My father was a professor of economics and our house was a chaotic mess at most times. Piles of paper were usually stacked carelessly one o...
My father was a professor of economics and our house was a chaotic mess at most times. Piles of paper were usually stacked carelessly one on top of the other: it was like Trump Towers meets Antilia. There was a library of sorts, which basically meant that there were voluminous books on agriculture, industry and cooperatives (the professor’s area of specialisation) each competing with the other to exasperate my mother’s fragile sensibilities.
Occasionally, a slight tremor would cause a mountainous collapse. I used to joke with my friends that I went to Switzerland often to see an avalanche. Like all teachers, Diwakar Jha was absent-minded, abstract and astonishingly unruffled by his wife’s nagging, which she had allegedly inherited as a family hand-me-down and was perpetuating as a fine art for future generations.
But there was one thing that my father never forgot: buying me books for my birthday. I thought that was my dad’s way of dodging giving me the more expensive sports car that some of my friends haughtily flaunted. I grew up reading (rather reluctantly, I admit) Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments With Truth and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India,and several books on India’s freedom struggle.
The Indian National Congress was centrifugal to the Independence movement...
