Natural courage, simple candour, honesty, intelligence, interest in ideas, lack of pretension, child-like vitality, gaiety, a very sharp sense of the ridiculous, warmth of heart, dislike for the pompous, the bogus and a self-important- that is how I can describe my friend T N Mahadevan whom I met for the first time about four years ago. There is something extraordinarily vital, vivid and vibrant, and essentially human about him.
He is kind, affectionate and gay. His moral feelings on any issue, which he never tries to conceal, does not make him conscious or priggish. His moral feelings are closely linked with and allied to his deep and critical aesthetic sense. He has a tender social conscience; he respects earnestness and public spirit. He is a willing and life-long slave of self-imposed obligations. He dislikes only the idle and fraudulent.
I discovered his great talent as a writer a few months ago when Mahadevan gave me some chapters of his intended autobiography in long-hand for my perusal. He has his own style of writing a naturally beautiful, elegant and graceful English prose, very reminiscent of the writings of Charles Dickens and R K Narayan.
Mahadevan was born in Trissoor on 15 February, 1925.
This is how he describes this event in his autobiographical narrative: 'The House where I was born was demolished years ago. In its place stood a brick and concrete structure when I visited Trissoor some 20 years ago. The Mithunapalli Temple to its south, Sarkar High School to the north and V G School for Girls across the road, still standing as I remembered them from early childhood, bore testimony to my eminently forgettable origin in the evening of 15 February, 1925, barely two weeks before my father died of a wasting disease which could have been 'Sprue'.
Mahadevan had his schooling in Trissoor. Later he studied in National College, Tiruchy and completed his intermediate course in 1942. Then he went to Maharaja's College, Ernakulam, for doing his BSc in 1942. During this period he got himself actively involved in India’s Freedom Movement as a top student leader. When the Quit India Resolution was passed at the Congress Session in Bombay, now Mumbai, on 9 August, 1942, Mahatma Gandhi and other great Congress leaders were arrested and taken to unknown destinations.
Mahadevan organised a strong protest movement against the arrest of those great national leaders.
Despite his active involvement in the freedom movement while being in college, he managed to scrape through a B A degree. Recalling his college days, Mahadevan observes with evocative poignancy: 'Most of my teachers are dead and gone. Thanka Chechi who knew me as a child and was later known as Miss Thankam, Professor of English, is still alive (1995) I understand but hardly functional because of severe arthritis. Though I was never her student, she loved me like a brother as she did her own cousin Janardhan with whom I grew up from early childhood. She gave me silent support during my days as a student leader and did her best to shield me from the understandable ire of Ramachandra Iyer who was Head of the Department of Physics and helped in getting me admission in the Physics Major Course. I have not met her since I left college. I should like to before she dies and assure her about my abiding affection and gratitude.'
Joining as a technical assistant in Indian Oxygen and Acetylene Company Ltd. Bombay in 1945-46, Mahadevan rose to the position of chief executive after nearly 40 years in 1985. In the early phase of his distinguished career in this company, he was a formidable trade union leader. In 1956 he moved over to Calcutta, now Kolkata, and took up a managerial position. He played a very important role in the field of import substitution in a scarcity-ridden economy of licence-permit-control-quota Raj. To quote his words: 'It was in 1958, if I remember right, that the bottom fell out of India’s foreign exchange reserves.
The situation turned so precarious that T T Krishnamachari, then Commerce Minister in the Nehru Cabinet, had no alternative but to suspend virtually all imports for a period of three months. To subsidiaries of foreign companies like my company, it came as a rude shock. Mukherjee and I and a few others from our technical and marketing departments took it up as a challenge to develop in India substitutes for what we were conditioned only to import hitherto.
Indian manufacturers of chemicals, plastics, capital goods and engineering products were offered on a platter a captive market for goods of less than acceptable quality that they were already making or developed in a hurry to exploit the new demand. It was a development most welcome and deplorable. Welcome because we were forced to become more self-reliant and innovative, deplorable because the average Indian manufacturer did not go beyond producing what was just passable in a short supply market by any means and at any cost.'
T N Mahadevan’s characterisation of some of his close relatives is very much like that of Charles Dickens's portrayals of Micawber, Uriah Heep, Mr Murdstone, Mrs Trotswood, etc. This how he describes his father’s sister’s son called Pichu Athan: 'Pichu Athan had a soft corner for my Amma. He claimed to have tried for her hand and lost it to my father, his favourite uncle, who was not much older but stronger and evidently more aggressive in his pursuit. ... The DNA concerned in his configuration was custom made for bluffing, harmless lies and hyperbole. I believed he had a genuine problem identifying fact from fiction, the genuine from the counterfeit, the good from the evil.
Often he deluded himself into believing that he was a student of Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam (he was only a school dropout!), was a dashing hero who carried swooning Eurasian girls on the pillion of his ‘Bullet Bike’ (his widowed mother could not afford even Chappals for the Prince!), a great musician and musicologist and an authority on English literature! Pichu Athan collected around himself a crowd of listeners, including unwelcome brats like us, whenever he reminisced about his stupendous achievements.
On such occasions, he made his imaginary tales interesting and made such telling use of his Malayalam expletives and swear words at any suggestion of contradiction or doubt that everyone found it prudent to swallow his stories hook, line and sinker. ... A good soul, utterly harmless, a man who helped many to find their jobs and feet in his heyday in Bombay, Pichu Athan passed away unsung and unhonoured. ... A sad end indeed to a colourful character whose bark was worse than his bite.'
In his personal memoir, Mahadevan has given interesting account of the characters of some extraordinary men who worked along with him in the Indian Oxygen and Acetylene Co., Ltd., under the caption ‘More Oddballs’. One of the most interesting characters he has described is one man called Sarma whom Mahadevan calls as ‘Dada’. This is how Mahadevan pays his tribute to this odd character: 'A man suspicious by nature and vengeful if provoked, Sarma became my admirer at work. Our relationship grew closer outside the office too.
Soon he became ‘Dada’ to me and my wife and ‘Doctor Mama’ to my children whom he loved with a tenderness he showed only to his daughter... When under the influence of the narcotic goli he took every day, Dada’s mood and temper swung from the benevolent and benign to the intolerant and ruthless. All of us gave Dada a wide berth at these times, often in the afternoon after lunch! ... This prince of oddballs who loved me more than any of my own brothers suffered a bad stroke on the eve of my transfer to Delhi in 1975.
He lingered for sometime in a vegetable state and passed away at the end of the year. In thousand years I would not find another ‘Dada’ as utterly unfeeling and ruthless as the original and as selflessly affectionate and caring too when he was in the right mood after helping himself to the right dose of his ‘Goli’.'
If you write for the general public, you will be insulted and told that you are no scholar. If you write for scholars, you will have no influence because you will be dismissed as a 'highbrow' which is a term of contempt. The choice between the solid, liquid and gaseous forms of communicating ideas is difficult.
Through his fascinating autobiographical memoirs, Mahadevan makes it abundantly clear that common things are never common place. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and wonderful prodigy. While it is true that universal things are often strange, yet at the same time it is also equally true that they are very subtle.
Through Mahadevan’s brilliant descriptions and portrayals, we come to understand that most common things can often be highly complicated. We also come to see that just because a thing is vulgar, we cannot immediately conclude that it is not refined. I am reminded of the beautiful words of G K Chesterton (1874-1936) in this context: 'A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things - law and a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real enigma. ... The nearest statement of the problem is this: It is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.'
Mahadevan’s poignant writing reminds me of the following beautiful lines of P B Shelley (1792-1822):
'We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.'
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