My father was a professor at IIT kharagpur.And hence I had spend some beautiful time of my life in that place. IIT kgp is a silent and dreamy little town. Not much hustle bustle. but still growing up there had its own share of excitement. IIT kgp may be a small town but is wholesome in itself. It has everything -market,postoffice, swimming pool, movie hall, stadium,restaurents,schools,hospitals, etc.There is something magical about growing up in small towns and villages.The friends you go to school with are also the ones you play with in the evenings. Their parents are friends of your parents. Friendships that are made last a lifetime. Secrets are few and community support makes up for the open societal structure. The experience is probably entirely different from the parents' perspective, when they are overwhelmed with raising young children in an environment that does not offer a lot of the facilities that are available in big cities. For us, the kids, this was an experience that has remained as one of the best periods of our lives. As in any place, it is the people who make up the community. These ramblings are about all those people who touched my life in many ways. Most of them were considered 'failures' by the society, and I was told that I would end up like them if I did not concentrate hard on my studies. Needless to say, I studied very hard and kept sports, art and music, my true interests at a distance.
Certainly, I did not want to become someone like the paper-delivery man when I grew up. He was an old man, probably younger than he looked, with a balding head, save for the little white hair around the sides. A big white moustache made him look like he was an ex military person, which he could very well have been. He would come in his rickety bicycle with all the papers and magazines delicately balanced on the handlebar. His bicycle did not have a stand and that meant that he would have to invent unique ways to make it stand upright every time he descended from it to deliver a paper, which was pretty often. Leaning the bicycle against a tree or a lamppost was common, but the nearest lamppost in front of our house was in a ditch full of thorns and the shade of the nearest tree was housing my father's scooter. The poor chap had to take recourse into ingenuity and came up with a novel way of balancing the bicycle by placing a brick under one of the pedals, something I could never do with my bicycle after several tries. Then again, I was privileged to have a stand with mine.
His stack would have all kinds of papers and my favourite, all kinds of magazines. He wouldn't mind if I went through his stack and would occasionally let me keep a Gokulam or an Illustrated Weekly overnight. I never failed to return it the following day and never with a tear or even a fold in any of the pages. With these simple acts he taught me to take responsibility when placed with a trust. No school taught me that.
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A postman is certainly not what I wanted to be when I grew up. A dark skinned, sun burned man came by everyday to deliver our letters. If our paths crossed on the road before the mail was delivered for that day, he would stop his bicycle and reach into his bag and hand me my mails, if there were any, which he always remembered without checking into his bag. The spontaneity with which he would go out of his way to serve someone is a small act, but meant volumes to me. It was a familiar sight to see him come down the road, stopping at every house to deliver mail. The anticipation grew to joy when he would park his bicycle in front of our gate. At an age, when there were no junk mails, every piece of mail was guaranteed to be handwritten by the sender with a message just for us. To see him go past our house and park at the next one meant that there were no mails for us that day. The sun might very well have stayed hidden that day.
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A young boy, not much older than me when I was in my early teens, opened up a bicycle repair shop under a tree next to Nair's canteen. He would come in the morning with a bicycle pump, a small toolbox and a bucket, which he would fill up with water after he sets up shop. 10 paisa to pump air into one tire, 15 paisa for two were his introductory rates. A flat repair would fetch him 75 paisa. The long line of bicycles waiting to be repaired after just a few days indicated that his business was doing well. I was told that life would reward you if you did an honest hard day's work. Watching Ramu's sweat drenched back and tattered clothes while he was plying me, or watching the young boy carefully applying glue to fix a flat tire, made me think about life's true rewards. They did not have money, yet they did not take the easy way out looking for it. These men could hold their heads up high with a smile and take everything that life threw at them. I realized then that money has very little to do with life's true rewards.
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Our parents always teach us to value money and spend it wisely. Back then most of the beggars that we used to come across were fake and a real menace. One of my earliest memories of the Tech market when I was a first or second grader is that of a cobbler who would sit by the entrance fixing shoes. A very old man, in the twilight of his life, he was beyond poor. He was halfway between being a beggar and a cobbler. One day, I was waiting in line behind a gentleman who was getting his shoe fixed by this cobbler. He put in two nails with his shaking hands and returned the shoe with a smile and said, "20 paisa". The gentleman stuck his hand into his pocket and came up with a 50-paisa coin. While handing over the money to the cobbler, he said, "Keep the change. You need it more than I do." I changed that day. I went home and thought hard on this very simple act of compassion that this gentleman, Dr. Sircar had shown to the cobbler. Would my parents scold me if I gave money to someone who really needs it? The conflicting thoughts of being careful with money while understanding its value and that of charity and philanthropy began playing a game of tug-of-war on my head. I saw the world with a different eye from that day on. I can still close my eyes and hear that statement I heard some 20 years ago.
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"We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobile rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind", said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is almost forgotten by a largely capitalist world right now where a person's success is directly equated to the size of his house and the value of his car.
I hope to teach these values I learnt as a child, through the most unusual and unexpected of sources, to my children. I would know that I have been a successful parent if I see such integrity and compassion in my children, regardless of the size of their houses or automobiles. In an age of corporate and political corruption, I am reminded of a quote made by one Alan Simpson - "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."
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