FLASHES OF MY LIFE - 3

FLASHES OF MY LIFE  - 3

COLLEGE DAYS

Since I passed the S.S.L.C (1941) when I was not yet 14, I could not be admitted for my Intermediate, in the College (Rules required that I must be fourteen and a half at admission time). So I had to spend one year at home.  I learnt Shorthand and typewriting in that one year  and passed two examinations in Typewriting and one in Shorthand.  But this one year gave my father a bonanza of time to educate me further spiritually.  Mostly a good amount of my time was spent on learning more recitations but I had also the time to listen to a large number of my father’s public Upanyasams on various Vedanta topics. He never formally taught me Vedanta or advaita proper but he always made me learn more vedic recitations and now and then participate in his pooja rituals and worship. The afterthought now tells me that father was strictly following the advaita maxim that advaita should not be taught formally to some one who was not yet ripe through continued performance of karma and bhakti!

During this period I had four friends who were very close to me.  One was G Subramanian, a little senior to me.  He had probably not completed his school education but because of the poor circumstances of his parents, he joined the Army as a soldier, but returned home around 1942 or 43, I know not for what reason.  He used to describe to me how they lived as soldiers at the war front. Many times he swore to me that he would somehow seek any employment, earn well and educate his younger brother and sister, so well, that they would not have to suffer what he suffered! The other friend of mine was CS Subramaniam (CSS as I used to call him), who had a good schooling, and who initiated me into reading a lot of English novels by authors like Dumas (his favourite -- and it became my favourite too) and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Count of Monte Cristo, and Father Brown stories. GSubramanian, CSS and myself took a photograph together which I still keep.

The third and fourth friends were R. Narasimhan (of Mangudi) and S. Kalidasan.  Narsimhan's mother ( a widow, with this only son) used to consider me as her pet son, because she considered me infinitely better as a student than her own son. She expected me to teach him; I tried but that did not help much.  On the other hand Narasimhan always talked to me in our private conversations only about  psychology of sex and I think he succeeded as a teacher! Both Narasimhan and Kalidasan used to accompany me on cycle (on either side of my cycle)  almost as bodyguards, and we used to ride in that triad formation through the busy Mutt street of Kumbakonam.  No damage done, of course,  even during a period of two years!  

Incidentally I learnt cycling in the summer of 1941; it was my uncle (actually he was my mother's step-brother, but of almost the same age as myself) Balakrishnan (Balu, as we called him in the family -- in later life he became a Cine photographer; he has been the Chief photographer in one or two early films of Shivaji Ganesan; so we used to call him Gemini Balu, in the family) who taught me cycling, during the period of ten days or so, when my grandfather B. Narayanaswami Iyer (Balu's father) died and we were all meeting daily for the morning rituals, with our evenings left to ourselves.

1942-44 saw me as a student of Govt. College, Kumbakonam in the (then-called) Intermediate classes.  I shall write about this period at a later time.

In 1944 (at my age 17) I joined St. Joseph’s College, Trichinopoly for my three-year Honours course in Mathematics. So we shifted our family to Trichinopoly. From that year onwards I was wedded to Mathematics for the next  44 years until I retired from BITS, Pilani.  And during the first half of that period, that is till I was forty or so, it was mostly Mathematics and Mathematics alone. I used to tell my wife (who arrived on the scene when I was 19 and was in my final year Honours course) that Mathematics was my first love, because she arrived in my life later than Mathematics!  Though it was all Mathematics, whenever I had the opportunity to listen to any public lecture by personalities like Swami Chinmayananda or Sengalipuram Anantharama Dikshidar or others of that kind, all that I had heard from my father would come back to my memory and many loose ends would start getting linked up. So long as my father was alive (till 1956, when I was 29), I used now and then to ask him some very deep questions that arose from my random reading or from what I heard from others. His replies, usually, touched a more profound chord than what I heard from other public lectures and I came to consider him as my guru, greater than all the gurus of the world!