R Chandrashekhar's Home Page

The Evening of Life     Congregation of ‘oldies’ are a familiar sight in the neighbourhood parks of Delhi. These 'elderlies' come early mornings and late evenings to sit on benches and chat in their respective groups even as younger walkers sweat it out to burn calories.     This park in Delhi’s Dwarka was a combination of two large plots – one a Rhombus and the other a rectangle.   At easy pace, it takes ten minutes to walk one ‘round’ of the path laid along its edges. Some of the ‘elders’ took time to dress for their park visit. They came with walking shoes, a couple of them even wearing shorts. Most others dressed in humble white kurtas and came with the only purpose of spending time on the set of four benches arranged as a square, chatting with whoever was there during the time they were there. Watching these ‘elders’ provides useful lessons on the stages in the ageing process. There are some who speak loudly, others in a mere whisper and some o...

  The Chariot of Konaditya     ‘Hire a good guide’ was my Intellectual old time Odiya colleague’s advice. The summer having set in and it being exam time in schools, there were few tourists that late March forenoon at the Sun Temple Konark.   The nearby coconut water seller seemed to attract a larger crowd that than the entry ticket counters to the temple site.   As the group joined the process to arrange their entry, a spectacled gentleman with a genial smile walked across towards us and introduced himself. ‘My name is Srikant Beura’ he announced and quickly, almost in the same breath,   mentioned his impressive credentials – ten years’ experience as a part-time guide at Konark; can speak German, French and Italian besides English and has been commended by several foreign tourists. ‘I have been waiting for you’ he said, as if having had a premonition that someone truly interested to learn about the temple would be coming that day, braving th...

The Star of Courage   The birth pangs of modern western Astronomy were indeed acute. Its founding fathers – Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler faced the wrath of the Church and suffered ignominy. Even today, the stars have more appeal as icons of fortune, rather than for their actual worth – massive heavenly bodies many million times of our earth moving in synchrony in a spectacular drama of colour, light, radio waves, birth, existence and collapse, all in strict consonance to laws of physics. Sudhir Kumar Walia had a semi-serious exposure to the stars. He did not own a telescope but took advantage of his native village of Upper Banuri near Palampur in the State of Himachal Pradesh being ‘closer to the sky’.   His modest knowledge of Astronomy notwithstanding, he had his own favourite oft mentioned theory that the relative distance between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom is more than that between the sun and the earth. Sudhir’s favourite star was Betelgeuse, the b...

The Civil Servant   `Hitler’, was the ‘affectionate’ name we gave to our school History teacher for his brush moustache and side-combed hair.   But this ‘Hitler’ differed from ‘original’ in many ways, most importantly, for being an anglophile. This fascination for the British was evident from the many examples he gave of Englishmen who had excelled in various endeavours they undertook of which the most quoted one was about the East India Company’s Resident in the Durbar of Maharaja Ranjit Singh being a mere twenty-three-year-old Captain. This young lad, ‘Hitler’ described with vividity, had left his country, sailed many months on a ship around the Cape of Good Hope to first reach Calcutta. Here he worked hard to impress his superiors to trust him to be sent on a challenging diplomatic mission, then travelled across land, without the facility of good roads or railways, to reach the ‘Durbar’ of Maharaja Ranjit Singh at Lahore to become virtually the second-most powerful pe...

Soldiers of Promise   The Mughal Emperor Jehangir had written in his memoirs that if there was indeed a heaven on earth, it was Kashmir. There is however no record of Jehangir having trekked into the Kumaon Hills and visiting Kausani, the quaint and remote hill station on its northern slopes. Had he done so, his siting of ‘Heaven’ may well have been somewhat different.   I realised what Jehangir had missed out while on a visit, some years ago, to the home of Retired Colonel B, the father of young Captain B, an office colleague in those days.   The Kausani folk, as indeed all Kumaonis, are a proud people. They claim their region to be the ‘Switzerland of the East’.   Kausani’s own tryst with history was when Gandhiji spent a few days at what was then a hamlet.   Memories of that visit continue to linger on in the minds of locals as lore.   A perceptible vibrance of ‘Gandhi’ prevailed with even a tea bush, from which Gandhiji had plucked leaves for hi...

Rahul and the Road   Rahul, old childhood friend, was a history buff and for some ‘history-related’ reason was affectionately “Clive of Arcot” to our group of friends.     A youth of several passions and skills which included stamp and picture postcard collecting, he was a very good driver - a skill taught to him by his dad, a medical college Professor who exuded clinical precision in all his actions. This trait the son not just inherited, but also assiduously imbibed not just into his driving but every of his actions. The old Professor’s instructions were crisp and unambiguous.   ‘Respect the Road’ and ‘Respect those on it’.    Treat the vehicle - much like a then jingle - as an ‘extension of your limbs’. Rahul complied, and the streets of Poona City of those times were that much the safer. Those were the laid-back days of the Sixties when life in Poona went by at a staid ‘old world’ pace affording indulgences quite unimaginable in present tim...