“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils”
(William Wordsworth, 1804)
Rishi had been invited to afternoon tea, or rather summoned to it by an octogenarian he knew about but had never met before. He returned home armed with three books. The books must have been imminently readable because he completed reading two of them by the end of the following week.
The gentleman Rishi met was Captain N.S. Mohan Ram, VSM [1] who had an exciting career spanning over six decades in the Indian Navy, Mazagaon Docks and TVS Suzuki. The three books were penned by him. They are his memoirs of a remarkably interesting and productive life from a period when a newly independent India had set out to develop and build its technological capabilities.
Very soon, I glanced at all the three books and decided to pick the third one. “A Small Town Boy” turned out to be a delightful recollection of his childhood in Coimbatore and growing up to be a young engineer at IIT Kharagpur in the 1940’s and 50’s. His style of writing and stories imbued with humour, honesty, idealism and an action orientation struck a resonant chord in me. May be it is that peculiar romance of a place that I associate with something that I love that took me there? Perhaps the Coimbatore I saw through the lens of his prose, reminded me of Madras when I went to live there after Rishi and I got married. The fresh hot idli’s that Amma’s trusted Sadanand brought for breakfast at Helios, the smell of filter coffee and simmering sambar that clung to the walls of Suryakiran where we lived, my first brush with golu [2] at Navaratri and surprise at what a woman-centred celebration it was, names of streets around the temple in Mylapore, the bhakshanams [3] at festival times, the paattu [4] class where Rishi learnt Carnatic classical music for a while.
My friend, architect and urban designer Kiran Keswani, came home to tea one evening when I was half way through the book. She had been reading a very insightful book called “Rest” she said, with research that suggests that periods of staying away from work leads to higher overall productivity. I asked her if she had read Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness”. She hadn’t.
I went back to my book later that night and lo and behold – on page 161 I found Captain Mohan Ram writing about how he became an expert at loafing around 75 years back quoting Russell “But I think there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous!” from “In Praise of Idleness”.
I grinned to myself and pondered over the last one in this genre.
I had just finished “A Man called Ove” when early this year, Rishi gifted me “Men without Women” by Haruki Murakami. As a token of acknowledgement, I decided to start to read it right away. Ove was one of a kind Swede. Amongst his other eccentricities, he drove cars designed and manufactured by Saab all through his life. In fact, his loyalty to Saab and obsession with Saab was a significant feature of the novel. His life, love, relationships all whirred around his Saab automobile. It turned out that the first short story in Murakami’s book was “Drive my car”. And what was this car? A Saab 900 convertible! This was in Tokyo. Oba, the mechanic who ran the garage in which the protagonist Kafuku gets the car serviced says “Swedish cars of this age are built to last”. In my head, Ove and Oba merge for a brief time . Few weeks later, I am leafing through the 2013 MPhil thesis of Kirstin Persson for the umpteenth time in the past one year when I become aware that a particular measurement that has been reported in the work from Lund University in Sweden was undertaken at Saab Dynamics!
Nithin Nagaraj whose research brings together chaos theory and neuroscience to learning from sparse data, pointed me to a concept called synchronicity. The term was coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe some coincidences that are related not by cause and effect but meaningfulness.
To me, however, they are simply, the Daffodils.
[1] Vishisht Seva Medal – a decoration of the Indian Armed Forces
[2] Display of dolls (Tamil)
[3] Savouries and sweetmeats (Tamil)
[4] Music (Tamil)
Unfold the Wings 