Karad Diaries-7

One of the other subjects that I was fond of, apart from mathematics, was Sanskrit. I scored easily in the subject, and was dismayed when I was not given the lead role in the college Sanskrit play ‘Columbus’. I just did not have the personality for the role, but this was something I could not understand at the time. I also had a morbid fear of public speaking, and participated once in a debating competition at my school to overcome this. I remember mugging up the entire speech, and delivering it mechanically, but that was all. It was only after I joined IIA and was invited to make a speech at the IIA National Convention at Nagpur, that I thought I need to do something about it. I wrote the entire speech, punches and all, and read it at the Convention. I still remember the butterflies in my stomach sitting on the stage before delivery of the speech, but I started out in earnest, and I received good response from the audience, which encouraged me to continue.

After this event, I tried every opportunity of speech at every public event, either by submitting papers to conferences or by impromptu interventions in the form of questions from the floor at every event, which sometimes resulted in invitation to the dais for making a small speech. Eventually I became quite adept at it, which gave me some recognition in the IIA circle, made me Chairman of the IIA Centre at Aurangabad and many other positions later.

This was a far cry from the shy and introvert demeanour I had as a school student in Karad. In spite of my participation in many outdoor activities with my friends, I was essentially an indoor person and did not mind staying put at a place and spending time alone, reading something or the other all the time. I remember reading almost all the hindi novels by Premchand one after another borrowed from the Municipal library at Karad. So reading ‘Dostoevsky’ was not a one-off activity, it was part of a pattern. Looking back, I think all this reading also made me a bit more introvert and less a man of action, which I tried to correct in my later life by joining the Communist Party, but that was after I started my professional career at Aurangabad.

In Karad, the only other activity I remember had to do with the religion or at least a practicing branch of it. Datta Bal, a spiritual Guru, had become famous when we were in school, and I used to attend the prayer meetings run by one of his disciples every Thursday evening, with some of my friends. The meetings were held in a closed room, with the light coming only from an oil lamp in the room in front of a large photograph of Datta Bal, the Guru, and the room would be normally filled with the smoke from the incense. We would try to concentrate on the diagram of Omkar painted on the wall, and recite the prayers en masse. I do not recollect getting any better intellectual or spiritual capacity as a result of these meetings and when I went to 11^th standard, with the pressure of study and other matters like clearing the Intermediate drawing examination for architecture admission, I stopped attending the Thursday meetings.

But the religions and their associated philosophies are fascinating topics, and my interest in religion has continued all my life. Recently I came across ‘The Case for God’ by Karen Armstrong, which stipulates that all religions in the world are basically trying to make their adherents better persons by prescribing a set of rituals about how to go about in life. I never considered myself a religious person as I do not carry out any of the rituals prescribed in my daily life, but found out that by Armstrong’s definition, I was actually a deeply religious person, though a bit gullible one, as many of my forays in being a good Samaritan have resulted in a good bit of trouble for me and my family - but that is a subject of another blog.