The question dawned on me, after reading a book authored by my former media colleague. M R Venkatesh’s slim volume – in tribute to Ramachandra Gandhi and Daya Krishna – tells me more about its author than I had ever known/found out about him in our two decades of friendship. We were colleagues in my Chennai newspapering days; we used to meet on a daily basis; and have been together on many media junkets all over Tamilnadu. This was in the 90s.
Reading his recent work – A Gandhi and a Socratic Gadfly - I realize that, in all those years of close contact, I never did try to learn of him as a person. We had spent our time together talking shop, which, in the case of newspaper reporters, pertained to political development of the day, our office politics, hassles of reporting, peer group gossip, and other such mundane media matters. Some journalists later write books on the mundane matters, and even make money.
I can’t see Venkatesh doing a self-serving biography after retirement (anyway, he still has quite a few years before he hangs up his boots). What he has done instead is write a booklet on a couple of teachers who had impacted him during his university days in Jaipur. And MRV worked on this, in addition to his daily newspapering for The Telegraph, Kolkata, as its Chennai-based correspondent. He has also shared the cost of printing with an old professor and some university alumni members.
I was aware MRV had taken Philosophy at the university; but I didn’t know he topped in it at Madras university and went on to do research at Rajasthan university (1983-84) as UGC scholar. This ought to make you and I wonder what a guy with philosophical bent of mind like him is doing in a newspaper. MRV knew as a student that ‘philosophy bakes no bread’. He chose print media for his bread and butter; joined the PTI news agency as a trainee journalist in 1985. (Wonder what his stipend was then; in the 60s when I was interviewed – and didn’t get through - for such an opening in PTI, New Delhi, the going payment was Rs.150, monthly)
If I have skirted around the subjects of MRV’s work, it is because I know little about Ramachandra Gandhi (other than his connection with Gandhi and Rajaji, as their grandson), and even less, about Prof. Daya Krishna. It seems other journalists were no more knowledgeable. Which was perhaps why the media widely ignored Prof.Daya Krishna’s demise. MRV recalls he knew of no major newspaper, other than The Hindu, that carried an obit on Dayaji.
This was when Prof. R S Bhatnagar, a former associate of Dayaji, got in touch with MRV in Chennai to get something written. It was a shame, if he, a leading figure in the field Indian philosophy, were allowed to go so unnoticed. Dayaji’s colleagues and some former students, worked out modalities of publication. MRV readily offered to bear part of the expenses, apart from writing the volume.
Interestingly enough, Prof. Daya Krishna, had some years earlier contacted MRV (as journalist, he seemed the obvious choice) to ask him to write a piece for JICPR – the journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research - on Prof. C T K Chari, an outstanding thinker who died unsung in Chennai. Prof. Chari had been on the faculty of the Madras Christian College for nearly four decades. As MRV mentions, even the local papers in Chennai did not take note of Prof. Chari’s death.
In his tribute MRV writes about the Kachori afternoons with Dayaji, when the philosophy professor let his students have a free-wheeling discussion on matters that lent themselves to what he termed ‘creative philosophizing’. The weekly afternoon of chats, laced with Jaipuri tea and kachori, came to be known as the ‘Jaipur Experiment’; an event to which Prof.Daya Krishna invited many notables, by turn. The invitees included Prof. Ramachandra Gandhi.
That was when MRV, then a research fellow, came to meet Prof. Gandhi. Describing his meeting at the university guest house MRV writes that he picked up enough courage to express his desire to read out to Prof. Gandhi a paper he (MRV) had done some months earlier, on ‘the problem of death and the Self’. Prof. Gandhi listened to our friend (full 15 minutes of it), and then “gave me a very concerned look, the wrinkles of his Rajaji-like forehead indicating unease, if not downright anger”. MRV, in his paper, had made out a philosophical case for justifying suicides in some human contexts at a certain level.
“I don’t know what motivated you to write this,” Prof. Gandhi lashed out at MRV– ‘it was then that one saw the fire, the passion and the commitment blazing forth in one sweep’. Prof. Gandhi proceeded to demolish MRV’s paper, titled pompously as ‘Meditation on Death’. “It was too stunning,” writes MRV, “and at the same time a very humbling moment, a kind of ‘satori’ (the Zen way of sudden enlightenment) for me as a student of philosophy”.
MRV’s not-for-sale publication is purely for the interested readers. They may contact the author at melapalayamv@yahoo.com
