30 years ago

There can be no greater soul or person than your father who made you what you are, and my salutations to my father MKR on this great day which I cannot forget in my life.  

Dear friends and relatives.

I am very much tempted to write this blog because technology has enabled us a lot to record things for posterity and immediate benefit to those who care to read. This day thirty years ago, precisely March 12, 1983, my father shed his mortal coils and reached the place of Eternity and Bliss as God/Mother desired he should. I was hardly 30 years old and had not settled down in life though I had a job for five years in the Indian Express as a budding sub-editor, after being placed by him under the care of Shri CPS, fondly called as Master. In 1978, I happened to raise my family and subsequently with Divine Grace was blessed with my son and daughter. All that before I could even to some extent realise the personal, social, emotional, economic implications of a full family.
It can't be said that it was too early for my father to leave as he had already completed 75 years and discharged almost all his duties in spite of having to choose a freelancer's career half way through his life with three sons born late in his life. He had married off two of his daughters when I was a small baby.
He knew only his commitments to his profession and nothing else, and was reminded dutifully about other tasks to the family by my dear mother every now and then. He did not know how to lavish love and care on relatives who visited him because his world was different from anyone's else, we normal beings. So nearly 25 years he spent with his sons and that is the period about which I am aware of because I was not born till May 1953. It might seem to many from the surface that he did not express fully and openly his love and affection as immensely as do parents of today right from the moment a child is born. You cannot also say that he was very cold and as hard as a rock in familial relations. He had his own priorities which ordinary mortals could not fathom rightly. But his genius bordering on a superhuman existence and eccentricity enabled him to assess all individuals who interacted with him. He would cultivate only those whom he wanted/liked.  It was difficult to get into his good books for anyone for that matter.
Mr M K Ramamurthy, sorry I have not mentioned his name so far because still I feel I do not have even a spec of his greatness to claim genealogical benefits. But among the three sons he had in the later part of his life, I had the boon or benefit or rare opportunity to interact with him because he depended on me for nearly 15 years to get his despatches typed, to be sent to the Economic Times or Deccan Herald by writing which he eked out a portion of his living. My mother saw to it that he paid a pocket money of Rs 100 a month  in those days for that shabby job I did (called typing because I could not follow his subject or possess the required vocabulary.Thus he taught me many things.)
His stock market insight got him a better portion of his financial assets just as the property he purchased out of his savings to settle down in Gopalapuram (just before my second sister got married). He did not raise any loan or pay EMI! Of course, in the years that followed he managed his finances with an OD bank account. But he never shared his cares/worries with anyone in the family and so no one knew how he managed those things we call crises ( of any variety).
I should say that if he had make a frank written statement of his achievements on the personal front my father would have had a lot to record as disappointments. First, the marriage of a daughter (third one) failed and she came home. The eldest son did not graduate or settle down with a decent avocation, and even I, the second one, did not show signs of great potential for achievement by then. His third son who managed to scrape through with his BA degree was placed in an advertising agency and till my father exited this world he did not have anything to regret because of his last creation. The history of my younger brother, after my father's time, better need not be recorded because of its bitterness for everyone.
The fact that my father had a little hearing difficulty enabled him to devote all his attention to reading books, journals and newspapers and keep acquiring knowledge and creating publishable reading material out of his incredible intelligence and the solid education he had received in the British raj, the Madras Christian College.
He most often did not bother about who was around him and whom he should pamper, at least in a small measure by present day standards of acceptable social behaviour. He lost his mother at a very tender age, missed his family life with father due to his hostel education and career in a distant land like Calcutta and interacted very little with his brothers and sister due to developments after the passing away of his father. However, his relationship continued on even keel with his sister who passed away months after him.
His association  with the Mail newspaper in Madras, the Statesman in Calcutta and the Indian Express, Madras, the Indian Finance (he served this journal before and after his Express stint) and later on with the publications of the Times of India Group like the Economic Times and Deccan Herald in Bangalore till he breathed his last enabled him to create published material which he and we have failed to collect and keep a record in hard copy. Today I am very much ashamed for this negligence. That the children did not learn enough or much from him for their life and career was yet another disappointment for him. I should admit that here.
Apart from being a journalist par excellence with unparallelled memory of history and economics (Indian and world), (he was called a walking encyclopedia by his friends and colleagues) , he was very  pious all my years with him and he joined my mother in Japam and Pooja every day, and he was a great admirer and follower of the Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam.He used to visit him every year a number of times, and had audience with him on many occasions. The Mahaperiyawal recalled his association with my father when I went for his darshan a few years later. That he was a Srividya Upasaka must have earned my father the right position in Devi's Sripuram for Eternity.

I had gone out of Chennai for a family wedding in Palani and before I could return on a Saturday morning to type is weekly stock market review for Deccan Herald (on March 13),he chose to sleep forever and far away from us. As such his last despatch could not be typed. No one could read his handwriting, and he used to dictate his articles to me whenever I sat for typing. I could not decipher anything he had scribbled. Only two stenographers in his lifetime could type my father's articles and even they would have a quota of mistakes which he corrected in the draft.
He prefered buses and cycle-rickshaws and never zipped past in cabs/cars though friends offered him that luxury. He never got trapped in opulence.
But my father's blessings and noble principles of living within one's means and simple living/high thinking, reading a lot to learn more and spread more knowledge, etc., continue to guide me, and I shall cherish all that till the call comes for me one day from the Lord.

I wish to offer my best and most dedicated Pranams at the Lotus feet of My dearest father this day with all the love I failed to show when he was with me, and he has to pardon me for all that I did not do to rise up to his expectations and be an independent man by the age of 30 by which time I had rushed to complete the constitution of what in my later life became my family. For my part, I could not in right measure assess and reciprocate the love he had for me. True love unexpressed and unreciprocated that was the equation between him and me as father and son.

R Swaminathan, March 12, 2012