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  This is my prayer to thee, my lord—strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart.

  Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.

  Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.

  Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might.

  Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles.

  And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.

  I have always admired my parents’ quiet strength. For forty years of his life as a schoolteacher, he rose morning at six, went to the river, gave me lessons, and then taught a large number of restless children, returned in the evening and again sat with me for the last lesson of the day before dinner. He never showed any sign of weariness, depression, or frustration. He did not know what boredom was and was able to remain happy and relaxed without external forms of ‘entertainment’. He reminded me of the great Bertrand Russel.

  Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in life. Wars, pogroms and persecutions have all been part of the flight from boredom. Even quarrels with neighbours have been found better than nothing. A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought of as an essential part of pleasure and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young. No great achievement is possible without persistent work ... that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony.

  I was the second of eight children. We had little money in those days but my father’s only concern was to give his children the best education possible and teach them good values. Though he never showed it, he was often hard-pressed for money, but he dealt with life with great cheer. And though we were always stretched, life was full of sunshine as there was no envy. As Albert Camus said, ‘Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me: it was radiant with sunlight’ …. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.

  This was how I learnt to cope with life, thanks to my parents. The lesson came in handy in later life, after I had resigned from the army, when I had no steady source of income for a long time and there were times when I went penniless. I, however, sought sustenance from my wealth of spirits and from the little joys offered by my farm.

  My father drew a small monthly salary of Rs 40 in 1951, the year I was born. With that salary and the little income he made from his farm, father met his household expenses, which included the meals of a few children of poorer relatives or close acquaintances who lived with us. He put into practice an age-old tradition that worked in many parts of Karnataka. Poor Brahmins were keen to give their children a good education but could not afford the expense. They sent their children to Gorur, the only village in the neighbourhood with a school. As there were no hostels in those days, the children stayed alternately with various relatives to ease the pressure on a single household, following a cyclical pattern of hospitality called ‘vaara’ or ‘vaaranna’. My father had decided to educate and bring up as many children of poor relatives as he could afford. We often, therefore, had more than five or six children staying with us and sleeping in the attic. The vaara system catered to boys only, as young girls could not be sent out to live with strangers and in consequence were denied access to basic education. My mother was unselectively generous and hospitable with the vaara boys, and therefore our house was forever bustling with activity.

  Father did not appreciate freeloaders but he was even more generous than my mother in times of need, and offered shelter, food and education to anybody who was in genuine need. I used to believe that one needed to be rich to be able to afford charity. Over the years I realized that my father was far from being rich; indeed was forever short of money. I however recognized my father’s wisdom, learning that one can share in poverty too, and this is a lesson that has remained with me.

  My Schooldays Begin

  My father got me admitted to school quite late and I straightaway joined the fifth standard. There was no uniform and I went barefoot. My first recollection of school is that it was large and I often sat on the floor. It was the only middle-school in the area, teaching children from twenty villages in the cluster. Though I was now formally in school my father continued to teach me.

  In the 1950s there was one middle-school for about forty villages and one primary school for twenty villages. Children had to walk miles to reach school. I remember how many of my schoolmates came to class soaked to the skin. They could not afford an umbrella and instead wore a goraga, a triangular reed raincoat. They also wore a peak cap made from areca-nut palm leaf to protect their heads from the rain.

  Apart from the Hemavathy, there was a river called Yagachi, upstream. The two rivers flowed into each other at the sangam, the confluence of rivers. I have vivid images of the confluence, of the large sand dunes that formed along the banks when the rivers were not in flood, and of how the waters swirled around the village temple and flowed right into the first house in the village when heavy rains caused floods. Children who came from far away crossed the river in a ferry, fashioned from buffalo hide. When the river was swollen, the ferry took a long time to cross and children arrived at closing time.

  The medium of instruction in school was Kannada and we were taught maths, science, and social studies. English was just another subject. School life was also great fun. We went on picnics and learnt how to cook and light a campfire, stole fruits from orchards, and also filled our pockets with wild varieties from the fields. Sometimes, after school hours, I played marbles and chinni kolu (a simple and popular village game played with two sticks, called gilli-danda in Hindi) with other boys. I, however, have my own special reasons for remembering school and particularly our headmaster, who was a very enterprising individual.

  As a young village boy, I had no clue about my future career. I nurtured a desire to move out and explore the world outside: ‘Beyond the temple, beyond the woods, beyond the borders let us go to new lands yonder!’, in the words of Kannada poet Pu Thi Narasimhachar. One day, our headmaster spoke to us about a competitive admission exam for a novel military training school called Sainik School and asked whether anyone was interested in taking the test. Without a thought I raised my hand.

  I began to dream of stepping out into the unknown. Meanwhile, our headmaster had filled in my application and sent it. I would have to travel to Hassan on a particular Sunday and take the written test. I did not know what ‘military’ meant, associating the word with a kind of restaurant called Military Hotel, which served non-vegetarian food I assumed ‘Military’ must mean non-vegetarian food. In rural Karnataka, a vegetarian would never visit a hotel. Travellers ate at the homes of relatives along their way and most temples offered a meal, often portions of the food offered to the deity. My father explained the actual meaning and helped me form a basic idea of the army.

  I was very excited and so was the entire village, as if taking the exam was itself a great event. My father was away on invigilation duty when I received the notice. I approached my father’s elder brother, told him I had to go to Hassan, and borrowed twenty rupees from him. Packing a small gunny-bag with a change of clothes, I walked to the bus stop on the day before the examination, to catch the 6 a.m. bus to Hassan. It was well past dusk when I got off at Hassan and walked to my uncle’s house.

  I had many uncles. The one who lived in Hassan was a Sanskrit and Kannada pundit and particularly religious. The family woke early in the morning to chant prayers and shlokas. Post prayers, I walked to the government school to take the military exam. There were about twenty students taking the examination from Hass
an district. I opened the question paper and after a glance went totally blank. The questions were in English. With my little English, I could not answer a single question and whiled away the time doodling on the answer sheet. Later, I frankly told my headmaster that I had not understood a word because the question paper was set in English.

  The headmaster, B.S. Nanjundiah, was a very imposing figure. He wrote strongly to the ministry of defence in Delhi from our remote village in Karnataka, challenging the examination and suggesting that the exam, as it was an all-India one, be conducted in regional languages. He said that conducting this examination in English was shameful because by doing so the authorities were equating capability and intelligence with knowledge of English. My headmaster’s action was largely intuitive but the lesson I learnt at the time was an important one. One has to be proactive and steer the course to make things happen.

  After a few weeks had passed, the headmaster called for me and announced that the defence ministry had decided to conduct fresh examinations in Kannada. He asked me whether I was still interested. I gave it another try and realized that enterprise pays. This was 1962 and I was in the seventh standard. I answered the exam in Kannada and knew I had done well. My mother was anxious. She did not want me to take the exam, much less pass it. People provoked her. ‘What’s wrong with you, Jayalakshmi?’ they asked. ‘Your son is only eleven and he’s going off to join the military?’ Mother prayed fervently night and day for God’s intervention. She would have been delighted if I had failed the exam.

  My father waited to meet me after the exam and took me to an Udupi hotel, the south Indian fast food restaurants that serve clean, tasty, and hot vegetarian food in a no-frills atmosphere. About a month later, the headmaster told me that I had been selected. There was much rejoicing and the headmaster made a formal announcement in school. I was looked upon as a hero because I was the only student to get selected from Hassan. There were speeches at the send-off. Everybody congratulated my father and I was an instant celebrity.

  A day after the examination I received an interview call. I was told that it would be held at the district deputy commissioner’s office in Hassan and that Lt. Col. R.N. Mullick would interview me. Someone had advised me to salute the officer. On the day of the interview, I took special care with my clothes and hair, which was well combed and glistened with coconut oil. I wore a new pair of shorts, specially tailored for the occasion, and a pair of earrings that my mother forced me to wear. The haute icing on my couture were my bare feet that stuck out in all their gaunt nakedness. The colonel was imposing in stature—tall, fair, and severe. I clacked my bare feet together, raised my hand in an awkward salute, and said, ‘Good Morning Sir’ in a booming tone. If he was amused, the colonel did not show it. He asked me a few questions and let me go.

  Soon after the interview I received the offer letter for admission to Sainik School. Appended was a long list of things a boarder needed to carry. It included items like shoes, socks, shoe polish, shoe brush, toothbrush, toothpaste, necktie, nail clipper, and soap. I had not seen a single one of these things before. My mother gave us Nanjangud Ayurvedic Tooth Powder for brushing our teeth, while farmers and other villagers chewed on a neem twig. My mother wrote to her brother who lived and worked in Mysore, asking if he could help me with the shopping. My uncle readily agreed, accompanied me to the shops in Mysore, and bought me all the items listed. I was excited about my new possessions and could barely wait for the journey to my new school.

  Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, the maharaja of Mysore, was at the time the governor of Karnataka. He had offered land and one of his palaces in Mysore to establish the school but this had been refused. The education minister, S.R. Kanthi was from Bijapur, a backward district town, and he wanted the school to be set up there.

  Bijapur was a full twenty-four-hour train journey from my village. The entire village gathered to see me off. When I saw my mother crying, I felt a lump rise in my throat. She was very upset and blamed my father for sending me away. My father too looked dangerously close to tears but he managed to maintain a tough exterior. I was to catch the train to Bijapur from Hassan and the entire experience was incredible, as it would be the first time I saw a train! I was, however, already homesick!

  At Hassan, a horse-drawn tonga took us to the railway station to catch the train at 11 p.m. The tonga ride remains fresh in my memory. I can almost hear the rhythmic clip-clop-clip-clop of the horse’s hooves and the clang of wheels on the rough surface of the road. Wordsworth aptly describes the emotion I experienced on seeing the steam-engine-drawn, train chugging in, as I waited with my father on the platform: ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky/ So was it when I was a child / So is it now that I am a man’. I still feel the same emotion whenever I see a train about to depart for some distant destination.

  The other recollection I have of that journey is of my father reading out passages from essays by Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak and Gokhale. The authors discussed their lives, ideals, and the struggles they negotiated to achieve their goals. Father also read to me excerpts from western authors like Thoreau, Goldsmith and Emerson, and poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth. I remember my journey that day as a medley of images, the principal one is of my father reading to me the most interesting and inspiring works of great leaders and philosophers.

  It was mid-September when I enrolled as a student in Sainik School, Bijapur. The school did not have a building of its own and was housed in a temporary civil structure rented from a local college called Vijaya College. There were only eight of us in my class. I was twelve years old at the time and was admitted in the eighth standard. A huge campus was on the anvil but what we actually had were makeshift premises that included tents, where we also had our classes. I readily took to life in a tent; the tent became a recurring motif in my later life and I kept going back to tents.

  I was in a trauma of sorts during my first days in school. The boys came from two different kinds of background. One group came with a private school or Christian missionary-run convent background, and they did not mix with boys like me who came from a village school. The boys from rural areas formed a majority. They did not know a word of English and lacked city polish. I remember there was an uneasy undercurrent of bullying and of tension between the city slickers and the village bumpkins.

  A positive factor in our lives was the presence of excellent teachers who were also extremely sensitive. They sensed the divide and gently ironed out the differences to help us settle down. The faculty represented a cross-section of independent India. The principal and the headmaster were Sikhs while the registrar was a Bengali. There were teachers from Haryana, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka. Among the students there were Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and at least one Jain boy. A majority of the students were from Karnataka.

  K.D. Singh, the principal, was an inspiring figure, a strict disciplinarian, and commanded the respect of students and teachers alike. He was a wing commander in the Education Corps of the Indian Air Force.

  I was extremely homesick, full of self-pity, and cried into my pillow each night. My father wrote to me very frequently. In his letters he asked me to be courageous, to take hold of my life and make something of it. I bemoaned my fate each night and regretted the sudden end to my carefree life in the village. I missed the freedom of running wild, the frequent raids on neighbours’ jamun orchards, and detested my new life with all my heart. I longed to break free and run away.

  I deeply resented the regimented life in school. A bugle, sharp at 5 a.m., was our wake up call. I felt like a tethered creature. Once out of bed, we ran rounds of the field, did Physical Training (PT), and one hour of prep from 7–8 a.m. We scrambled back for a wash, changed our clothes, and headed to the tent where breakfast was served. We rushed to class after this and continued with classes, till lunch was served at 1p.m. A short break followed, after which we were herded into another hour of prep. Tea and games followed; dinner was served at 8
p.m. A lull followed dinner, when I acutely felt the distance from my home and village. Lights were switched off at 9 p.m.

  I cried a lot, but through my tears I would sense a steely determination take shape within me. I would not return empty-handed, I told myself. My friends in Gorur looked upon me as a hero. Running away from school would amount to letting them down, and it would also be a great disappointment for my father.

  The teachers were very friendly. Among them, John Mathias in particular took me under his wing. He groomed us in city manners and social etiquette. He did not spare us if we were badly turned out. ‘Stand straight, with your chest out,’ he would command. He showed us how to sit at a table, taught each of us table manners and the use of knives and forks at the dining table without inconveniencing the persons seated beside us with sideways thrusts of the elbows. He taught us to say grace before a meal. I was aware only of the Vedic graces before a formal community meal back in my village.

  John Mathias also taught me how to dress formally, the norms of social etiquette as well as using a public utility service, like a western-style toilet. His personal tastes were impeccable and he set a great example for us. He demonstrated how one polished a shoe and put a gloss on it. This whole exercise in grooming continued throughout our schooldays, training us to become responsible citizens. I also remember G.D. Kale, our Hindi and Sanskrit teacher who also supervised our NCC drills and occasionally PT. Kale was a strict taskmaster and he wanted us to develop a robustness of character.

  One day, most unexpectedly, Mr Mathias recommended my name for house captain. It was a great day. Still raw and rustic, I felt on top of the world. I was being given the opportunity to prove myself. I loved the outdoors and sports, though I did not excel in any. Mr Mathias inspired me to pursue sports and extra-curricular activities. I led an active life under his guidance and my confidence touched new heights.