My Father, page 15
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Reflections on a Father Extraordinaire
IN HIS LIFE, MY father took on numerous public causes, both inside as well as outside the government. He did what he thought was right, with passion and courage, giving the causes his all. At the same time, he did not neglect his duty towards us, the children. During our formative years, he remained attentive to the long-term direction of our careers while also monitoring our progress on an almost daily basis. The only thing he compromised on was his own career.
He chose to stay with the Rajasthan Secretariat Services so that his posting would remain fixed in Jaipur during the critical years of our education. He knew that his income was far too meagre to send any of us to residential schools in any of the major cities in India. Therefore, returning to politics or availing of opportunities such as joining the RAS, which could have led to faster promotions but would have also required movement from one place to another, would have compromised our studies. Indeed, even in Jaipur he could not afford to send us to the elite English-medium schools such as St. Xavier High School. That meant that he had to work extra hard on us at home for our success.
Not having gone to school, my mother could not read or write. Therefore, she could not directly aid us in our studies or otherwise assess our academic progress. But she was an active participant in monitoring and disciplining us. A day would rarely pass without her scolding us for not having spent enough time on our lessons. She was fundamentally an intelligent woman and would remind us daily to do our homework. She kept track of our examinations, ensuring that we could study undisturbed and uninterrupted when preparing for them.
Mother handled the family finances and, despite having had no formal education, never made a mistake in tracking them. She could give a complete item-by-item account of monthly expenditures from memory. One of her major strengths was that throughout our lives, she managed the family budget within Father’s income without complaining that she did not have enough funds to meet the necessary monthly expenditures. Father would hand over to her a fixed sum at the beginning of each month, and she would finance all expenditures out of it. She worked hard to manage the household, keeping order in the family. Until I left India in 1974, she would make the special dishes, desserts and snacks for all festivals at home to economize on expenses. Treats for Diwali – all kinds of papris and shakkarparas – would be made to last throughout the vacation period, and we loved them. When it came to many traditional dishes from Mewar, she had a magical hand.
As a devout Jain, Mother went on a lot of fasts, especially during the eight-day annual holy event of Paryushana. On the concluding day of the event, Samvatsari, all Jains are encouraged to fast, staying on water only. But the days immediately preceding and following this day are celebrated with numerous traditional homemade dishes. On the preceding day, you prepare yourself for the fasting day, and on the following day you are rewarded for having fasted! For Mother, Samvatsari would often be the third day of continuous fasting, but she would get up at 4 a.m. the following day to get an early start on cooking the fancy dishes we had come to expect of her.
According to traditional belief, fasting cleanses your soul, and therefore the day following Samvatsari is celebrated as a day on which to seek forgiveness from all for any hurt you may have caused them the preceding year. We could never forget this because when we woke up on the morning after Samvatsari and went to pay our respects to Mother in the kitchen, the first thing she would do was to seek our forgiveness for any hurt she had caused us. We would then reciprocate and begin our own routine of seeking forgiveness from all others we knew.
While Mother could not read and write, she had excellent skills of comprehension. She, obviously, had no knowledge of English. But in the 1980s and 1990s, when we would come to visit the family from the United States during summer vacations, I would often observe my nieces ( Ravi’s and Ashok’s daughters) watching the afternoon shows in English on television. My mother, who would be sitting in the room too, could more or less follow the storyline without any understanding of the dialogue. Even more interestingly, when she and Father visited us in the United States in 1985, sometimes it was she who would be explaining to him the television shows. The American accent, which Father found difficult to follow, had robbed him of the advantage of knowing English when it came to watching these shows.
Though Father rarely expressed it, he was aware and appreciative of the importance of my mother in his life and in the smooth running of the family affairs. When the two of them differed on an important family issue, most of the time it was Mother who prevailed. His own dependence on her naturally grew as they advanced in age. For me, it was a pleasant surprise to see Father’s generous acknowledgement of Mother’s importance in his life in his autobiography. In the section devoted to his personal life, he wrote,
We have completed 65 years of married life in June 1999. For us the journey from Suwana to Jaipur was not an easy one. We have seen many ups and downs during our long journey but went through them cheerfully. My wife was always a source of strength to me even in the most trying circumstances. It was due to her that I could maintain high standards of integrity throughout my life.21
I do not know if my father also conveyed these thoughts to my mother. Since she had no ability to read even Hindi, let alone English, I very much hope that he did.
The fact that the family could own a house and a car while also meeting its daily needs on Father’s meagre salary speaks volumes about my parents’ frugal living style and Father’s excellent long-term financial planning. One of the luckiest or perhaps most farsighted things that Father did was to build a house of his own as early as the late 1950s. One of my earliest memories is of Father occasionally returning from his morning walks with a rose or two, over which we siblings used to fight. We were living in a first-floor rented flat in a building on M. I. Road in those days, and I used to tell Father to build a bungalow of our own one day and grow roses in it. That dream came true sooner than I could have imagined.
To buy land and build the house, Father had to take a loan from the government. But his salary placed a relatively low ceiling on even the loan amount for which he qualified. The amount had to be such that after deduction of the monthly instalment to repay the loan in a few years, the net take-home salary was sufficient to meet the day-to-day family expenses. With the limited loan, the only location where he could afford to buy land was way outside the city, in what seemed to be a jungle at the time. When the house was built and we moved there in 1959, there were no other houses on either side of it as far as one could see. There was a mazaar and a burial ground across from the house and a famous Ganesh temple some 200 yards away, but nothing else. At the back of the house there were a few huts made of mud and straw. The result was that the land price Father paid was less than Re 1 per square yard.
Within one to two years after we arrived, there was a burglary in the house. There were easily a dozen people sleeping in various parts of the house that day, but the thieves were real professionals. They chose a time in the night when everyone was in deep sleep. They took whatever little jewellery my mother and my recently married sister Premlata had, but nothing else. Within a day’s time, they had melted the jewellery and sold the gold they had extracted from it. The total value of the theft, ranging between Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000 at the time, may not seem much today, but was a serious blow to the financial security of the family. Eventually, the thieves were caught, but only a fraction of the loss was recovered.
The episode left a deep sense of insecurity among the family, leading Father to consider selling the house. A serious potential buyer even visited to check out the house, but luckily Father changed his mind and did not proceed with the sale. With the population of Jaipur having risen ten-fold to nearly 4 million since the house was constructed, its location now defines more or less the centre of the city. Consequently, the price of the plot has skyrocketed, to somewhere between Rs 100 million and Rs 150 million.
It turned out that after paying the instalment on the house loan, Father’s take-home salary was insufficient to meet even the bare essential expenses of the family. Therefore, it was decided to rent half of the house until the loan was fully paid. As originally built, the house had four rooms and another, very small room on the first floor. The family ended up living in two rooms while the remaining two rooms were rented out. We used the small room on the first floor as our study. On the few occasions that Kaka Saheb would stay with us for his treatment, he would end up sleeping in that small room at night. For a family of six this was a tight squeeze, but with enough open spaces in the house in the form of a veranda next to the rooms, an adjacent large walled yard, a veranda outside at the entrance to the house, a lawn in the front yard, and a big backyard where we planted various fruit trees and even carved out our own little plots to grow peanuts, it did not feel that way.
After the house loan was paid, Father was able to take loans for house repairs and a car. Rather than spend the funds on repairs to the main house, he invested them in adding a room to the main building and creating an annexe in a small part of the empty space in the backyard. We, the three brothers, got the new room in the main building as our study. Kamala got the small room on the first floor that had served as the study for all of us till then. As for the annexe at the back, Father rented it to a family and used the proceeds to pay the instalments on the house-repair and car loans.
By the time Father retired in June 1976, all loans had been fully repaid and he had no liabilities left. In the years following his retirement, he only added assets and incurred no liabilities. As such, when he passed away, we only inherited assets. Well before passing away, he also made a clear will delineating how the house should be divided among his children, should they decide to do so. He also willed that Kamala should have the use of the annexe in the back, should she choose to live there. That eliminated a common source of friction among siblings after their parents pass away. Later, Mother did the same with her jewellery before passing in 2015.
Father’s sacrifice of his personal career so that his children may build theirs did not go in vain. Including me, we are five – three brothers and two sisters. The three brothers are all younger than the two sisters. I am the youngest. I did my MA in economics, securing the first rank in the entire University of Rajasthan. I then went on to do a PhD in economics at Princeton University. During the last fifteen years, I have been a professor at Columbia University in the United States. From January 2015 to August 2017, I served as the first vice chairman of the NITI Aayog, with the rank of a cabinet minister. The NITI Aayog is the think tank Prime Minister Narendra Modi created as a successor institution to the erstwhile Planning Commission. In 2012, the government of India honoured me with the Padma Bhushan.
Moving from the youngest to the older siblings, Ashok comes next. He went on to join the medical profession. After spectacular performances in both MBBS and MD at SMS Medical College in Jaipur, he became the first medical professional from Rajasthan to become a Doctor of Medicine or DM in neurology. In 2002, the Medical Council of India awarded him the Dr B.C. Roy medal, the highest Indian award in the medical field. The government of India topped that by honouring him with a Padma Shri in 2014. As a physician, he is a legend in India and has contributed to saving thousands of lives during his long and illustrious career as a neurologist.
My eldest brother Ravi was the brightest of us all, ranking twenty-fourth among tens of thousands of students taking the high-school board examination and ninth university-wide in his first-year BSc examination. He appropriately went into engineering, the most competitive and coveted field of his time (the medical profession was seen as a fallback option for those who could not make it to engineering in those days). He distinguished himself as a student of metallurgical engineering at what is now known as the Malviya National Institute of Technology. The institute appointed him as an assistant professor immediately after his graduation. He later joined the private sector and went on to serve as the senior vice president of Hindustan Electro Graphite Ltd. The Institute of Engineers, India, has honoured him twice with the ‘Outstanding Engineer’ award.
My sister Kamala is next. Like me, she chose to go into the arts faculty and did an MA in political science in the mid 1960s. The traditional course for young women in those days was to get married after completing their bachelor’s or master’s degree. With my eldest sister Premlata already married in the late 1950s, that was also the wish of both my parents for Kamala. But Kamala was the most strongheaded of us all and chose to defy tradition. She remained single for life. After her MA, she did a BEd degree and went on to distinguish herself as a teacher, retiring as the principal of a senior higher secondary school in Jaipur. For her services as a teacher, she received a state award in 1992 and a presidential award in 1995.
Though Father did not live to see Ashok and I receive our Padma awards, his interventions in our early lives were critical to these and other of our achievements. He expected us to work hard, especially at our studies, and saw to it that we did. He moulded our thinking and careers, even risking the possibility that in the event of failure we might grow up to resent him for pushing us into careers we did not choose.
By the time Ravi was in the eighth grade, Ashok in the sixth and I in the fourth, Father had come to a decision on what our career paths would be. By this time, Ravi’s talent in mathematics and science was clearly evident. In those days, most bright students went into engineering, which offered an assured decent job. But Father felt that Ravi was too bright for engineering and should aspire to be a scientist. Accordingly, he had him opt for science and mathematics for his high school diploma. Father’s plan was that Ravi would do an MSc in physics or some other branch of science. But after the first year of his BSc, Ravi decided that he would rather be an engineer and switched courses.
Father was also of the view that there should be a doctor in the family, and no one had a better personality and temperament for it than Ashok. Therefore, from the time Ashok was in the sixth grade, Father began motivating him towards a career in medical science. Mahaveer School, where we brothers began our schooling, did not offer biology in high school. Therefore, after Ashok completed his eighth grade, he transferred to a school that offered biology, which was a required subject of study in secondary school for those wishing to enter a medical college. Ashok became a doctor, as planned for by Father, and eventually specialized in neurology.
My case was probably the most complicated of the three brothers. Having himself been in administration and perhaps appreciative of the value of public service, Father wanted one of us to go into administration, and specifically, join the IAS. By the process of elimination, I was the automatic choice for this, but there was more to matching me with administration than it being the default choice for me. My father thought that I had both the talent and the right bent of mind to succeed in administration. In those days, I was certainly the most argumentative of all the family members.
Father had figured that given the structure of the IAS written examinations and the skills I would need as an officer, the best course for me would be to study history, economics and mathematics for my BA, and economics for my MA. History, economics and mathematics would provide me ample flexibility to select my papers for the written IAS examinations, while more advanced training in economics would come in handy for me as an officer. To have recognized the importance of economics in the early 1960s, when few appreciated its value in a place like Jaipur, testifies to his connect with the outside world.
For my tenth-grade diploma, Father thought it was fine for me to study science and mathematics. That was my choice too. Therefore, I continued in Mahaveer School after the eighth grade. During these years, he kept motivating me to switch to arts after the tenth grade, though not wholly successfully. I did quite well in my tenth-grade board examinations, ranking among the top 1 per cent of those taking the board examination and scoring distinction in mathematics and chemistry. In those days, anyone studying arts or commerce was automatically assumed to be inferior to those studying science and mathematics. Acutely aware of this stigma, and having done well in my tenth-grade examinations, I had remained reluctant to switching to arts. But I was pliable, and Father prevailed.
I had always believed that Father had no qualms about giving me the necessary push for the switch. Only recently did I learn from Ravi that, on the contrary, Father remained anxious the whole of the following year on account of it. He feared that if I ended up doing poorly in arts I would blame him for my failure the rest of my life. It was only the day the results of my pre-university examinations came out and I scored the top rank in the entire university that he breathed easy. That was the day Father told Ravi that he had been worried all year that if I did not do well I might blame him for my failure.
In the end, I did not follow the path Father had chosen for me to its final destination of IAS. Nevertheless, I did substantively fulfil the mission he had chosen for me. After a long academic career in the United States, in January 2015, I returned to India for three years to work at the NITI Aayog in the central government at the highest level and fulfil the mission of public service my father had envisaged for me. Given the importance of the position I held, I was perhaps able, in those three years, to contribute more to public causes than I might have via a lifetime career as an IAS officer. Moreover, my writings as an academic during the past twenty years have focused directly on public policy in India, which too is a form of public service.
