho-physical aspect of my personality. This is justified by the medical theory implied in the Ayurveda, which states in its textbook, Astangahrdaya, that all diseases have an emotional origin. While in bed I was honoured by a telegram from the Guru, which was addressed to my father, with kind references to my illness, the actual words of which I do not remember. How stealthily and with what precautions I went about the business of actually absconding from home, leaving all near and dear ones forever, is a story I shall now have to tell in detail.


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CHAPTER TWELVE

FROM HOME TO HOMELESSNESS
THE BREAKAWAY FROM HOME TO HOMELESSNESS
Education is essentially a weaning process. The growth from one's relativistic moorings to reach out to full absolutist freedom is a similar process of weaning from old patterns and value worlds to the larger and inclusive, open, generous, bold and free dynamism of the Absolute. Radicalism, progressivism and fundamental transcendentalism, are other words that could be used in the same context. Emancipation and salvation also imply the same weaning which starts from infancy and lasts till late in life and sometimes to life beyond, however understood.

We have seen some of its trials in the foregoing pages, but the conflict involved comes to a head in this chapter of my life where I have to tell the bitter story of my running away from what is called 'home' and all that was dear and near to me till then. Relational asphyxia could not make me endure any more the circumscribed relativism in the rarified air in which I was destined to live. That I should grow out of it became more and more imperative. Torn between instinctive loyalties, obligations and affections, and the vision of a freer future for myself, I was caught in a dilemma and it was hard to take a decision. The decision, however, came with great force and, like a man going to jump into the sea, the resolution was slowly building up within.  

WRONG PRECAUTIONS FOR A RIGHT STEP
How was I to take that step which would put me on the other side of the relational setting in which my birth circumstances had placed me by necessity? Did not the relations deserve some respect at least? Were they all to be summarily brushed aside one fine morning? The mother who carried me at the expense of her own health and the father so inseparable from my life's origin and growth, could not be slighted without the violation of some basic imperative of life. These were considerations that were still valid in spite of the absolutist attitude affirming itself inside me day by day.

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Even the discarding of wrong ideas cannot be haphazard or abrupt. Wrong issues or ends might need right methods and right ones at least apparently wrong ways. The course of right action is full of indeterminate factors (gahana) as the Gita puts it (IV. 17).

There is no rule of thumb to guide one in such matters - except that all action done in full dedication to the Absolute will have necessarily a right motive and thus become justified. The categorical imperative implicit in all absolutist conduct is a law unto itself where ends and means cancel out in the neutrality of the absolute value itself. The white heat of the imperative urge in the name of the Absolute is its own justification where ends and means cancel each other out into the white radiance of absolute joy or value. But getting rid of relativistic lags from one's life - like getting rid of wrong currency issued by governments by cancellation - demands as much accounting and other care as the issue of the same. Wrong and right actions are to be understood as counterparts under the aegis of the Absolute, for the sake of which each action is to be adjudged right or wrong. The positive and the negative have to be made to tally and then cancelled out against each other. Dispassion is thus the key.

The precautions that I took before running away from home were not right in themselves, but were only right in the intention of avoiding or minimising evil while remaining in the purely relativistic setup. Would my disappearance shock my parents too much? This was the first question that cropped up. To avoid it, or at least to mitigate its evil, I devised a miniature or mock escapade first and went away to Cochin for a few days without giving any hint to anyone, which was itself meant as a forewarning about my secret resolve.

My plans and whereabouts were made more and more mysterious from thence onwards, and whether I was to be expected in one place or another was to be a matter of no concern to anyone but myself. About a fortnight of such a preliminary hide-and-seek prefaced the decisive step I was to take. Meanwhile I had borrowed five rupees from Rahuleyan, one of the disciples I had been teaching at Alwaye, and kept it ready. The zero hour was drawing nearer and nearer for me.

I remember how on the penultimate day I was asked by my sister if I would be present at a family dinner party where all were invited. I was careful to give an evasive reply which amounted to a lie in intention though not in actual meaning.

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I knew quite well I would be a hundred miles distant on the way to the Nilgiri hills where I was absconding, but actually promised to be present 'if possible physically'. Dame Rumour also whispered to my ear that this dinner party was not a simple or single event, but might start for me a chain of other relational complications, as there were to be there young ladies of presentable age; and the circumstances involved did not show clearly the green light for me to go there without misgivings, although only vaguely felt and not understood at all clearly at that time. The subtle conspiracy in the outer world of relativism was ready to draw me into the tentacles of the octopus, as Victor Hugo would put it, and it needed the courage of a heroic toiler of the sea to extricate oneself before the suckers and the arms tightened on to one's skin and drew the body closer and closer to the inevitable slavery to relativism forever. I was myself conspiring against such forces on my part and biding my time.  

THE TECHNIQUE OF ABSCONDING
The hour drew near and the day that I was to break away from family obligations actually arrived. I had to defy all authority of uncle or aunt and declare myself a rebel from the context to which I belonged. The authoritative voice of a relative could still influence me in a subtle way and make me wince with guilty writhings within, like a dog that was being questioned by its master when found straying. The conditioned conscience can be relied on to guide man in right conduct only relativistically and not absolutely, and it is then, when two standards of behaviour are involved, that pangs of conflict become possible. One feels like a criminal or like a hero alternatively till inner character or convictions stabilize the position. Only the love of the Absolute can give any stability to life. Thus absolutism is no fanciful aspiration but a daily necessity, more like bread or the rice bowl than any rare confectionery. I suspected myself one minute and at another was timid like a rabbit.

The plan was finally made up. The Madras train was to arrive from the South just before noon. I was to hide behind the station in a tea shop till it actually came to the platform, lest someone should notice me at the last moment and foil my determination against the whole world, as it seemed at the time. I already had the ticket to Coonoor in the Nilgiris in my hand. I had heard that Swami Bodhananda, one of the senior disciples of the Guru Narayana, lived there in retirement and seclusion. The coolness of the climate of the Nilgiris had always remained an attraction for me. The presence of a sannyasin whom I could join added to the attraction.

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Meanwhile I waited for the train to come on to the Alwaye platform, which it did in a minute. My precautions were not over. I came out of the tea shop opposite and looked furtively all round to make sure that none noticed me in the cowardly act of absconding secretly. All was wrong except in the light of the Absolute, which alone could be always right. As a last precaution I left enough time for the passengers to alight and when the second bell for the train had struck, I entered the crowded compartment and was lost in the middle of the row while the train steamed off. It was soon crossing the river not far off while the roaring girders of the long bridge raised a din, which seemed to me like the groan of some giant in distress of death. Soon all was over and I felt troubled no more as the engine wheels turned faster, instilling more confidence within me. The world of relativistic affiliations was being left behind and the freedom of the Absolute was beginning to console me from within.

My entire luggage consisted of a wooden box a cubit long and about six inches deep, which contained all my belongings. I remember hoping that my luggage would never exceed its limits ever in later life. This pious hope was too simple, as later events have proved on many an occasion. Whenever I had to count my suitcases and trunks on alighting from train, ship or plane, my watchful conscience seemed to remind me mockingly of my original resolve, which proved impracticable again and again.

At one of the intermediate stations I had to change trains and two or three constables stopped me on the platform for questioning, guessing that I might be some servant boy running away from his master, judging from the dress and disarray in which I might have appeared to them. My khaddar (homespun cotton) dhoti which I wore round me was supposed to be white but repeated washing had made it somewhat salmon red. I had no proper haircut and, having given up using any oil, my hair was turning copper-coloured. To add to this I had still an unhealed sore from the recent abscess which was bandaged under my armpit. The policemen used their familiar technique of talking to me abruptly and rudely to see how I would react to a shock so that they could guess better; they even asked me to get into the compartment where they were seated so that they could question me further, but my abrupt reaction and curt English words made the constables turn to other subjects and leave me alone.

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I boarded a different compartment and arrived at Mettupalayam in the night. There the mountain railway began but there were no trains at night because of the menace of wild elephants which occasionally disturbed the station-master at Kallar station at the foot of the Nilgiri range. The first train was after seven in the morning and the last train returning to Mettupalayam brought back the station-master alive each evening. I had therefore to wait till daybreak and, being a third class passenger with only a few annas left in my pocket, had to sleep on the platform with my wooden box for pillow, among goods packages waiting to be loaded onto the morning train.

 

The Nilgiri Hills.

 

I had never been to the Nilgiri hills before and had heard it was nearly 8,000 feet in elevation above mean sea level. It was an adventure to go there with such clothes as I was provided with. The temperature touched freezing on certain winter days and frost sometimes covered the landscape almost like snow but not quite so. It was a hill resort mostly popular at that time only with Europeans, who lived a post-Victorian life of nabob-like luxury with their horses, both for racing and carriages. Only the most select of them, with some of the so-called Indian nobility that conformed to their way of living, could own property on the hills, and the Maharaja of Travancore himself was disallowed once upon a time the privilege of owning a summer palace in Ootacamund, the topmost of the three hill stations on the Nilgiris, the two others being Coonoor and Kotagiri, which latter were below the 7,000-foot line, while the first raised its peak, Doddabetta, well above the 8,000-foot contour line.

SOLITARY REVERIES DURING THE NIGHT
The thoughts about going to this unknown place kept me half-awake throughout the night as I laid myself to rest on a piece of cloth spread on the platform with the box for pillow. Many thoughts passed through my over-alert brain, half of which I have forgotten. They made a strange impression on me and were different in emotional content from any other such reveries that I have had in many a solitary hour of my life, before or after. With the uncertainty of the situation, all strings attaching my personality to the past being broken, the self felt a lightness and a free ease in which more interesting thoughts than usual filled the imagination as well as the subconscious within the two limits of which they circulated.

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They could be compared to those smokeless flames that burn sometimes in pure gases such as hydrogen with a high temperature but are hardly visible at all. The flame may be said to be present all over the gas and not at its tip alone, and to consume all the fuel at once. Other smoky flames might have more light, but in the case here the effects of burning and the burning itself formed one single process as my thoughts burnt too intensely in a fire that seemed self-consuming by its sense of loneliness and self-sufficiency. It was a subtle form of agony that was not all suffering but which had still its bright lining and perhaps its sweet far-off uses or utilities unknown to me at the moment. Orphaned from home by my own choice and an orphan, as it were, rocked in the cradle of Providence that was my only protective foster-mother for the future days of my life on earth. I was pervaded mentally with a strange emotional state which must have had its purifying effects on me. I must have slept actually or nearly so as the hours glided by, striking one vigil out for another, when a shunting engine sent a shrill shriek at early dawn to startle me rudely, as it were, to bring me back to my own humdrum way of life.

I woke, and with the money I had in my pocket I could not afford a breakfast in the restaurant that was beginning to cater hot rice cakes called idlies and dosais - or perhaps I did have some after all - I do not remember clearly. I got into the train before the morning mists had uncovered to view the Nilgiri foothills, which alone were within sight. At Kallar the twin-engined locomotive had to clutch on to the cog-toothed bar between the usual rails. I had read the words 'Made in Winterthur, Switzerland' on the engines and knew that they were imported specially from that far-off country which was to be my second home many years later. Newer and newer and yet more interesting vistas were opened up as the train went over half a score of bridges; over chasms and torrents; passing waterfalls that suddenly leapt into view; and an equal number of tunnels too, long and short, that could have excited me if I had been a schoolboy - went past till a line of conifers, planted along the railtrack, announced the approach of Coonoor, where I was to alight by about ten in the forenoon.

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A SANNYASIN GIVES ME REFUGE
During the last days of my stay in bed at Alwaye after my operation for the abscess in my armpit, a sannyasin had visited me. He made a good impression on me by his bold and generous ways, although intellectually I did not have much in common with him.

Tall and well-built, he had travelled in the Himalayan regions as a regular sannyasin and had become acquainted with the tradition and ways of life of that order for a number of years. He could be said to be a natural absolutist, though not expert in the sastras.

His open-minded generosity drew all men to him and he also proved himself capable of bold actions in the interests of the public good, like a sort of unofficial outlaw rebel like a William Tell or a Robin Hood. He lived his own life in a retreat on one of the plantations of a medicine-man with whom he was friendly because he himself was known as a healer. He had recently returned from North India, and his attractive personality drew me to him naturally in my days of uncertainty and need. Of all people in this world it was no mere coincidence that a sannyasin should have given me permission to share his roof and bowl of rice after I had left my home behind.

This was in keeping with later events when I was also to belong to that order which at that time I looked upon with a certain mistrust still within me. All holy men were beginning to be suspect to me, but this did not lessen the attraction they had for me even from my earliest days.   

I FIND THE HOME OF THE HERMIT    

Coonoor.

 

On alighting from the train at Coonoor I found that I had no address with me; and as for being welcome to the hermitage of the sannyasin, I only had the vague feeling that I would not at least be unwelcome anyway. I went first to the post office to ask for the direction to go to a place with the peculiar name, Ottu-patti, which was a suburb of Coonoor town. I asked for the hermit by name - which was all I knew about his address. They soon directed me to go up the hill with steps going up a steep path. The strange flower gardens and cosy cottages that I passed with trees like conifers and eucalyptus made the place look somewhat of a fairyland, smelling pleasant, cool and fresh, and I could have almost expected to find a lonely widow or a giantess hiding in cottages with chimneys, as one sees in picture books like that of Jack and the Beanstalk. On reaching the top of the hill I saw the signboard pointing to 'Mount Pleasant'. The vistas of scenery that soon opened up became more alluring still, and the sunlight resembled that of the other rival orb, the moon, rather than that of the sun as known on the plains.

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I walked on and on, confident of finding some more clues to the house of the hermit and, following fresh hints given, I turned round to the other side of a beautiful hill and came up to a valley which was not unlike a treasure valley, where fruit trees could be seen planted in rows, both pears and plums with plenty of fruit on them. Oranges were also to be seen in the locality, although not in the same orchard where I was going. I found a rill crossing the path and stopped to wash myself and rest awhile, enjoying the scene, and could already guess roughly by the loneliness of the little cottage I saw a furlong or so beyond in front of me, that here was where I was to find the hermit, as Dr. Watson expected to find his Sherlock Holmes. The sense of leisure and the newly-won freedom that I was beginning to taste already made my fancies fly faster than ever before. Fancy became soon translated to fact when I actually recognized Swami Bodhananda in front of the cottage.

He lived all by himself, and the villagers came to him for medical help sometimes. A servant-cum-relation of the Swami brought foodstuffs and vegetables from the market every Tuesday, being the gift of the fellow medicine-man whose orchard it was. There was a stream that flowed over a rock nearby where one could wash clothes, and there was a loft-like upper room with a low roof where I could sleep at night, next to the nests of sparrows and other birds that lived in between the tin sheets of the roof and the tiles, making a noise like a set of quarrelsome housewives, starting quite early in the mornings, which was the only nuisance of that time. I went for walks with the Swami and joined the bhajan or singing parties that went on singing devotional songs till past midnight on Saturday nights. I learnt to conquer sleep and keep beating time and singing, sometimes till the small hours of the next day. The names of Rama and Narayana were repeated endlessly by the workers in the cordite factory at Aravankadu where they were mere illiterate labourers. The company of these simple people gave me joy, while more sophisticated company could have irritated me. Thus was my home life with the family ended once and for all, both in my interests and in those with whom I was connected. This resulting happiness for both parties has grown stronger ever since and has proved that the step I took was not altogether wrong, at least in my case.



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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE BIRTH OF THE GURUKULA
From 1923 to 1928 my life was full of adventures and uncertainties. This period of a demi-decade stands out in my memory as a special period of trial and preparation for me.

Poverty, sickness, crime; having to live in cramped and unseemly places, never settled down; with twenty-six members of an artificial family for which I was the only breadwinner - brought me to the end of my wits and resources in the very first chapter of my adventure in life after leaving home.

NEVER AGAIN
They were all troubles that I myself brought on my head because of my wrong ideas of doing good and being good in this wicked world. I believed in being charitable, and thought first of a home for waifs, like Dr. Barnardo's Homes about which I had read in magazines. Social service had appealed to me even from my high-school days, and the appeal continued into college days. I went to villages round Kandy in Ceylon distributing Epsom salts and quinine to malaria-stricken people, and in Madras I worked and taught in slums. Then it was my turn to think of waifs and orphans of whom I had a handful of twenty-six to look after from day to day for four or five long years.

Public subscription was to be the source of income, supplemented by some charges paid by boarders who were rich enough to contribute ten rupees a month (two US dollars). I soon found that my own wrong tendencies to be active - my own karma - had caught me in its coils, and that I could not extricate myself from its mortal grip.

The story is hard to tell even at this distance of time, and perhaps will not be pleasant to read either, but it has to be told, at least for the lesson that it taught me, which sweet use of adversity might help another innocent ignoramus like me, and save him from the consequences of misplaced good intentions.

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The Upanishads warn us against people who think in terms of 'ista' and 'purta' - those relativistic benefactors whose ego prompts them to think that they can help others. They often end up in creating turmoil and trouble for themselves and others. Poverty is easy to face when one is braced against it and when only oneself is involved, but the zero poverty I suffered those five years was one which could be described only as a square-root-of-minus-one indigence. I can truly promise, after such an experience, that I shall never again pride myself as a doer of good to others any more in my life. I say a hundred times 'no' to any philanthropy which does not include one's own happiness under a dialectically conceived formula of general happiness and the happiness of each. Beware of all relativistically conceived goodness or charity.

I PREPARE TO LEAVE THE SHELTER OF THE SANNYASIN
While I spent my days with Swami Bodhananda in the little cottage in a sort of treasure valley on the outskirts of Coonoor, my plans were being incubated within me for a residential secondary school on independent, original and Upanishadic lines. So one day I said goodbye to the noisy sparrows and had nothing more to do with nightly singings and taking the name of the Lord in vain. During my wanderings in the countryside I had found a neglected small-size tea factory which was on a large tea estate on the southern slope of the Nilgiris on the way to the plains. This was Cleveland Estate, owned by one Ramaswami Pillay. Swami Bodhananda knew this generous proprietor who had once given hospitality to Narayana Guru himself on one of his early visits to the Nilgiris sometime before 1920.

 

Bakasura Malai, Coonoor.

 

This neglected tea factory stood near a lonely rock with a stream of water trickling by. In front was a precipitous valley, but beyond the depths there rose a mountain named Bakasura Malai which was a peak that raised its massive head dominantly above all others and seemed to peer into the distance sphinx-like; from there, through rising smoke or mists one could see the hot plains full of toiling, sweltering millions - ploughing, sowing or reaping in the fields spreading below.

There was a cascade not too far off, and the bushes had eglantine, wild orchids, lilies, and that wonder-shrub, strobilanthes, that flowered once in twelve years, turning whole hillsides into a heleotropish deep blue shade of colour when the cycle of twelve years was counted again. Freak strobilanthes however, did not observe the rule, but their rebel flowerings were few and far between. They had to obey the law of nature taken as a whole.

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The crested bulbuls sang in the bushes at early daybreak. Washing and bathing in the stream that went over the rocks and through ferns and moss were the delights of sunny noons. Strolling with the senior Swami kept me generally occupied, while great plans were being hatched within. The chapter I had left behind lost its pangs for me and, before its tears dried completely I was trying to justify my life by making bolder plans for doing good through an educational institution in the tea-factory house which I was to name the Gurukula.

I thought of many alternative names for the Gurukula that I was ever to be wedded to. The consideration that prevailed finally in the choice was that, besides the name of the Guru there were only the minimum letters which made it into the right name for an educational institution.  

HOW MY REVERIES STARTED
Once, when spending my holidays in an out-of-the-way corner of Kerala, just before I heard that I had passed the intermediate examination, a sight reminiscent of an ancient picture had somehow sunk deep into my consciousness - it was a teacher of Sanskrit who lived in a rich man's country house earning a livelihood by teaching a group of boys and girls sitting on the veranda of the house in the antique way of old India. Although it was a simple sight, this had a strange attraction for me.

The pandit, who was something of a poet too, taught Sanskrit declensions and conjugations of irregular verbs, but he was a man not too full of dry grammar. He taught Kalidasa's 'Sakuntala' and other poems, and enjoyed doing it. Kalidasa's poetry excelled in a pure eroticism that, however, did not hurt anyone's morality; but perhaps only rubbed off the prudery that sat awry on some bachelors and spinsters. Kalidasa's pure eroticism agreed well with the type that this full-blooded teacher represented. His pupils too were attracted towards him with more than usual regard, verging on personal affection.

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I happened to watch a good-looking young man who was devotedly attending to the Guru's needs at a bath he was taking in a brook that crossed the rice fields, through rushes and strange wild flowers. The sun was shining and the young man was washing the clothes of the Guru impeccably white. A piece of antique India was seen surviving, and the highlight shed on the spot just then seemed to be meant for me to take special note of it.

Here was something interesting not seen in modernism - the sacred sight in which teacher and taught lived a common life in the intimacy of a family. The memories and suggestions were too deep and rich for me to miss, and I cannot recall this event even now without emotion. Plato's Academy and Aristotle's peripatetic institute of teaching were nothing compared to this Upanishadic model. It was a pastoral paradise that I saw, nowhere well described except in Rousseau's 'Emile', or here and there in Upanishads or Puranas. It moved me deeply for no reason and prompted me to act many years later. I felt that the wicked world could be excused and all its faults forgiven if rising generations could absorb wisdom from their elders in this beautiful way.

I felt for a moment that I could lay down all to see even a fraction of such an ideal felicity realized in this earthy life of ours hereunder. There was nothing so impossible about it, I thought, but I hardly realized that even things easy of accomplishment could be too good to be true. My later life has not totally shattered my dreams, but the troubles I have had in following the alluring lead of this strange desire are yet to be recounted. Woe unto the simple idealist led from one favourite dream to another! But it is better far to have made the mistake than not to have erred at all.

PLANNING THE GURUKULA
Once the building and five acres of land were promised on the lovely Cleveland Estate in surroundings of natural beauty at an altitude of five thousand feet among the delectable mountains, the first matter that received my attention was a plan which had to be printed as a prospectus setting forth all the special features intended. The basis was a Vocational and Normal Secondary Boarding School for boys up to the age of eighteen, and beginning with the secondary classes after elementary education.

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Where were the funds? What kind of boys were to take advantage of this kind of private enterprise which cut against the grain of recognized institutions? Many warned me about being impractical. Even an Englishman, the friend of an old lawyer classmate of mine living in Coonoor, went so far as to speak chillingly to me on being one who would never make good like some of the bright Indians he knew back home in England, who were smart and practical in their outlook.

I did not know then how right he was, but looking back over the years I really have no inclination to regret my decision to which I adhered wilfully against all others. I had to be original in my own way, although that might have some tragic touch about it. Nemesis had to work out its chance somehow through my wilful personality, and I became blind and deaf to all advice. They call this 'Eigensinn' in German, and I had much of this trait. It was made of the stern stuff of tragedy, although not outside the right idealistic track. If it succeeded it would do so only as success could; and if it failed again, by the very utterness of the failure it could be considered, in effect, a sweet form of adverse circumstance which, by a sort of double negation, became a stepping stone to success. It was good both ways. Such was the absolutist dialectics going on within me.

The plan had to be put on paper and, being one who insisted on being original all through, I had great difficulties in outlining the plan. So that I could be sure that I had done a good job of it, I decided to go away from where I lived with the sannyasin to the public gardens called Sim's Park. With two slices of bread and some pickles packed in paper hidden under my shawl, I went to the park and sat there ruminating and giving shape to a new kind of boarding school which would have vocational training side by side with subjects of cultural value drawn from both the Eastern and Western cultures. All the new educational features such as the child-centred school; learning through doing; the Dalton and the Peoples' School; the Gary Plan and those innovations of educational theory or practice brought about by Dewey, Froebel, Rousseau or Tolstoy - were all to be incorporated with ancient Indian education as the basis of the whole. The Socratic and the Upanishadic worlds were to be blended into one.

I composed paragraph after paragraph with an inner agony that none could see as I sat on different seats of the park till the shadows of evening fell, and I returned to the hermit's roof to eat my plate of rice and sleep next to the sparrows again. This went on each day for a week or so.

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Except a vague hope that all would be well, there was no sign on which I could build. It was like going through a dark tunnel in the hope that there would be light visible at the other end. But the loneliness did not deter me. I was prepared to pay the last penalty for wanting to be original and, minority-minded as I was, if what I thought appealed to my reason, what others said, or what the cheap books said, did not change me. Such is the way of absolutism, which is full of repeated tests of one's dedication and integrity at every step. One has to be alone with one's best thoughts. All who have tried to walk the path of absolutism have been left alone or have left others alone. Absolutism is thus a 'flight of the alone to the alone', whichever way one might look.  

I PRINT MY PLANS
At last the manuscript was ready. I also found a friend who was running a press at that time. He was favourably disposed and offered to print it free of cost for me. Generous intentions, however creditable, were one thing, and effective generosity quite another. The press was always engaged for work that was readily paid for, and every time a paragraph of my manuscript was composed, there was always another job that had to be given preference. As a result, I had to attend the press at least fifty times for over a month before I could get the prospectus out. I have calculated that I walked about the distance of two hundred miles before the work was ready. Some price had to be paid somewhere and, whether one wanted to go to the next deck above by climbing the steps at the bow or the stern of a ship, the number of steps would mostly be the same. Nothing of value can be gotten without sacrifice in one form or another. This can be a mystical ascent or the brute physical labour of a Sisyphus. It works out as the same, whether paid for in one coin or in small change. One escapes nothing that one deserves, good or bad. Such is one of the secrets of the way of absolutism, which the earlier one learns, the better.  

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ENTRY INTO THE GURUKULA BUILDING
The building that was given for the Gurukula was a small abandoned tea-factory. It was two-storeyed: the second storey meant for withering the leaves and the first for the machines. The ground-floor room was not cemented, but was used for storing planks. When I looked below some of them I did not actually see snakes, but several big ones seemed to have made it their favourite haunt, guessing by the skins they had shed. The ground was dug up by rats or bandicoots too, and it took some labour to make it anywhere near habitable.

Almost penniless as I was, I could not think of engaging labour, but with a few annas that I had left I bought some sugar, milk, bread and tea dust, and induced some of the workmen who sang bhajans to help me clear the place free of wages, which they willingly did while I boiled water for their tea. Thus was the Gurukula started as if from scratch, waiting for the will of the Tao for its future, if any.

I must thank those simple men who were my only friends and who seemed to understand only vaguely what I was after, but whose co-operation was as unstinted as only the common human is capable of. As man to man their relation was simple and straight, and to give a helping hand was normal for man. In spite of so-called civilization, the American has retained to this day this spirit of being a comrade to fellow men. The man in the street, as he is often referred to, and hailed as 'Hi Joe!' by a passer-by, is often ready and willing to be helpful at the risk of his own life, and this must be attributed to the spark of absolutism that sophistication has failed to kill to the present day. I remember with gratitude the helping hand of those simple labourers.  

FIRST DAYS OF THE GURUKULA
On the first floor of this tea-factory house, lying on the planks with which the floor was constructed, there lay an old tent. This was for me all the furniture and bed too for my ambitious project, whose proud prospectus was now printed and ready, with a sky-blue cover and a blue silk ribbon to bind the quarto leaves together in good style. The contrast between how I lived actually and the excellence I aimed at was reflected in the gap between the silk ribbon and get-up of the prospectus and my old tent bed. My plans had to move within these limits, sometimes touching on things of the earth earthy and sometimes soaring high into the intelligibles of the Platonic world.

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Swami Bodhananda himself was not confident that I would succeed, but was a sympathiser from the beginning. He even prevailed on some of his admirers and disciples to send some boys to the boarding-school. After a month or so some idealistically-minded parents were prevailed upon to send a few boys - less than a dozen - to the Gurukula. They came mostly from Trichur in the then Cochin State. So, with the abandoned coolie-lines by the side of the abandoned factory for kitchen, the Gurukula started functioning.  

MAKING TWO ENDS MEET
Philanthropy and business success are two factors that can spoil each other doubly or enhance each other effectively when combined. It is a case of double gain or double loss. Between the two tendencies it requires the greatest tact to make ends meet.

As it happened in my case, my business aspect went down and the philanthropic side dominated, so I soon found myself in a dilemma. The paying boarders would not pay, at least in time, and with my poor show of a boarding school I had no bargaining power with defaulters. All began to go wrong. I was reduced to relying on begging and had small pots distributed in a village where we collected handfuls of rice. A mixture of varieties of rice thus supplemented the source of income. Everything became precarious and a bag of rice did not last more than a week. Four voluntary teachers, some supernumeraries, some guests both wanted and unwanted, Saturday programmes consisting of bhajans, debates and distribution of sweet puddings where visitors were catered to - all worked out wrong, each defeating the purposes of the other.

In spite of all this, the protection of the Tao seemed to make us outlive one crisis after another and, like the fibres of a rope which, when one end is twisted on the next, all together make for a strong cord, one item that failed was supported by new items of help. Thus we went on from month to month and year to year, just able to make ends meet, though they would not meet, considered rationally.

Horizontally viewed, the undertaking spelled failure; but it was a success treated as a whole as an event that progressed infinitesimally and geometrically by an absolutist form of ineffable progression. Like the surplus value of Karl Marx, there was a subtle mathematical factor which we sometimes call God if we are old-fashioned, or the Law of Possibility in scientific language.

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Somehow, between improbabilities and mere possibilities, the fact was that we survived. Sometimes we picked greens in the field for vegetables and depended too on skimmed buttermilk that a dairyman gave us free. Improvised curries, growing vegetables, begging, waiting for windfalls for the next meal to be secured, borrowings and every means short of stealing had to be resorted to. Stealing itself could not be ruled out in the case of absolute need, as the proverb implies by saying 'all's fair in love and war' or that 'necessity knows no law.' Sanskrit also has 'apat dharmam' (action on extreme emergency) with which one might lighten one's pangs of conscience occasionally, though one can hardly say in every case if it was right or wrong. But we were to be shocked soon out of even this sort of questionable consolation, as shall presently be related.

A THIEF ENTERS THE GURUKULA
The entry of a burglar into the Gurukula which was itself trying to make two ends meet shocked the inmates out of the complacency of doing good. An axe on which we depended for hewing wood was gone; a locked room was opened at night; and when someone raised an alarm and gave chase, the lock was hurled at him and it went buzzing past his head. These were not events to be fitted into a lyrical or pastoral paradise. They woke men's minds to an outer world where harshness was the rule and not an exception. Cooking could not be started the next day and a new axe was too costly to be bought at once.

We were at our wit's end. Soon an idea suggested itself. 'Let us start on a walking trip to the villages round about. Let the drum, the mrdangam, be tied to hang round the neck of the boy who could keep time with it. Let the little harmonium be carried by another, the cymbals by a third'. Thus a wandering minstrelsy became improvised at short notice. 'Are we all well met in front of the Gurukula? Lock the doors! Is something forgotten at the last moment, as when Betty came downstairs saying 'The wine is left behind!' to John Gilpin, when he was ready to start?

The signal was given and off the Gurukula party went in single file up the hill and over the ridge to the humming town below. The bazaar was where we had to go, as someone directed, and the drum sounded, the cymbals struck time, and a voice sang begging before the shop of a respectable friend who gave four annas (a nickel).

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That was a good start. By persistence and after three or four days we returned with about sixty rupees and felt rich. Nothing like a frontal attack on poverty, we realized, congratulating ourselves and starting the Gurukula life again.

This all-out attitude brought us other gains besides the money. There were some gifted boys among the orphans and others who formed the Gurukula group of that time. Someone had gifted to each boy a pair of green shorts and a khaki shirt, and with a flag which had 'One Caste, One Religion and One God' blazoned on it, we went in single file from Coonoor, walking towards Aravan-kadu and Keti, the neighbouring villages.

At this last place a friend put us up for the night and we entertained the group of villagers with singing. An orphan boy, who was in fact twice orphaned, because those who had adopted him and become his second parents also died, was found straying in the streets, with nobody to care for him in this wide world. He could not tell us his correct name and ignored his age. We called him Girijan as he was found on the 'giri' or hill.

Our boys readily adopted him and with this new member our ranks swelled. This boy, however, was somewhat like Kipling's Mowgli, because he had forgotten civilized bowel and other allied toilet habits, and we had to reclaim him from the animal depths to which he had descended because of being unwanted by any loving persons around him. The boys were seen to be full of sympathy and he soon became something of a human pet.

After spending some days in Ootacamund and in the villages nearby, singing and entertaining, we returned, a wiser and happier group, to the Gurukula.



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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FERNHILL: THE HARD YEARS

With twenty or more inmates, mostly orphans or from poor families, and four teachers: one of whom was a carpentry master; another a Sanskrit teacher; the third an artist who taught painting; and myself who handled all subjects; with no servants to hew wood, carry water or cook; and with a totally uncertain and sparse income - the Gurukula ship was sailing through an ocean of necessities every minute from 1923 to 1926. To keep the pot boiling or the wolf from the door; to keep away from dirt, sickness, crime or loss of reputation - required all our resources and precautions.

The ship still sailed on, although there were occasional cloudbursts and windfalls, adverse or favourable, as it bravely ploughed through the ocean of samsara's adversities and pleasurable adventures. The journey of joy seemed never-ending and also the struggle that inevitably formed its concomitant counterpart.

Both of these persist in one form or another in subtle ambivalent compensation or reciprocity that the Tao or Providence decides for us, and there is very little margin for possible personal individual initiative in life's journey treated as a whole. The tide carries each individual forward in the eternal process of becoming in which we are caught, and we keep our places in continuity and contiguity, rising and falling alternately, like waves on the ocean's breast.  

TRIUMPH OVER TRAGEDY
One thrush cannot make a summer by its singing, however full-throated, and one voice in the wilderness is lost as nothing within the mysterious echo and counter-echo in the corridors of the totality of human life. Man, who takes pride in his conquest of nature, often forgets that his skyscrapers and bridges, subways and embankments, only scrape the skin of nature which, like a sleeping giant, can crush the frail little Lilliputians any time. One has to be slightly drunk or mad to face the challenge with a smiling temperament. On taking a retrospective view one wonders how all that we endured was at all possible, but the robust idealism of younger days is often lost in its full coloured content as age weakens vitality.

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To watch the sides of a bag of rice set in the corner of the store collapse when twenty-four hungry mouths had been fed for less than ten days, put me often in a mood of godly fear on many a morning when I woke from sweet slumber that effaced suffering and enabled me to dream sweet dreams of compensation for stark reality. Maya was sometimes a cruel Goddess, but often a nurse and a consoling mother. High thinking alone can make up for too plain a living. Thus balanced, on the whole all goes well.

Such is the lot of every one of us here. But the strange paradox that one can even enjoy suffering in the spirit of pure tragedy or martyrdom is the utter dark trait that can have its own splendid brilliance behind the vanities otherwise making life empty or purposeless. Thus viewed, there is hardly anything we should either reject outright or accept as highly desirable in life as it unravels itself stage by stage before us. All this depends on the degree of intensity of the philosophical mood which enters into the composition of one's own character. Between a fatalistic and an adventurous attitude, life moves on forever like a big fish within a river flood, sometimes turning away from one bank and sometimes from the other, between the necessities and contingencies that arise in endless succession.

The force of becoming is a car of Juggernaut that can crush everything beneath its wheels, but the spirit must still triumph in its contingent victory - such is the nature of life's procession.

STREET BEGGING
Unable to make two ends meet and still wilfully bent on seeing the Gurukula experiment to its bitterest end, we became absolutist mendicants on the street by the sheer necessity of survival.

When I was a high-school student there happened to be a broken-stringed violin which no one wanted, lying in a corner of the house. I readily adopted it as mine, and began to ply the bow across the strings with all the earnestness of a musical connoisseur dreaming of becoming adept - which I never did. The note that I thought of inwardly did not always correspond with what the instrument actually gave out, as the bow was elegantly moved up and down as best as I could manage, and my fingers deftly tried to play bass or tenor, sharps or flats.

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It was an absorbing hobby and I only got as far as following vocal music sung by another, taking the cue from the singer as he improvised. Being self-taught, there were innumerable lacunae in my technique, but I managed to keep up appearances on many an occasion, such as the one in which I was involved in the role of wandering minstrelsy that was forced on me as we started out as a choir of student singers asking for pennies.

We comprised a motley company indeed, consisting of some misèrables and others of brighter vein. There was Swamidas, who later committed suicide. He was our drummer, with his mrdangam slung around his neck. Then Vijayan, the dark-complexioned peasant-stock boy of Kerala with a coppersmith voice that was his fortune. It could attain the five and a half sharp key with ease. But another urchin hardly ten could raise his shrill voice even higher. He too was a foundling and was given the name Bhagavan Prasad which replaced his more ordinary name of Kuppuswamy. Later on he became a regular music teacher and trained sets of students who excelled in the art.

Shanmathuran was the show-boy of the group, both because of his looks as well as his voice. There was a special quality in his larynx and vocal chords with which he could charm everyone. It was his lung illness that carried him away too, before full manhood. Later, when we acted plays, he invariably took the chief female part, and drew much applause and admiration, some of the expressions of which became a nuisance to me as an educator.

And so, as related in my last chapter, the cymbals struck up the time in the hands of Koru who taught carpentry, and with myself playing the violin, we sallied forth into the marketplace. We were all serious-faced as beggars must be. Smiles do not accord with mendicancy. As already told, we felt encouraged by our initial success. Added to this way of begging, there were the collections from the money-boxes or pots put in houses week by week. Soon this art of beggary developed in other ways. The life of the Buddha was first made into the form of a traditional sort of devotional song/sermon known as a 'hari-katha-kalaksepam'. Prose and poetry alternated in such a recital, with dancing interludes, the dancers wearing anklets and jingling bells, in which little Narayanan excelled, especially as he did the part of Krishna with a gilded cap and peacock feather. Soon we added another story, that of the Guru Narayana, interspersed with rich verses in praise of Subramania the War God, written by the Guru, which describe Subramania as having swallowed the sun and moon, and planting his foot in a fiery radiance.

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A CURIOUS ANSWER TO PRAYER
All this gave us a new outlet, full of promise and interest as it took creative shape out of sheer necessity to keep us alive. Beneath the sombre faces there was a flame of creative joy lying dormant and full of hopes and possibilities in the far-off unknown future of the destiny of each and all of us.

Our evil days were not over, in spite of the collective prayers I led for God's help and guidance. These prayers were sometimes conducted after I had lined the twenty up and made them turn right about so that no contagious emotions might spread by each looking at another's face.

God must have heard these earnest appeals, I am sure, but he took his own time to come to our rescue. Perhaps we did not deserve his kindness as yet. Such was our consolation. Another consolation may equally have been in the doctrine of the Mimamsakas that the apurva (non-heretofore) element in our prayers and acts qualified them in such a way that the end results were lost in the world of the absolute adrsta (invisible or non-experienced), proving to us the mystery of the Absolute.

Both prayer and its effect might trace their intersection in the mysteriously dark-splendid matrix of the Absolute, which might shine bright or dim between the waking and the sleep of total human consciousness. It pays back in gold coin what it receives in small change given by petty humans in this refractory planet set afloat in space, ever dutifully going its rounds at the command of the Absolute Principle of Cosmic Order.

In our case our prayers were answered in quite a different way than what we expected. The owner of the tea estate was obliged to sell and transfer five acres of land, with the small factory building included, to prospective buyers of the five hundred-odd acres, who insisted on having the piece promised to the Gurukula included in the sale. We had to find a new shelter for the inmates within a month, or face the possibility of finding ourselves without a roof over our heads.

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CONTACTS WITH HIGH LIFE
'Why don't you catch hold of some rich people?' was a question constantly dinned into my ears by those who seemed to sympathise with me in my work. The rich people in question were known to be elusive enough not to be caught by me. That was the answer that my own inside echoed back to me, but which I did not dare to state openly. However, this did not detain me from giving the matter a chance.

The Sub-Collector of Coonoor was an ex-professor of English in the Presidency College in my student days, on his fresh arrival from England. He was, I thought, sympathetic, and I approached him. I arranged a variety entertainment, with the boys taking part, in the hall of the Cosmopolitan Club in Upper Coonoor. All the élite of the township was invited to tea and I spoke and even played the fool in public, as the chief of three Jews in a dramatic skit. The whole show, however, which only weighed on my pocket, went off otherwise in mere smoke, and our lot was no better for all the contrivance adopted.

Two other similar occasions come to mind, which belong to the same period, in which grand programmes were gone through with dignified pomp. The first of these took place on June 8th, 1924, as the first anniversary of the Gurukula, with Sir A.P. Patro, then Minister of Education, as president. The printed programme, which I have retained, shows the items as 'Music by Gurukula students. Secretary's Report, Play: Tagore's 'Sannyasin' by the Gurukula students'.

It was attended by Sir T. Sadashiva Iyer and Dr. James H. Cousins, who also made very encouraging speeches. Dewan Bahadur K.S. Ramaswami Sastri contributed his own words of appreciation and advice, and, with Sir A.P. Patro's concluding remarks, the day of speeches came to a close after what was reported in the dailies of the time as a successful function. This did not add appreciably to the lot of the Gurukula in its basic bread-and-butter aspects and, with the impending déménagement, the contacts made with high life only made the contrast of luxury with stark needs all the more pronounced.

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After wandering all over the hilly countryside for several weeks, we found another home for the unfortunate inmates, not far from Ootacamund. A neglected cottage with four rooms with no proper flooring was given, free from payment, along with a quarter of an acre of adjoining land, for a period of three years, by a lawyer's manager called Sussi. After making an approach path to it from the branch road through eucalyptus, acacia and fir-trees here and there, the family, with all its miseries, came to be established there. Water for cooking and drinking had to be carried from a quarter of a mile away, and we used a rivulet that was the source of the Bhavani River flowing through the valley in Bishop's Down where the new Gurukula was located.

EFFORTS TO FIND A NEW HOME

 

Ootacamund.

 

Meanwhile I had made some efforts to obtain a permanent plot of land for the Gurukula. One such attempt was at Coonoor to get the Tent Hill forest land; and another to establish ourselves on the top of the hill separating the Wellington and Aravankadu villages. Both fizzled out.

One day, while I was at Ootacamund to visit some Gurukula sympathisers, one of them took me in his old car to the western slope of Bishop's Down, and made me sit waiting in the open car at about sunset while he visited a friend. I was kept watching the landscape where wooded areas and grassy plots alternated in dark and light greenery, with the setting sun lighting up the scene from the West, as it tended towards the twilight hour.

There was a particular spot highlighted just then, which seemed to beckon me with its beauty. It so happened that coming events cast their shadows before, for it was at that very spot that there was some wasteland which I was able to get for the Gurukula from the Government for what they call an upset price as down payment, with the rest to be paid on a rental basis for an indefinite number of years. This spot also happened to be less than half a mile from the house where the misèrables had to be moved in 1925.

Between the first anniversary mentioned, of June 8th, 1924, to the laying of the foundation stone of a proposed building of the Gurukula on the new site at Fernhill, the boys lived in seven or eight different huts which were hardly to be called habitations. Sleeping on cow-dunged floors; flea-bitten most of the night, with a scarcity of blankets; waiting for the groceries for almost every night's meal with incertitude till dusk; starting out to beg early in the morning without breakfast; walking miles and miles, sometimes as many as twenty, to reach Coonoor or Kotagiri by foot to meet some sympathiser - were normal in those days. It was at this time that Mahatma Gandhi sent a Hindi Teacher called Ramananda from the United Provinces, who lived and suffered the same hardships as the boys.

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PUBLICITY FOR THE GURUKULA
On the insistence of Gurukula sympathisers we had a public meeting, with the Collector of the Nilgiris as president, to explain the aims and objects of the new Gurukula as an educational venture. This gained wide publicity and also some criticism.

Then I conceived of a foundation-laying function on the four acres of land that had come to us as if by the will of God. Prayers, therefore, could not be said to have been wholly unanswered. The function was to bring together the wealthy and the élite then present in the Nilgiris for the summer month of holidaying for which Ootacamund (of which Fernhill is a suburb) was called the Queen of Hill Stations in India by the ruling class of that time.

Printed on gilt-edged cards, the invitation is here before me now (1963) after a lapse of thirty-seven years. The high-sounding words printed in classy type run as follows:
'Formally requested by Sir A. P. Patro, Kt., on behalf of the Gurukula, H.H. the Maharaja of Travancore will lay the Foundation Stone of the new buildings of the Sri Narayana Gurukula (near the Railway overbridge down from Fernhill Rly. Station) at 3:30 PM on Sunday, the 13th of June, 1926. The Hon. Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyer, K.C.I.E., will preside over the Third Anniversary of the Gurukula on the same occasion. The pleasure of your company is earnestly solicited. RSVP.'

The detailed programme also indicated a speech by Dr. W. Dodwell, Esquire, ICS, tutor to the young Maharaja, who made his maiden speech on that day. The function attracted other royalties like Her Highness the Maharani of Travancore, the Raja of Bobili, and a cross-section of the élite of the Nilgiris, including seasonal visitors.

The Foundation Stone had a marble slab, inscribed in gilt letters. The bullock-cart bringing the chairs for the visitors could not climb the path leading up to the fully forested grove of eucalyptus trees where the function was to be held and, as it was already near the hour of the arrival of the distinguished guests, I was torn between receiving them and pushing the wheels of the cart to bring the chairs in time. At last all were settled down. The function went off well and was fully covered by the dailies of Madras and elsewhere, and 'ended successfully' as they say.

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Some, I learned afterwards, expected tea to be served on the lawns, because of the RSVP of the invitation, but went disappointed. Otherwise, all went well, and it was referred to as the red letter day. 'The Gurukula has hit the jackpot' said some as they returned at dusk. 'The dreamy idealist has after all acted as he ought' said some others.

The boys and the teachers, who lived in the newly occupied hut a few furlongs off, went there to sleep, but there was no supper for anyone that night, as the grocer's bill had gone up to its maximum breaking point and it was too late already. I asked the senior boy to manage by borrowing from a petty shop newly started in Fernhill itself, and I retired into the tent where the foundation had been laid, while the boys somehow managed to borrow rice. Having paid the last penny in my pocket to the man who had gilded the marble foundation slab, I decided not to think of any supper, and slept alone in the tent that night, not without some fear of wild beasts. These details may be interesting in showing that between the big front and the stark reality there is often a striking ambivalence.

These contrivances to make the Gurukula stand, as it were, on all its four legs, were utter failures, for we found ourselves worse off after the publicity than before. Pomp was all empty and ended in smoke alone, as all vanities are destined to do. Inner stability depends on other deep-seated spiritual sources of nourishment, to tap which this was but a necessary stepping-stone of adverse experience.

TWO WINDFALLS
Meanwhile, when the grocer's bill had attained its limit of adjustability, touching a figure of three or four hundreds, a windfall came from the then Head of the Sri Ramakrishna Math, Swami Shivananda, who was spending his days of retreat in a bungalow overlooking the valley where the boys lived. His keen and sympathetic eye must have lighted on the Gurukula whose meaning, with his own background of renunciation, he must have understood well.

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He instructed Chinnu Maharaj, a brahmachari later known as Swami Chidbhavananda, to count the number of inmates and present an umbrella each as a gift from him. Thus a bundle of umbrellas came to the Gurukula which, if the donor will pardon, I have now to confess I was obliged to pawn at the grocer's to keep the pot boiling. Necessity could not respect laws and far less conventions or proprieties.

The other windfall was a more spectacular event. We had decided as a counsel of despair not to get money by asking, but to wait for the Tao to act by itself, if it wanted, or else to go without necessities. A salver was placed near the Guru Narayana's picture in the place where we came together for meditation each day.

Thus waiting for the grace of God to take effect by its own accord, what could be considered a miracle, if the incidental circumstances were forgotten, actually took place before our eyes. Just when our need was greatest, there arrived on horseback a lancer, who could be said to conform in appearance to the typical Bengal Lancer with full accoutrements. He came to the door of the Gurukula and handed to the Head a cheque for two hundred rupees as a gift from the Maharaja of Jodhpur. The misèrables could hardly believe their eyes. This amount only kept us going for about a month before the wolves were again coming near the door. Such was the sea of necessity or samsara in which we were to swim or save ourselves alternately.

THE PLAY'S THE THING
When I was convinced that we were at the end of our tether, and considering that life itself was a stage, we hit on the idea, like Nick Bottom the Weaver's company of men who played Pyramus and Thisbe before the Duke, that the play's the thing. Whether we were on a stage already, or were to stage a play, both meant the same, in effect, for one could be a projection of the other. How to pay the grocer and survive? That was the question. Stage a play and collect money for the entertainment as the article in trade. Although this way was not quite absolutist, the absolutism of necessity gave it that character from the opposite pole of the situation.

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Where the positive absolutism ended and the negative one began was a question so subtle that only expert Mimamsakas or semanticists could answer. To be so delicately balanced between evil and good was asking too much from beggars who could not be choosers and, as necessity is its own law, we planned a five-act play, relying on necessity again, as the mother of invention, to give us the ability both for the writing and acting, on which we had to fall back again as the last of our own resources.

I went into the seclusion of a well-thicketed hilltop to invent or create a play that the given set of boys could act, giving speeches to each and arranging the dialogues in such a way that reality blended with acting imperceptibly in the characters, whose actual types were also dramatic characters or personages, with interchangeable idiosyncrasies discernible one way or the other, as between play and thing.

Thus the role of dramatist was thrust on me by sheer poverty, which proved at least once to me that I was not solvent enough to borrow even two rupees from a friend when in extreme straits. I might then be said to have touched the zero point of insolvency. This was the negative side of my absolutism, of which I could not be proud, except ironically. I am proud to have survived, after sinking so low, by the rule of the last being the first, and the principle of Nemesis that will rob the have-not of what little he may possess, to give more of what one already had. When absolute zero was thus touched, fear was lost, and I became inwardly tough and emancipated from the alternating context of the duality of luxury and necessity. I inwardly said goodbye to both, and hardened myself like steel to face anything for always. This was a great gain indeed!

The play shaped itself magically into a musical and lyrical comedy, reviving the atmosphere of the Gita Govinda which centred round the erotic-mystical relation between Krishna and Radha, whose atmosphere has survived in Mathura, where cries of 'Radha! Radha!' fill the air to this day.

The black brew of our miserable actual life had to be compensated by something that was light and lyrical. The Radha-Krishna episode supplied the theme, so, calling the play Krishna Lila, I spent four or five days in seclusion composing it, sitting all day within a thicket, where one or two foxes came and looked at me and went back, as I remember even now. My creative genius was in demand compulsorily and, after much trial and error, I produced a full musical operatic piece, some of whose songs were composed by the Art Teacher, Raman, who was then part of our staff.

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The play was soon ready and acted in five places, two in the Nilgiris and the remaining three in Ernakulam, Paravur and Cochin. To make a long story short, we returned able to clear our grocery debts and gain another lease of life - but our woes were not at an end.  

SMALLPOX, CRIME AND SHAME COME TOGETHER
The final defeat of the first chapter of the Gurukula venture came in a cruel form. Over and above sheer poverty, rags and dirt, there first came an attack of smallpox, and half the boys had to be segregated. Mr Kutty Ettan Raja, who was then the Health Officer at Ootacamund, was kind enough to allow special rations of milk and bread for the boys, who went in a truck to be disinfected and admitted into the isolation camp. Like Napoleon's and Alexander's armies when adverse circumstances faced them, all went wrong internally between the inmates and the head of the Gurukula, who began to be considered a bad man, principally because following him further ended in a cul-de-sac.

The crime referred to came in the form of a visitor who was an ex-criminal. He had stolen a watch. He became a quasi-inmate of the Gurukula, staying with us off and on as a kind of religious mendicant, after being released from his term in prison. There was a neighbour of the Gurukula, Ramanathan, who also frequented the Gurukula, giving some French lessons to some of the inmates. This teacher of French happened to tell some of the boys that Jogiswami was an ex-jailbird. This irritated Jogiswami who was somewhat abnormal. He ambushed the teacher, hit him with a big stick and absconded.

Three of the senior boys and the Sanskrit pandit Madhavacharya gave him chase as far as the bazaar in Ootacamund, but the miscreant took refuge with two friends of the Gurukula living there, who sent the boys back saying that they would bring the man with apologies in the evening. They kept their word, and when they were on their way on the railroad track, without my knowledge and against my wish which they knew well, the boys assaulted the man who was being brought by the peace-makers. Naturally, these men were completely offended and estranged, and returned to Ootacamund, having decided to lodge a complaint of conspiracy and rioting against five people, as required by law, including the Head of the Gurukula, as aiding and abetting the crime.

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I was summoned before the magistrate and the courtroom was packed with visitors. Compromise talks that mutual friends had attempted meanwhile failed twice, and the offended friends, who were brothers, demanded their pound of flesh with wilfulness. Public opinion turned against them soon after and, although one grown-up involved had to pay a fine, the boys were warned and excused in view of their adolescence. As inspection of the spot proved that the charge of aiding and abetting in the crime by the Head of the Gurukula could not stand, I came out of the first criminal trial in which I was involved scot-free.

The shame referred to came from the fact that neither the boys nor the staff could be controlled by me any more, as I had failed to point to a bright future for any involved. A rival camp was formed by a fellow-swami whom I had invited from Ceylon to help me with the Gurukula work in my absence, and many of my trusted disciples began to disadopt me and take to the rival side. The public was torn between the new group and the old which, having lost face altogether, could not cope with the situation.

Full disruption set in; some Brutuses themselves stabbed the fallen leader of the Gurukula - and all was lost. The music, the drama, and the female roles that boys were made to take, incited the pent-up sex instincts both among the boys and their favourites, and ugly charges were slung at each other in the rival camps. The atmosphere degenerated to such an extent that the Gurukula could not continue on the same lines any more. The rest of the sad story remains to be told.


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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A HUNGRY MAN'S 'LOVE AFFAIR'
The three years after the Gurukula had come up against a veritable cul-de-sac, as described, were a period of criss-cross interests and events. The fallen head of the Gurukula was held in disrepute, and even those who hesitated finally threw their stones at him, as an animal that had failed in the hunt, like Sher Khan, the Tiger in Kipling's 'Jungle Book'. A fallen hero in disgrace, with Dame Rumour to fan the flames, can call down upon his own head all the cruelty that the group mind is sometimes capable of. The very nature of things seemed to resent him, and all called out loudly for the halter with which he could be hanged.

There was no more chance for him to retrieve his reputation. All were against him and claimed to be right, even from the beginning, almost as if waiting for him to trip and fall. My visits were unwelcome, and if people did not resent me to my face, again it was because of relativistic considerations. If I had admitted my fault and begged pardon, I would have committed another fatal mistake, because none was in a mood to pardon. That would have inflamed the resentment they secretly nourished against me. I stood alone as a failure who was confirmed beyond remedy.

I could not mistake this, as it was evident in every little detail of how people treated me - and I was even then a bit of a psychologist myself. It was not, as I could know, any persecution complex, nor any overdose of self-pity that made me feel sore against all. I could count no-one on my side. Like a hunted criminal with a conscience that needed to be stabilized every minute, night and day, I skulked away from the public gaze. One step more in the same direction and I could easily have been pronounced abnormal and then abandoned forever. It is the social or the relational aspect of one's life that often drives one mad, even when all is whole and healthy still within the self.

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THE GURU TAKES MY SIDE
I would have lost all hope within me if I had not found at least one man who thought that I was not all lost. That one man who could save me from utter moral destruction was none other, as it happened, than the Guru Narayana himself.

For a change I went to the Shivagiri Mutt at Varkala, where about that time the Guru had fixed his residence more permanently than before. With some of the boys who still remained loyal to me, after first trying to settle down at Alwaye, I found myself with less than a dozen boys at Varkala, in a rented building opposite the Ashram's Bhojana Sala (dining room) on the other side of the valley and the paddy fields.

I was offered the post, temporarily, of Headmaster of the English Middle School that the Guru had newly created at Varkala as part of the Ashram activities. It was supposed to be a model school, combining the best features of the then-prevailing system and innovations that were suggested by me before a public gathering specially called by Guru, before which I gave out the scheme of a new kind of school which was in my dreams.

Although the Guru blessed it fully, the public could not see eye to eye with me in the matter of the innovations, and all boiled down to my finding myself a temporary Headmaster for the Middle School which was already there, and continuing in that capacity, on a salary of less than fifty rupees ($10) a month, for about one academic year. This small income was welcome to me, as I had still some bills to settle in Fernhill where the old Gurukula chapter had closed.

The Guru's constant guidance was available to me at Varkala, and he even visited, in my absence, the site of the original Gurukula at Fernhill when on a visit to the Nilgiris about 1927. I heard reports of how the Guru took my side when all had given me up, and recommended me as one who would again succeed, although he had failed in his first attempt. The Guru's absolutist eye could see what was opaque to others perhaps, and he asked a friend of mine, who hesitated in his loyalty to the old Gurukula, to take him to the new site where the foundation stone had been laid in 1926.

The Guru climbed up the steep hill with that friend till he could see the very spot on which the Gurukula was to be. Although he did not set foot on the land, even the glance that he gave to it is treasured by this humble disciple to this day as an act of extreme grace and compassion towards me. How I can know this is hard to explain, in the same way as stray glances between young lovers can have an eloquence known only to the parties involved.

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No love can be one-sided if it has absolutism implied in it. Other miscellaneous affairs which pass for such are not fit to be counted. Absolute regard spreads its message with lightning speed and is independent of age or kinship. The farthest factors can meet in it.  

FAVOURS WITH FAVOURITISM
It must here be remarked, however, that although the Guru treated me as a favourite, he behaved at other times as a perfect stranger, and sometimes too as one ranged on the opposite side to me. The rule he followed in such matters was inscrutable, and when he conferred any favour, even to one most near to him, it had to be in the service of some absolute principle or value involved. Conventions or contracts understood in the social or commercial sense were foreign to him, and his favours fell on persons with the same uncertainty as the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Such is the way of favouritism in the Absolute. Any disciple who thought he was indispensable or special would often find himself torn in resentment and disillusionment - for the Guru could be an utter stranger or most intimate friend without notice. The art of discipleship in the context of the Absolute has many traps and pitfalls which require the greatest tact and humility to avoid. An amplified version of the kind of trouble one has to face is found in the story of Milarepa the Tibetan Yogi, as related by Prof. Evans-Wentz.

Being a would-be Guru myself, I did not approach too near to the Guru to get myself involved in situations annoying to either party, and kept out of the radius of twenty yards of the Guru, and never pretended that I could wait on him personally. The best service I could render was to give the Guru the best of my attention to his words. Willingness to listen, next to the will to believe, is dearer to a Guru than brute service catering to his physical wants, for which work applicants were in plenty with the Guru, and I did not wish to add to their number.

The simple fact that I was a good listener to his words, with one hundred percent attention given to him, was duly appreciated from the Guru's side, and this was how bipolarity of relations between us was affirmed day after day.

It was during this period, between 1926 and 1928, that I had many opportunities of listening, sometimes for hours on end, standing in his presence with folded hands, forgetting meal hours.

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When all had left him, because his subjects were mostly above their heads and sounded monotonous and irritating to them, trying their patience to breaking-point; and as one after another turned away from this impossible man who went on from one subtle subject to another unendingly, I often remained the only listener left. None who is not a philosopher can stand such apparently useless jabber-jabber. Such moments were fully compensated by periods of silence; the Guru excelling in taciturnity alternately with spells of rare eloquence. An absolutist teacher must have an absolutist listener.  

THE ART OF ARBITRATION
Already, earlier in the year, I had received from the Guru a precious lesson in the art of arbitration. I had newly settled down at Varkala with my boys when the Guru went from Madurai to Ceylon. On arrival there he found that there were two rival camps among his followers: a minority of honest men in whose name a piece of land to be gifted to the Guru's cause was legally vested; and a majority who suspected them.

The majority group called upon the other to hand over the property to the Guru while he was actually present in Ceylon. A meeting of all interested was called, and the Guru was asked to preside. One speaker of the majority group called upon the other to place the documents at the feet of the Guru. Those in possession spoke in reply and said that it involved some legal formalities before it could be transferred, and that a lawyer had to be consulted. As the others were mostly illiterate workmen, someone whispered that this was a trick to keep the land to themselves, under pretence of formalities needed till the Guru left the shores of Ceylon.

From a whisper of suspicion, a flame started, then a bonfire; and after that a general conflagration prevailed. A second meeting and a third tended to make the situation get out of hand, and the Guru in his neutrality did not indicate which side was right. When one party accused the other, he listened as sympathetically as to the other - who might have been the more sinned against than being sinners - which the Guru must have known. Feelings ran high as Swami Govindananda and myself were summoned by wire to come from India and deal with the situation.

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As we arrived at Colombo Fort Station, some representatives of the rival parties had already come into the compartment to win us to their side. They were at daggers drawn, and any moment one might have expected untoward incidents. Rumour, gossip, tale-bearing, back-biting, slander, insinuations and invective began to have full interplay; and as someone had, on the very first day of our arrival, whispered that they had seen both of us, the new arbitrators, taking tea with a suspected lawyer of the minority group, we were to be blackballed. Every bargaining or arbitrative power was lost for us both, and there was a stalemate for about four months before it became evident to all that the minority group were honest men.

I went to a lawyer's office and had a revised deed registered, and all suspicions and snake-rope confusions were laid at rest forever. The Guru himself presided at the meeting in which there were scenes of tearful reconciliation, and so we returned to India after a few days by the Ceylon Boat Mail, crossing the ferry between Dhanushkodi and Talaimannar in choppy weather at sea.  

A LESSON IN NEUTRALITY
I remember that the train was delayed for several hours because a buffalo was run over near Anuradhapura. Seeing it was midday already with no sign of the train moving on, I took out the new stove I had bought in Colombo, and cooked a full meal of rice and curry for the Guru with the provisions that Kumaraswamy carried with him for the Guru.

The Guru, who sat in the first class next to where we sat in the second class, appreciated the meal which was cleverly cooked with clarified butter and cumin seeds, in which the small rice was first gently roasted, and then water poured on in correct measure to see that each grain was perfectly cooked, remaining separate without getting mushy. I have always been proud of doing such little things in my own way and later, when in Europe, gained commendations from many for the dishes that I prepared.

Thus it was, that after a twenty-four hours journey by ferry and mail train we reached the city of Madurai, hot and smelly, with evidence of unholy vapours even when the train was within miles of the congested old growth of the rumble-tumble city, with its four temple towers looking sphinx-like from a strange bygone world of the time of the Pandyan kings.

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In all this story the central point is how the Guru kept himself as one apart, not revealing, even by the twinkling of an eye, the side he favoured in the tempest-in-a-teacup turmoil through which we had to live in Colombo. At certain moments it seemed that he spoke more considerately to the majority group who were evidently over-suspicious for nothing. Instead of estranging the ignorant or  evil elements and driving them to an opposite position, his strange and enigmatic neutrality, because of his absorption in the Absolute, acted as that little leaven that leavened the whole lump, and kept them still together for the good of all. He indirectly taught me on that occasion how absolutism could be at the same time most tactful, without being a whit insincere or partial to anybody, on a basis of boundless generosity. Blessed are the peacemakers! Many a lesson which has been very precious to me has come to me from the Guru in this informal way.  

COULD A GURU LIE?
On the ferry as we crossed the Straits of Mannar, reputed to be the same by which the hero of the Ramayana crossed over to Lanka (Ceylon) in days gone by, the choppy sea made us seasick, each to a different degree. The Guru was seen to lie down on a deck seat most of the time. I kept walking up and down the deck, imitating the restlessness of the ferry-boat of about 1000 tons which pitched  and rolled like a young pony; Vidyananda nearly got it and Kumaraswamy, the personal attendant of the Guru, was knocked down by seasickness.

If one could keep oneself from a sense of fear as the boat went up or down, to keep the peristalsis unaffected alternately by fear or its opposite, and could harmonize or sympathise with the ship's motion instead of protesting, seasickness could be mitigated if not fully avoided. But there are certain ladies whom I have known becoming seasick in New York Harbour even in a 50,000 tonner like the SS Liberté - the former Bremen - even before the ship had been untied or lifted anchor.

It is the mind that is involved here, and those who live in that zone of the mental mechanism where outer movements meet the inner adjustments to them are more prone to the trouble of mal-de-mer than others. It belongs to the psycho-physical zone of the Self. When we reached Dhanushkodi on the Indian side, and the mail train was still warming up its engine alongside the terminal Mandapam Station, this diagnosis of mine was confirmed by the Guru in the following manner.

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We had already found our places in our respective compartments, and the Guru's place was at the other end of the train. After consoling ourselves for a while on touching terra firma again, especially that of Mother India which, with all her faults, meant something deep even to one who despised this poor country, each one of us went to the compartment where the Guru sat and came back with a report of what the Guru had said to each.

It was about the seasickness, and each had a different version about how the Guru himself felt. On first hearing one which was not compatible with the other, I thought for a moment that a Guru could lie, till I discovered the underlying principle of the Guru, which was to speak to a man who was sick to a certain degree as if the Guru too was sick in the same way. Inner or outer zones of the psycho-physical makeup that each man has could be matched, as when we speak like a child to children. The ego that sleeps or wakes is not effaced, but one that might be deeper still and alternate with the other. Matched in this way there was perfect veracity in what the Guru said, for when I went and told him that I was not sick at all, he returned the compliment in the same coin, and asserted that he was like me and felt nothing at all.

Each man may be said to consist of many vessels, one inside the other, and a psycho-physical inner compatibility is more honest philosophically than a mere physical or mental one mechanically conceived as a standardized truth fit for all and sundry. Honesty itself has thus two different axes of reference, and the purer and inner one is respected by a spiritual Guru more than what is merely agreeable from outer standards.

This was another of those precious lessons that the Guru taught me on that memorable trip back from Ceylon. He proved that he could lie to reveal a truth that is more profound and precious for the cause of wisdom for which he was the Guru. A petty truth could be falsified in the light of a Great Lie. Whether called true or false conventionally, it is the Absolute Value-quality that counts. Truth is one, but the conventional lies possible to man, where possibilities and probabilities interpenetrate into a complex tangle of relativistic elements of true or false, can be valuable or absurd according to circumstances of time or place only. Such is the indeterminate
domain of Maya-values in life, which conventionally-minded people give more importance to than the real Truth-value which lies deeper than the visible surface of things.

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THE BUTT OF A PRACTICAL JOKE
I had not yet finally learnt the lesson that relativism and absolutism cannot be lived together. After my early days at the Cleveland Estate Gurukula, near Kateri Road Railway Station, where I had a bad attack of a malignant type of malaria that did not respond to the extra doses of quinine, when undernourishment had sapped all my resistance to disease, sleeping on an old tent and with no coin to pay for nourishing milk, I once made the mistake of visiting my mother in Trivandrum.

I remember I had to take a detour by boat as there was a breach in the railway; then with dysentery too and nothing I could eat or pay for at the boat jetty where I slept the night at an out-of-the-way place called Karuppandanna, and finally reaching the house where my parents lived, I went skulkingly with the criminal conscience of a prodigal son to the presence of my father and mother. If I had been a true absolutist, I should not have done this because, like a relapsing fever, relativism asserts itself again at the slightest chance. But I had to conduct the experiment for myself to learn the lesson the hard way.

Relations who met me on the way added fuel to the fire of relativism beginning to burn me from within, and all nature seemed to conspire to tell me that I should respect the feelings of my mother who, they said, was missing me badly.

Half-convinced one way and the other, I submitted myself to the temptation of entering the family house again. Relativism, like Sani (the planetary deity Saturn), entered into my being. It took me many years of re-learning to shake off the subtle lurking evil effects. The hesitant soul in the path of absolutism is doomed to destruction, as the Gita categorically declares. The lengthening shadow of its after-effects can be traced in my life, by myself at least, as I am the best witness to myself. Beware of the lapse of relativism when once you have opted for the way of the Absolute! One episode particularly stands out in this context. My visits to the family were few, perhaps once or twice a year, and lasting less than a couple of days each time - but even this was enough to complicate matters and give a handle for the forces of relativistic Maya, lurking in Nature itself, to work on me to enslave me.

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Love was the last subject that could have arisen in me at the time, half-starved and emaciated as I was, with only a pale future for me as a young man entering into a career. Sometimes on visiting the house, I was not recognized as one of the sons, and was in effect turned out by some servant who had never seen me before and suspected me. Sometimes I had to wait in the anteroom while the family dined inside as the servant would not let me in.

All this, however, did not deter a holy lady who frequented the family from taking me apart one day and whispering into my ears that a tall, beautiful, big-eyed lady student of the college had been in love with me for the past seven or eight years. She was a classmate of my sisters, who had all three been at Madras as students together with me a few years before.

I have once seen a kitten that was almost dying of starvation in a neglected part of the house, to whom I offered a black cloth ball at the end of a string to play with. In spite of its starvation, the kitten's instinct of playing at catching mice was fully alive. My case was not different. Although ill-attired and half-starved, wandering at that time with the orphans and waifs who were staging self-written plays to keep the pot boiling, the strange sound of a love rumour still sounded interesting to my ears.

I followed the matter up, and my sisters, who were themselves interested and friendly with the girl in question, confirmed the gossip of the holy woman who first communicated the matter to me. I saw no harm in a Platonic friendship, while anything that sounded more real was both impossible and repugnant to me. Further, in those days I was steeped in the theories about life of Tolstoy, who had written somewhere that life had two movements, like a ball suspended from the roof, swinging when the string itself was moved up and down by a pulley arrangement. The vertical movement had only an indirect influence on the horizontal circles, parabolas, ellipses or spirals that it traced, or could be made to trace.

This example stuck to me and I thought that a love affair could be treated vertically, with all the horizontal aspects carefully eliminated by intelligent rejection. A form of companionate alliance could be worked out, in which both the persons involved could find some kind of happiness. Wild dreams and theories as these evidently were, they only led to an ugly practical joke being played on me, verging on some kind of tragic foreboding; for such an alliance was too good for this wicked world and only brought me lower down still in the credit that I held in the public eye, although true morality remained all the while intact inside. I learnt once again that relativism and the absolutist way cannot be combined without double loss or double gain for one side or the other.  

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THE JOKE IS PLAYED TO THE BITTER END
The joke took the following shape. Some of the boys were in the know of the gossip whose tiny trumpetings were heard with magnified wonder. The matter became talked about in nooks and corners, and a plan was hatched between some grown-up visitors to the Gurukula and some members of the staff who had all lost confidence in the Head, as already related.

The Platonic companionship was much discussed, with all its actual implications. After many 'if nots' and 'why nots' it was decided that a joke was to be played on me at my rueful expense. It took mature shape on a certain day when we had returned to Fernhill after the dramatic performance in Cochin, as related already. A mock marriage was to be celebrated. A telegram was sent to the lady. A lawyer and an artist gave a final shape to the joke, whose seriousness they ignored wilfully or unwittingly - or sheer horizontalism prompted them. A day was fixed and invitations sent round to friends. The words of the telegram were ready and composed, saying that the marriage of so-and-so was being celebrated at Fernhill, and asking that the lady and my sisters with whom she was then staying as a boarder in the same house should do likewise, which I heard they complied with religiously to the letter.

The joke had taken on such practical momentum that it was hard for me to stop it, being myself within the soup - which circumstance reduced my powers of effectively countering it to almost zero, however much I realized the possible ugly consequences. What about the reputation of the girl and her future? What about my own reputation and integrity as a man of renunciation and benefaction, though not yet a fully awake absolutist?

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All was in jeopardy, and I thought I was going to face some sort of moral crucifixion. A dummy lady was made to sit on a chair and I had to sit next to it, as songs composed by the lawyer guest and the artist were sung in the presence of a gathering of friends, some of whom were puzzled as to how to take the whole matter. In spite of my protests and my spending many hours about midday in the seclusion of an 'Olive Mount' to devise measures to mitigate any possible evil, the entire joke was played out to the letter, except that I prevailed upon the youthful mischief-makers in excitement over such a ticklish subject as their master's marriage, to insert the word 'virtual' before the word 'marriage' in the telegram that was sent, and further too, in order that misinterpretations might not complicate matters later, I put on the mantelpiece of the room where the joke was to be played to its bitter end, a fully elaborated statement about the nature of the alliance that I was willing on my part to approve.

More than these two items of precaution was impossible for me who had no executive powers except of goodwill with which to dictate any terms at all - which powers, if I had exerted them, would have only made the joke more so, fanning further its distortions and unhealthy absurdities. A joke is like the bitter taste of the scum of foam on a sea beach, as Bergson has described it, and any further fuss or shaking about it would have only made the bitter taste bitterer still.

Such was my predicament. I guess too that there must be a fundamental weakness in my character which was not stern enough to stop the rot earlier. Thus the bitter joke was acted out actually to its bitterest end as events only too soon confirmed. The relatives of that beautiful lady naturally took offence at this kind of treatment of a girl who herself had many suitors more fit for her hand. She was removed to another house in a huff. They were reported to have threatened even to shoot the fellow who dared to make advances in this absurd way. Even the Guru got scent of this affair which took some time for its embers to be extinguished completely from that relativistic gossipy underworld where rumours can last long and remain as ever-remembered affairs, with nothing substantial at all within them as kernel to the whole matter.

The Guru was reported to have feared that I was going to be lost to the cause of pure absolutism forever. It was only when I received a letter from the lady herself, when I was in Europe a few years later, that the last sparks died down, because she asked for my permission to get married to a fellow-inspector of schools in a far-away place, which was readily granted by me. Her death a few years later put the seal on the story more finally; but bad reputations, like John Brown's soul, go marching on somehow here or elsewhere, as they are bound to do in human history.

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There will be two kinds of gentle readers who will judge me still on this episode. To those who tend to be with me, I say that they may not be all in the right; and to those who tend to judge me adversely I would only suggest, as Rousseau did in the beginning of his Confessions, that they should stand with me before the throne of the Most High Judge of all before throwing any stone at me. If accusing me of anything that is not fully in keeping with the dignity of human nature with all its limitations in this complex relativistic world in which it is the lot of all humans to live and die, I plead 'not guilty'. Let the Judge of all Judges decide; or let all this be treated as a joke and be forgotten, which perhaps would be a better form of indulgence shown to me.

Thus ends the story of a hungry man's first love affair, put on paper so that my enemies, if any, can heap calumny on my head - if they are so disposed - to the end of time. Disrepute and death are interchangeable values in the context of true absolutism. Absolute Honour is beyond life and death.


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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

REAFFIRMING MY SVADHARMA
Before returning with the Guru from Ceylon, as described already, there was an event of sufficient importance in my life which I should now insert into the context.

During the last days of our stay in Colombo the Guru had disbanded the group of disciples because of petty squabbles between them about money matters. The Guru heard about this, called the treasurer of the group and summarily ordered him to divide whatever cash there happened to be among the members of the group equally. I got my share of about forty rupees. The Guru was in one of his difficult moods when he discarded all relational moorings for a free life on his own, as he often did, even many times during one and the same day.

Saying no-one of the group should follow him, he left to live with two personal attendants alone near the beach in a discarded temple on the sands washed by the seas. I too banished myself into the world at large, as it were, rich with the rupees in my pocket. The important swamis left one after another, as things went wrong for them, item after item, and as they began to lack conveniences to which they were accustomed.

The Guru himself had predicted that they would do so, and only a handful remained behind in Ceylon till all the work about the reconciliation (already recounted) was properly terminated. Swami Govindananda, who was with me when I first entered Colombo, went back to Conjeevaram (Kanchipuram), where he had himself founded an ashram. Sugunanandagiri was sent by me to look after whatever remained of the Gurukula at Fernhill in the Nilgiris in my absence.

BUDDHISM AND BRAHMINISM
The first thing I did on banishing myself to live on my own was to go and buy a stove and some vessels in which I could cook, and it was in a neglected corner of a night school that I found myself for the first night. The workmen from Kerala who were running the night school treated me kindly, and I had no need to cook my own food. I soon found the house of a clerk of an export company, a Swiss firm, who gave me more decent hospitality than I found with the workmen in the crowded port. I soon made more friends.

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Although the Guru had prohibited any of the group to follow him, I thought that all rules must have exceptions, and presented myself of an evening at the seaside temple retreat where the Guru spent his days. I remember visiting with him a Buddhist Vihara in the centre of the city, a fairly large one, where the monks lived the same life that they must have lived for a thousand years or more. A stray remark that the Guru made while closely observing a mural painting in the Vihara has stuck to my mind through the years.

The Buddha was represented as getting his education, and his teacher's figure could be clearly distinguished as that of one wearing the sacred thread on his shoulders. In spite of the anti-Vedic heterodoxy of Buddhism, this tacit recognition of Vedism was very significant in the Guru's eyes, and he drew my attention to it in so many words.

'There too Brahminism stands, as it were, above', he said. He meant that there was lurking in the way of belief and life of the ancient Vedic context something of value which mere rationalism could not brush aside and treat with any contempt. Vedism, properly understood as the dialectical anterior counterpart of Vedantism, flowering later in the Upanishads, held some numinous and proto-linguistic secret and an implicit pattern of behaviour which was basic to Indian spirituality in many respects, even before it was critically revalued - just as an uncut diamond or the bulb of a flowering lily could have value. The four learned Brahmins recur in the Buddhist stories in many forms and, on final analysis, cannot be dispensed with. This too, in the context of the Theravada Buddhism of Ceylon, was all the more remarkable.

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I AM GIVEN THE YELLOW ROBE
Not many days after this visit, while I was once again present at the oceanic temple retreat, the Guru called me and presented me with a sumptuous silk shawl of that bright orange yellow or ochre hue that was just the right tint for the robe of a Buddhist bhikhu or a Hindu sannyasi at once. Seeing me hesitating for a minute to receive such a holy mantle from his hands, the Guru added a remark which, by its cryptic significance in reference to me, has remained in my memory indelibly to the present time.

'The colour', he said, 'is not inside each fibre of the cloth'. Of course it covered it only from outside and therefore 'there will not be any harm done by your accepting it', he added. It was only many years afterwards that the full significance of what he said dawned on me by degrees. He wanted me to distinguish between a pattern of life that had its reference to the world outside, which is social, and the true inner world, which remains ever pure and transparent.

If a policeman on traffic duty at a road crossing in a metropolis did not wear his uniform, he could easily be run over. His uniform thus gains an importance in reference to the social function he has to fulfil, irrespective of the spirituality of the soul within. As I learnt later, it was Emile Durkheim who had made this distinction clear by referring to entities which were real in a social sense and which he called 'choses sociales'. Long before I had acquainted myself with this French sociologist, the Guru had made it clear with the example of the constable. Even the white armband or gloves that the constable sometimes wore had their importance. If one shook one's head in denial in the dark when someone asked a question, it would not be effective if, at some later stage, others had to bear witness to the denial. Thumb-impressions and the registration of documents are sensible only in this sense that they are sometimes socially inevitable. It would be wrong to make a fetish of outward things, but they cannot be omitted altogether in the world of everyday necessities where obligations come into full force.

Another aspect of the same gift became clear to me in the same way by stages. I had always had my reservations about the necessity of conforming to the pattern of behaviour of a bhikhu or a sannyasi with the several marks of holiness that go with them. I tended to think that they rather belonged to an age that had passed away, and that modernism had to revalue them and give them a fresh outward as well as inward significance. How this was to be done still escaped me. Moreover, the suggestion implied in the donning of the yellow robe - that one became holy by that alone - was repugnant to my way of thinking.

The boys of Ceylon who belonged to the Buddhist tradition were recruited into the Order even when they were teenagers when they hardly realized what they were going in for. There must be a sort of half-way house at least - or more than one such stage of preparation - for the ascent that spiritual progress or perfection must follow, so that the holiness claimed and that actually deserved could correspond with the least possible hypocrisy.  

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SANNYASA AND TYAGA
Narayana Guru himself often referred to sannyasins as tyagis (those who had renounced), which merely meant that they opted for a way of life in keeping with the high value of the Absolute, minimising personal desires and ambitions. A certain duality between what was to be attained and the means of attaining it was thus accepted - although even the last vestiges of such a duality could be progressively abolished by the aspirant in his pilgrimage to the Absolute.

Just as all can in principle be fellow-passengers, even in the queue before actually finding themselves in a train in motion - some with tickets in hand and others still to buy them - so the common intention could combine all into one class in intention or in principle. So too, anyone who has taken a resolution to follow the path of the Absolute could be considered as belonging to the same context as any other member of the group.

The Bhagavad Gita, in its last chapter, has faced this problem of reconciling ends and means in the context of renunciation by introducing the notion of tyaga as a concept coming in between the non-initiated stage and the fully-fledged pattern of life represented by sannyasa. The stage of tyagi-hood would automatically mature into that of the sannyasin in its fullest sense.

All these theoretical considerations became clear to me only many years later. The Guru seems to have known in advance roughly how my life would shape itself because of the transparent clarity of all his thoughts as a yogi, and presented me with the yellow shawl with the remark which took away the edge from any objection that I might legitimately have put forward.

Thus it was that, without ado of any kind, I was first admitted into the order of disciples of the Guru, although I did not don the full robe with all that went with it till many years later, after the age of sixty. It was my great good fortune that an actual Guru of the standing of Narayana himself took such interest in me as to give me the robe even so early as 1926.

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The first seal on my decision to follow the path of the Absolute was thus put on me by the grace of the Guru himself and by his own initiative, as it were, when he was at the seaside temple at Mukhadvaram (Facing-Door to the Ocean), as that place was called. In a certain sense the Absolute itself may be said to have chosen me, more truly than I choosing it. The pilgrimage thus started for me more earnestly than before and, except outside the limits of India where the robe meant nothing, I have habitually donned the yellow mantle on my shoulders all through my life and ever since.  

FINDING MY SVADHARMA
To be a misfit in life; to feel frustrated; to lose one's proper bearings; not to be consequential; to miss one's vocation; to be maladjusted or wrongly articulated to the outer circumstances of one's life - are a malady of the spirit which has been referred to also as 'straying from one's svadharma'.

The compatibility of the inner factors of life-tendencies with their own counterparts outside oneself is a desideratum for a happy life. Thus gaining the soul or harmony is also sometimes called 'coming to oneself'. One finds various types of persons not hard at all to come across in the world, from hobos to an endless variety of peculiar characters, who may be said to be people who have not found themselves in terms of the world, or vice-versa.

Great souls who deserve to be graded highly in the scale of spirituality might wander thus, unknown to the busy man. A bloated ego, too, sometimes makes a man a misfit and thus be virtually lost to himself and to the world. The waste of human wealth under this heading is a greater loss than any other form of waste. A social asphyxia applicable to whole groups of people might express itself in the form of such a malaise, which might even make countries or nations weak and vulnerable to outer elements. Distorted or exaggerated notions of caste, when statically conceived, can create mass misfits in society - as in modern India - or drive suffocating social elements underground. Disastrous situations might thus arise in private and public life when svadharma is violated or even when wrongly understood and applied.

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Only a few can survive the test when it comes. Whether with a brahmin or a pariah, it is the violation of svadharma alone that can be pernicious, and the consequent kind of social asphyxia can occur both by exaggerating the demands of social divisions, keeping them watertight, and from mere promiscuity. An inner law and a two-sided compatibility have to be respected. Finding one's svadharma thus resembles attaining yoga, and the guidance of a Guru is needed. During the period of my life between 1925 and 1928, I found myself frustrated and lost in this peculiarly subtle way, and it was due to the Guru's grace that I regained my harmony, balance, or normal spiritual health itself, as I must now tell.  

THE GURU PLANS A MODEL SCHOOL
I did not, in short, have any occupation that really suited my inner temperament. Wasted manpower was what was the matter. I was a fully-trained educationist and in love with that work wholeheartedly; but in spite of the best efforts made by the Guru to give me a school to run according to my own ideas, local society could not see eye to eye with me.

The Guru himself had gathered from me the gist of my new educational ideas, and fully endorsed them on his part. He gave me to understand by his attitude and actions that he would co-operate with me in founding a Matrika Pathasala (a model school) which would combine the best in the Indian educational tradition with what was modern and practical in the Western Public School system. He gave an attentive hearing to me on the subject more than once, and agreed that there was something in what I said.

The ancient forest schools in which the teacher and the taught lived in bipolar adoption and intimacy were conducive to the natural transference of the wisdom represented by the elder one to the younger by a natural osmosis between them. Play and work could thus be combined harmoniously. The ideal of the child-centred school, with a programme of interest rather than a curriculum imposed from outside, could be combined with good drilling in the mechanics of language or calculations. Individual tendencies and types could be respected, and the bookish way could be complemented by activities, so that one became recreation in terms of the other.

The English type of Public School with its stress on character and hardihood, with team spirit and self-reliance, with the values of honour and sportsmanship, could enhance the value of the future citizen of India; and the scope of patriotism itself could be widened to include all humanity within the ideals of 'One God, One Religion and One Caste or Race'.

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A pragmatic outlook and the project method were not incompatible with an Upanishadic way of life. Even Rousseau's 'Negative Education' was, in theory, not drastically different from the ideals of 'Gurukula vasa', Brahmacharya, and Guru-bhakti as known in India from the most antique times.

The Guru himself had shown that he was interested in such a school when he established the Advaitashrama Sanskrit School at Alwaye, where he could himself be seen taking the boys for a bath in the broad, clear river, and feeding them with milk porridge with his own hands. Such ideals were all Greek to the intimate entourage of the Guru at that time, who were struck by the glamour of all that was merely Anglo-Indian which was just then invading the life of the intellectual middle classes of India. To wear a cross-belt or be an officer in the Indian Civil Service was every parent's dream of a career for his son.

My parents too had this dream on one side, and an almost equally strong enthusiasm for what the Guru represented on the other side. The people voted for the more glamorous picture, and all the plans that I had hatched with the Guru's understanding encouragement did not take root, although the preliminary earthwork for the new school, with the support of the Guru - who agreed with my own views and enthusiasms - was all done by myself so that I could pilot the project myself.

One day the Guru gave me a Chinese umbrella which he had himself received as a gift from some admirer in Ceylon, and sent me and another man of the neighbouring locality of Nedunganda to go to the countryside, announcing the good news of the Model School that was going to be. Enough funds were soon collected; a solid building was started; and it was even understood that I should be given full charge of the experiment - but all transpired otherwise.

When the meeting of the people of the countryside actually took place for giving shape to these ideals, the interesting features of the new school were dropped one after another for something in the name of being more and more practical and utilitarian. Really nothing was left of the message-aspects of the plan and a mere humdrum middle school on lines that the Department of Education, with its red tape and conventions could approve of, resulted.

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The committee of so-called respectable people of the surrounding regions formed a managing committee for the building, but persisted in holding that office even after the building was completed instead of letting better counsel on educational matters prevail. As a result I was cold-shouldered and pushed aside as someone who could not fit into the practical and realistic context into which the plans matured.  

Nothing that could enthuse me resulted from the whole affair, and I remained a sort of supernumerary who was not wanted. Doors closed one after another against me, although my favour with the Guru remained intact and always in full strength, as we understood between us.

THE PLAN OF AN INDIAN PUBLIC SCHOOL
The Guru's kindly regard kept me still morally undefeated in spite of the failures and frustrations that came my way. For lack of a cheap and qualified hand to be Headmaster of the Shivagiri English Middle School that occupied the new building (meant for the Model School so ambitiously conceived), I was appointed on an honorarium of forty-five rupees per month as the Headmaster by the manager of the Building Committee which persisted in functioning as the Educational Committee too, though in an irregular way.

I could suggest no new item of innovation. The respectable local contractors and others who understood nothing about ideals in education - who formed the major part of the Committee - were those whose wishes prevailed and to whom I submitted weakly, because of love of the Guru and also because I had no power to dictate, except to myself. Things took their own course and I remained more and more dissatisfied inside, finding no proper outlet for my pent-up forces and dreamy, ambitious projects.

Just at that time it happened that an important man of India, the Hon. S.R. Das, Law Member to the Viceroy of India, had the idea of starting a Public School (as in the English, not the Scottish or American usage) for Indian boys. As an old Trinity Collegian, I found his plan, as detailed in the newspapers of that day, very attractive. I contacted Mr. Das, who had already collected several hundred thousand rupees for the school. I sent him some of the literature of the Gurukula that I was interested in, and about my own experiments.

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Mr. Das was very much interested in what I had to say, and wrote me a letter of six or seven pages saying how he agreed with my views. Why should I not follow up the link thus established? No real deflection from my own svadharma would be implied, because I was going to be an educationist anyway; and as for sannyasa, I believed in revaluing it myself by my own experiments and revisions. Sannyasa was not a fetish with me, and I could continue it in spirit without conforming to the outer details of its pattern of behaviour, which had become rusty and outmoded. The Public School life, for a while at least, would give me something worthwhile to do to revitalize my inside, which was going into moribund disuse. My best powers were being stifled. The newspapers also announced soon after, that Mr. S.R. Das was going to England to select the personnel for the new venture. Why not go there myself, and meet him, not only to further discuss the details of the plan with him, but also to acquaint myself more directly with the working of Public School education in Europe?

The idea was attractive to me and, when I mentioned it to the Guru, I saw no signs of disapproval. He must have known himself of the pangs of frustrated svadharma, and was willing to support me financially on my trip to England for finishing educational training.

Another friend whom I had approached for such help through a loan failed me at the last moment, and the Guru, watching with a keen eye what I wanted, and interested in saving a frustrated disciple who could not fit into the plans into which he had intended to place me, adopted the next best alternative of helping me to go abroad. One thousand five hundred rupees were thus arranged by the Guru's own initiative, and I could begin to plan my trip.

PERSONALITY EFFACEMENT
In the meanwhile, the story of the Guru's illness about four months previous to this event, when I met him at Varkala after his visits to Madras, Palghat, and other places for his treatment - as recounted elsewhere - has also to be fitted into this context if the scene is to be visualized in its completeness.

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Every day he was getting weaker, although the worst pains that he suffered with prostate gland trouble were cured by the attention of the best surgeons and doctors available, both Western and Ayurvedic. He had come back to Varkala and, after changing his residence twice or thrice already in one week - staying in the Guest House, the Traveller's Bungalow and a vacant room of the new school building, not yet fully occupied - he still gave his keen and minute attention to all details, and I was not omitted from his regard although I felt that all others in the world took me for granted, at best.

To efface one's own personality and not let it make any impression on people around is one of the siddhis (psychic perfections), if any, that I have cultivated, perhaps unconsciously, all my life. Many happenings in my life which I can remember have proved to me, time and again, that the personality can be so adjusted as to make no impression on the world, and conversely, the world will also leave you alone as if you did not exist.  

TAKEN FOR GRANTED MORE AND MORE
An absolutist can become a misfit in two ways: because he is above what people expect; or because he is below. In my own case, I cannot say definitely today if it was one way or the other. In many respects I was treated as if I did not exist and at other times I have heard praise lavished on me, deserved or not. Many are the occasions that I can call to mind in my early days in the family, when I have been forgotten when some nice eatables were distributed in glee around me as I kept quiet in my room, listening to the jubilations outside.

One cannot possibly mistake this circumstance when one is forgotten or overlooked, whether by one's own dear ones or by strangers. The latter have tended to show me some more attention than those dear or near to me, with whom I can remember bitter instances in which a sort of cold cruelty of omission has met my over-enthusiastic accostings. This kind of grievance has been so evenly distributed in my life that on looking back I begin to wonder if it is not after all my own peculiarity that has been at the bottom of the whole mischief. I can therefore seriously blame no one.

If I refer to some of the instances, it is only because of the value such reminiscences might have in the case of readers of this neglected man's life of solitude. Temperamentally I feel here a kinship with that 'promeneur solitaire' who wrote about his reveries - that dear soul, the product of European civilization before the French Revolution - J-J. Rousseau, my admiration for whom I may have to tell in more detail later.

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A very striking instance of my being taken for granted took place as follows: the Guru was still having treatment while he lived in a special bungalow rented for him at Ernakulam. All the disciples, both lay and monastic, had gathered round him, and there was quite a colony of followers who lived and boarded in the same building. I was also there. Swami Bodhananda was the leader of the monastic group and Mr. T.K. Madhavan of the lay followers.

The ailing Guru, though bedridden, was the centre of humming life around him. A score of lay, and an equal number of monastic, disciples were counted. After the period of rest at Ernakulam it was arranged that a specially chartered houseboat that could navigate the backwaters of the West Coast should take the whole group to Quilon, and a notice was put up mentioning the list of the lay and monastic members who could alone get into the boat. On scrutinizing the list again and again, like the writing which the angel showed to Abu Ben Adham, I found that my name was not there. Like a bat, neither bird nor animal, I was forgotten.

Starting from Palghat, earlier on the same trip with the ailing Guru, I was honoured with a similar omission when about fifty first, second and third class tickets were bought at the Guru's expense for all the other disciples and even attendants.

As invited guest in two respectable houses I was on one occasion left waiting in the drawing room, taken for granted or forgotten, or even semi-consciously forgotten maybe, while all had their noisy feast inside. Then, when I was found still sitting in the room, I was apologised to most maladroitly, which made the situation still worse for me.

On the second occasion I was the guest in a village headman's house. He was reputed to be very respectful and hospitable to all guests, especially holy men. This did not deter him from forgetting me as I stayed in a small room, forgotten, without any food for twenty-four hours. When he suddenly remembered the omission, he and the whole family were so conscience-stricken that all of them came with food, one after another, and waited on me with a vengeance, as it were, and asked me resentfully and almost angrily, that I should not consider their family such low people.

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A State Government which once invited me to advise it on rural reconstruction and treated me as a Gazetted State Guest, with ministers waiting on me, omitted to pay me even my train fare after I had fulfilled my commission correctly; while for a similar work a few months before, forty thousand rupees was paid to another man supposed to be an expert.

Other miscellaneous instances of slighting that I should not omit are the instance of how a dear blood relation refused to cash a cheque for me, saying that he would lose the commission of four annas (five cents) on it; and when another kind relation, a lady this time, would not part with a spoonful of special salt to flavour soups with, for which I had expressed a fancy while visiting her house. If you add to this that very near and dear ones have filed criminal suits against me for getting possession of some properties in my name, the limit of understandability in such an attitude that is possible between humans, with no other ill-will, would suffice to beat anyone. I can only say that a subtle form of asuya (jealousy) that Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (IX. 1) attributes to his own dear disciple Arjuna, as directed against him, works against any form of absolutism in this world. I have even had the rare honour of being turned out of houses, not only by strangers, but by those relationally very near to me, before I could learn the lesson once again and once for all: that absolutism and its opposite cannot live together.

Like King Janaka, who became the victim of a curse for unwittingly killing a hermit boy in the forest while on a hunting expedition, mistaking the boy for some animal; there lies on my conscience too, the harm that I inflicted by neglecting a pigeon in my zoology laboratory, forgetting to feed it during the ten days of intervening holidays. Although I tend to err more on the other side of being superstitious, this parallel might have some sense in some subtle astral or ethereal world where mind and matter meet. My trip to Europe - to be recounted next - will reveal how I got clear of all these factors, and entered into a working world with its own norms and values.