A Lingering Longing
“I’m no Gandhian and I don’t intend to be one,” he continued from where he had left. “But as is being done, I see it’s a disservice to his legacy to deify him; it’s when I approach him as man that I value him as a human being, but in his picture of mahatma, I see many a wart in his atma. Credit him for cleaning up the public toilets but why not condemn him for having forced his spouse to do the same; why laud him for his quixotic abstinence unmindful of his wife’s conjugal plight; was he not an inveterate autocrat in the democratic garb; what about his falling afoul of Prakasam, and how he played favorites with Nehru. Why bother about him as he’d been reduced for long as a political mascot of the slavish-minded of the self-serving Nehru family that hijacked his name to grind its dynastic axe! What an irony it is that his party that sundered the British yoke should have rendered the political reins into Italian hands? Bemoan the congress party.”
“I’m no apologist of the dynastic congress but what about the duplicity of N.T.R on the political stage,” I had interjected. “When he needed to fill A.P’s coffers, he advocated drink all over; prompting the IT tycoons and the corporate honchos to shun his dry land at the time of our early reform. But when voters pulled him out of the kursifor his eccentric governance, he made prohibition his political plank to regain power; that’s about the immorality of our politicians as the public memory being short; that’s how A.P missed out the early openings even as P.V’s vision helped shore up the country’s economy.”
“What to say when Rajiv Gandhi’s ignoble reign is celebrated and Narasimha Rao’s path-breaking role is sought to be sidelined,” he said “We are a naïve people to figure out our country’s heroes, say Nehru vs. Patel or Rajiv vs. Rao and zeroing on our national interests; maybe owing to our feudal roots and slavish moorings, we suffer from the approval syndrome, which is a compulsive need of one to be seen by the others as an egalitarian to a fault. But then, the world doesn’t seem to appreciate our quixotic mindset as the foreign press tends to picture Sonia Gandhi as the most successful Italian politician.”
He paused as if he was unable to digest the indignity of it all.
“While Ruma ruled my heart, Rathi became the heart of our family,” he resumed his tale. “The inclusive camaraderie that extended to third cousins in our family appealed to her friendly nature, and so she took to my people as duck would to water; well what a knack she had in letting all feel at home in our 2BHK flat. But when a well-heeled visitor said if only we had a more spacious dwelling, he would’ve loved to put up with us whenever he was in town, she told him that we don’t bite more than we could chew; but how my poor dad used to go out of his way to please all and sundry; it’s as if man massages his own ego by playing host to those who profess closeness.”