We are used to seeing screen stars avowing eternal love and then divorcing the next week, followed by unsavory stories about the protagonists whose sources are easily guessed. This is not confined to Hollywood. Now in big cities, in our close circles, ruptures of close relations is a frequent occurrence. We care for somebody, perhaps deeply, as deeply as we know how, and yet the relationship collapses at some point, leaving odious detritus.
 
The question is: What remains? Of an event that was of such prime importance, what endures in our life?

I was recently in a club where somebody invited me to play a game of table tennis. He was a very poor player, but, I discovered to my embarrassment, I played even worse. This was a memorable epiphany, because I had played the game for years with a fair degree of skill. I had entered competitions and even received lessons from two world champions, Viktor Barna and Richard Bergmann.

​Equally discomfiting was the experience when a friendly woman showed me the acoustic guitar she had recently acquired. She showed me a couple of chords she had just learned, and I tried to show her a couple more. I couldn’t. My fingers simply didn’t obey my arrogant will. It was no use reminding myself that I was a guitarist in a band and had performed in events and restaurants.
 
My years of loyal practice did not let me retain my proficiency in playing a guitar or table tennis. I had lost the skill, though fragments of the know-how might have lingered. I asked myself: What had remained?
 
In table tennis, the joy of learning from masters and playing against wizards had faded, but I had learned the heady thrill of competing and, more often than not, coping with the pain of losing. Playing in a band taught me, in a way I could not have imagined, the real meaning of coordination. Even more, my ears learned the difference, even for a folk song or movie tune, the difference between good music and really good music.
 
Building a relationship with another person, or even living with him or her, is a much more important affair. When it ends, do we retain anything of value?
 
Recently I attended the graduation ceremony of a young person whose parents I have known for years. The parents, Michael and Abigail. divorced some years back, and Abigail attended with her current husband and Michael came with his new girlfriend. As we sat together after the ceremony, unaccountably I felt a great sadness seeing Abigail and Michael talking to each other, amicably but distantly, like polite neighbors. I remembered the time when they started seeing each other and dreamed of living together and the many years they lived together and had children. Is this all that remains? Courtesy and quiet conversation?
 
I spoke to Michael and Abigail later, independently.
 
Michael isn’t a loquacious person. Eventually he volunteered, “I felt angry and humiliated when she left me. It was no comfort that she wasn’t leaving me for another person. It made it clearer, in fact, that she would have no part of me. But you can’t be angry all the time. It came to me that she had struggled -- and, in fact, had had problems. I was a large part of the problem.
 
“So, four years down the line, when she told me that she was to marry someone, I sincerely wished her well. I had briefly met the person, and he seemed a decent person. I wanted them to find the happiness that had eluded us.”
 
I am more comfortable talking with Abigail, and she was more outspoken.
 
“Michael was a special person for me, for a long number of years. I had a difficult time with him at the end, but he still remains special for me.”
 
She looked at her present husband and added, “I do not regret my decision to leave the marriage. It was the right thing to do. I was not happy, and there was no way I could be happy. No matter. Michael will always be a very special person for me.”
 
I remembered my discussion, some years earlier, with a couple both of whom are well-known practicing psychologists. They had each divorced their spouses after a failed marriage and met and married years later.
 
“We did not know better then. Our marriages had seemed burdensome, and we decided to end them. Our spouses were decent people, but our relationship had seemed irrecoverable and hopeless. That’s the way the cookie crumbled.
“Now, having counselled scores of couples and seen their problems, we feel perhaps those relationships weren’t so ill-fated after all. Probably those marriages could have been saved. One is never sure, but it is possible. We just didn’t know better.”
 
Many leave one another in acrimony, at least distaste. Fortunate – but sadly few -- are those whose relations end on a pleasant note and they can go their way with something to treasure.
 
We cannot all play guitar or good table tennis all our life, but we can treasure what we have loved and learned.

I was just a young college student when I strayed one evening into the Ranji Stadium in Kolkata. My friends were having a party, but I was curious about an exhibition of photographs my father had told me about. His friend, a press photographer, had told him that it was worth looking at.
 
Once there, I was glad that I had gone alone. It was a remarkable experience of my life, an experience that merited some silent meditation. I believed then, and I believe now, you cannot go through the exhibition like that without an internal shift. Something changed within me.
 
Edward Steichen was a leading photographer and he was by then, at 80, the photography director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As the ‘culmination’ of his career, he set about creating an exhibition that would show the oneness of people everywhere. He chose the title, The Family of Man, from a poem by his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, and he also used Sandburg’s words to spell its theme:
 
There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.
 
Steichen traveled to eleven countries, assiduously collecting 500 photographs from 300 photographers of seventy countries, essentially telling the story of ordinary people living ordinary lives through ordinary experiences: being born, growing up as children, playing in streets, eating with the family, working in the field and in factories, suffering pain and affliction, losing relatives, enduring war and hardship, facing old age and death. The interlocking story was of a human being, whatever the age and gender, striving and struggling, braving and living and succumbing and braving in every land.
 
The exhibition ran in the US for fifteen weeks to a record number, then, with government support, toured the world for eight years, in 37 countries in six continents, even the USSR where it evoked wide response from young people (it did not go to Franco’s Spain and Mao’s China). In India, the exhibition travelled to seven cities including Kolkata.

I was spellbound. It was my first exposure to what great photography can be. It was, I realized, not just a pressman’s tool or a wedding photographer’s instrument, to record a gesticulating politico or an overdressed bride, but a powerful artist’s paintbrush, to offer a perspective, clarify a vision, tell a story, and, in the best of cases, change our eyes and our life. Like a soldier’s gun, it can kill an illusion or an inset prejudice, like a surgeon’s scalpel, it can remove an obstruction and help us to see an extraordinary, unwonted truth.
 
I had so far thought very poorly of photography as an art form, compared to music or painting and certainly to literature. I was tired of kitschy depictions of sunsets, boats on rivers and blooming flowers in overstocked gardens. The exhibition showed me a completely different use of the medium. To tell us, succinctly and without pretension, the magnificent story of life, in all its beauty and ugliness. To help us uncover, without a word and in utter silence, the meaning of the unending flurry of human events that pass in front of us, often unregarded. It made a child’s laughter or a mother’s despairing look an unforgettable anthem of every family’s story.

​I was seeing the masters. There was Diane Arbus, with her shocking representation of mentally ill and transgender people, Robert Capa and Mathew Brady showing us the incalculable human ravages of war, the fashion photographer Richard Avedon uncovering the faces behind the masks, Alfred Eisenstaed, capturing a sailor kissing a nurse on Victory Day, W. Eugene Smith who masterminded the idea of a photo essay, Andreas Feininger trapping the soul of a city in his film, Margaret Bourke White whose shot of Gandhi still adorns India’s stamps (and who, incidentally, took the best photo of my girlfriend) and the Frenchman who was to become my idol, Henri Cartier Bresson, telling heart-wrenching stories with every photo shoot. There was too a touching still from Ray’s Apu trilogy.
 
I later found that Susan Sontag had criticized the show as overly sentimental and Roland Barthes had commented that showing people being born and dying told us little. No matter. The exhibition went on to inspire thousands, who felt in some way that it was telling their story. In that sense, Steichen was right in saying that, when people looked at the photos, the faces in the photos looked back at them, and there was a sense of instant recognition.
 
Even artists and photographers felt inspired. Ten years later, the German magazine Stern sponsored a giant exhibition similar in theme. Twenty years later, the UN sponsored an exhibition on The Family of Children. There have been retrospectives and exhibitions on women, on marginal groups and even an exhibition called The Family of Invisibles. They have highlighted the agonies of neglected and marginalized groups.
 
I know better what happened to me. I devoted five years to photography, learning its myriad techniques and loving the strange new world it unfolded for me. I became no more than a proficient photographer. But it did something more. I learned to see.

I was late to arrive, but the moment my hostess opened the door I knew it was the typical Washington party. A dozen people, of whom I appeared the least sprucely dressed, all talking and affecting an earnest bonhomie they were unlikely to be feeling. I was quickly handed a glass of Pinot Noir and seated at the only remaining seat.
 
On my right sat a well-regarded professor of the university where I had once lectured, with whom a conversation was less feasible, I soon discovered, because of the advanced hardness of his hearing. On the left sat a woman in a simple royal-blue dress, who, the hostess said, had just returned from India. That doubtless was why I had been placed next to her.
 
Celia smiled pleasantly as she gave me her hand. She had a soft, rolling voice and a deferential style, but her words had a contrasting directness. She sounded clearly American, but I seemed to detect a trace of something exotic. She enunciated more distinctly and gave longer pause between sentences.
 
Since she had recently visited India, I asked her if she had enjoyed her trip to India. She could have gone to India for pleasure or for work, but I made the foolish male presumption that she went as a tourist. She stunned me with her reply.
 
“I lived in India for thirty years,” she said, “I am a nun.”
 
She added, “Yes, to answer your question, I enjoyed my stay in India.”
 
When I confessed to my silly assumption, she said generously, “That is all right. Most of us don’t wear a habit any longer. People who are used to seeing nuns in habits are sometimes confused.”
 
She then smilingly pointed to the brooch she was wearing on her dress. She explained that she wears it with her street clothes to indicate her calling.
 
She had entered the church as a young girl, enthusiastically received her training and had gone to India to serve. For more than thirty years she had lived and worked in a small town in the south. Her life was simple. She lived with an Indian nun in a modest cottage, shared domestic chores, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. She taught young children during the day and helped in a church-run clinic in the evening. Her days were long and nights were occasionally short, when she was awakened for some medical emergency. It was hugely different from the comfortable middleclass life she had led with her dentist father and firefighter mother in an Ohio town.
 
I could not help asking if she was happy in her sharply altered circumstances.
 
“The first several weeks, perhaps months, were a period of excitement. Everything seemed like an adventure. An Indian town and daily life in it were like an unfathomable mystery to me. I knew nothing and I understood less, despite the briefing I had received from my elders and superiors.
 
“Once the period of transition was over, I settled down in my new life. I was peaceful, very peaceful. Of course, there were pains and irritants. Sometimes with the town people, more often with colleagues, but these were, at least in retrospect, minor and fleeting. I knew the patients at the clinic liked me; the children perhaps liked me a little more. That kept me going.”
 
And how did it feel to be back in the US after three decades?
 
She smiled, “At first cataclysmic, to be honest. I had returned to a country very different from the one I had left. Everything was different: food, clothes, transport, newspapers, phones, computers. The church was a solace, the mass offered friendly familiarity. Though, even there, the priorities and concerns seem to have changed.”
 
Has it been difficult to settle down?
 
She thought. “Honestly, yes. It has helped that I now live in a hostel with other nuns, many of a comparable age and experience. I feel I am settling down quite well.”
 
She laughed and added, “The only thing that bothers me yet is the food. I have gotten so used to Indian food that anything I eat here seems a trifle bland. I miss the spices. I tried cooking in the kitchen we have, but the smell lasted a long time and bothered other sisters. I had to give up on the idea.
 
“But, don’t worry,” she concluded with a laugh, “I am not starving.”
 
Three weeks later I made a reservation at the best Indian restaurant I knew and invited Celia. She looked bright in a yellow dress and the brooch shone with the candles the waiter lit.

​I ordered some cumin-and-ginger drink for both of us and, a pen ready, got hold of a menu.
 
“You have to tell me, Celia, of the food that you ate in India and liked. I want to mark the items in this menu to get an idea.”
 
She took a little time to recall the names from a language she knew scantily, but eventually was able to name eleven delicacies: two meat, three chicken, four seafood and five vegetarian entrées. Then, over her strenuous objections, I ordered all the eleven menu items. The waiter was slightly taken aback, but he wrote down the order assiduously.
 
It was my turn to explain to Celia.
 
“I want you to remember tonight as the India Night, when you could once again taste all the eleven Indian dishes you had tried earlier and liked. I have talked with the restaurant manager and he has promised that whatever we don’t eat now will be packed very carefully and you can store it in the hostel refrigerator for several days. You just have to heat it and eat it on successive days. There will be no odor, and the other nuns will not complain.”
 
I will long remember Celia’s startled but happy face.

“I love my daughters,” said Arijit Datta, “and I believe they love me too. They are good and responsible persons, the way their mother and I wanted them to be. They are kind and thoughtful. I am sure their friends and colleagues think well of them. Their neighbors, from what I hear, like them. I have a high opinion of them.”
 
He paused. I knew there was something more.
 
“It is just that I can’t connect with them,” he said with a sigh.
 
Arijit is an old friend, older than me, who has kept in touch with me despite my itinerant life. We briefly worked in the same organization, a European multinational group, and I came to know him for a curious reason. He had a crush on my secretary, a charming young woman who relished the attention of dashing older men. I tried to help, mostly by leaving the scene whenever he appeared, but the relationship came to nought, for Arijit left for a better job in another city.
 
There he rose rapidly, married, had two daughters and headed the local management association. We met periodically, for I visited his city for work and we met a couple of times for dinner. He was a bright person, with a flair for conversation and friendship; I enjoyed myself every time we met. Apparently he too liked being in touch, for he called from time to time and occasionally sent brief notes.
 
When I went abroad, he took pains to remain in touch. I followed his successful professional life, but sometimes had the glimpse of a certain loneliness. His wife had developed Parkinson’s, and the symptoms, mildest tremors at the start, grew steadily worse. Their lives diverged. Arijit moved constantly, his wife, home-bound initially, turned bed-ridden.

​When I saw him on a brief visit to India, I was surprised to see him so gray. His wife had passed away, but his two daughters lived with him. Priya was in the university, and Shreya, the elder one, was a junior executive in a pharmaceutical company. They were both bright and pleasant, and I assumed, no doubt naively, that he would be well looked after.
 
We all presume that our children, who have lived years with us and have known that we have loved them, will remain close to us. They will share our joys and understand our pains. When we get older and begin to see the erosion of our strength, when perhaps we start losing friends and the advantages of our positions, they will be, by their very presence, our reassurance. At one time we took care of them and gave them our support; perhaps they can stand beside us now. Once we could advise and guide them; maybe now we can count on their counsel when we need it.
 
Arijit said that, when his wife lived, he had to depend a lot on his wife to look after the two daughters. He had to struggle to cope with his work, prove his mettle and win in a competitive struggle. Win he did, but his work days expanded steadily with his responsibilities and he frequently spent twelve to fourteen hours in the office. He made an effort, when his wife died, to take a bigger role in the children’s life. He spent more time with them, talked daily about their studies and their interests.
 
I asked about his daughters and learned that Shreya has done very well in the pharmaceutical company and Priya has had a good start in a technology startup.
 
“Of course, I know they belong to a different generation,” Arijit said, “their values and styles are different. Mine were different from my parents too. Still I believed I owed my father and mother an effort to connect with them – talk to them, understand them, care for them.
 
“My children seem to live in a different universe. I can’t touch them – not even digitally. When I call them or send them a message, I seem to sense that I am intruding on their time and I need to have a smaller footprint.”
 
Arijit had had a successful career and a busy social life with friends. It pained me to hear of the loneliness behind the façade of such success. That he had lifted his visor and shared his agony with a friend overseas also told me the depth of his pain. He never once begrudged his daughters their professional advance; it is likely that he helped the process in some way. But he longed for a closer How (not) to get a break. link with them, or at least the chance to develop it.
 
That longing clearly grew as some health issues arose; his thyroid gave him trouble, he could walk less and had to control his diet. He had maintained his large apartment, in the hope that his daughters would visit him sometimes. But they never did, and he started considering alternatives.
 
I knew this from our periodic exchanges. It was still a surprise to get his letter. It spoke of a radical move.
​
“It may surprise you,” it said, “but I took a quick decision to move to this tiny house in the foothills of the Himalayas. I rent two rooms from the elderly couple who own it, and they take care of my rooms as well as my food. My thyroid and other problems are unlikely to let me live beyond a year or two. I want to live that limited period peacefully, with no cares and few expectations.
 
“As long as I lived in the city in a large apartment, I could not help hoping that my daughters would visit me and perhaps pass a night. That has not happened in some years. I decided to face the reality that I will leave the way I came, by myself. Your messages have helped – and fortified me in my decision to make a clear break with the past. Thank you and best wishes.”

My father had a lot of friends and he put a lot of stock in what his friends said. One of his friends was the principal of a school. It was no surprise that, one night, over dinner dad divulged that he was considering moving me to his friend’s school. He thought I would have better education there.
 
It wasn’t any better, unless a bigger building and a more pretentious name could be assumed to portend better learning. Our texts were the same dull books, our teachers were the same unimaginative task masters, and our hours comprised the same boring rote learning. In literature, I refused to write the silly formal essays others wrote and got reprimanded for submitting New Yorker-like tongue-in-cheek compositions that raised the tutor’s eyebrows sky-high. Of Pythagoras’s theorem, I found somewhere an alternative proof that I considered more elegant and drove my teacher up the wall for using it instead of the standard proof he had taught in the class. The first lesson was to conform; the last lesson was the same. Anything faintly original and slightly different invited derision and penalties.
 
My guerilla tactic was to take an inconspicuous rear seat – but not the last bench, for that would invite branding as a backbencher – and amuse myself in other ways. The central one was to bring an interesting book and focus on finishing it, looking up occasionally at the teacher or blackboard. The other was, especially when the teacher set a task to be completed in the class, to draw sketches of other students, the teachers or whatever I could see through the windows. Of the last, the most intriguing was the plump girl who brushed her long hair, standing at the window of a neighboring house. Often a portrait was accompanied by a satirical limerick, usually focused on what I considered the person’s most annoying feature or execrable habit.

It was the latter that proved my undoing. Walrus, a teacher who had earned the title because of his luxuriant moustache, set us the task, in his composition class, of writing an essay on My Most Memorable Experience. I was certain the others would write pieces on terminally dull themes like ‘The time I scored the winning goal’ or ‘The year I got the medal for geography.’ I considered titles like ‘The year I got caned for asking a witty question’ or ‘The time I scored with a plump girl,’ but settled for the modest story of my blowing off a batsman’s glasses in a cricket match with a wayward googly.

I should explain that students were expected to carry as many exercise books as the subjects taught, with classwork in the appropriate notebook. I carried so many story books in my bag that I had space for just one exercise book, in which I recorded all classwork. When at the end of the class Walrus collected all the exercise books, so that he could grade them at leisure, he took away my only exercise book. The greater disaster was that the exercise book contained my entire series of sketches of the teachers, including Walrus, along with waggish limericks on each. I had nightmares of being summoned to the principal’s office and then asked to go home with my shamed parents, irrevocably expelled.
 
The next day, as Walrus walked into the class with a quizzical look on his face, I anticipated disaster. When Walrus somberly declared that he had made a strange discovery from the exercise books he had collected, I waited for lightning to strike.
 
Walrus took the pile of exercise books from his bag and placed them on his desk. Without a word, he took the exercise book from the top, adjusted his glasses and started reading. It was the story of a cricket match, unquestionably my essay. He read several paragraphs, then stopped and said, “I will not read all of it for a reason. The essay is not exactly what I expected to see, but it is a good essay, a very amusing one. I am impressed that someone in my class can write something as comical as this.”
 
It was not exactly what I expected to hear.
 
He added, “I will not read the whole essay, because I have something more interesting to read. I find in this exercise book a long series of sketches, each accompanied by a short poem. I could read them all to you, but I will selectively read the ones that are most likely to be of interest to you.”
 
He started reading the limericks on the teachers, and after each reading held up the exercise book to show the sketch. He began with the principal and went through all our teachers. Finally, as my anticipation grew, he came to the verse about him, read it and demonstrated the sketch and said, “I did not realize that my facial hair was the most noticeable feature about me! Well, now I know.”
 
The bell rang. The class was over.
 
Before leaving, Walrus said, “I believe creativity deserves some recognition. I have recommended to the principal that the author of the essay and poems should be the next editor of our school magazine.”
 
When the magazine came out six months later, I saw my writing in print for the first time in my life.

Years ago I had a friend in school who could write with both hands. It amazed me, for I could write with only one. It amazed me, too, to find that there were creatures, like alligators, that lived comfortably both on land and in water. It took me a little more time to notice that people do two or more things, perhaps not simultaneously but sequentially, quite competently. The same person can cook well and play excellent bridge or be a high jump champion and play piano like a pro. But, is there a link? How does one transition, and how easily and enjoyably, from one activity to another?
 
I have an interest in languages and learned a number of them. I have tried my hand at writing in three of them and translated from another three. Bengali, my mother tongue, and English, my acquired love, are the two closest to my heart. I continue to write professionally in both of them, and that led to a strange discovery.
 
To meet a deadline or in anticipation of one, I sometimes write two or three columns for a publication. After writing three columns in succession for an English publication, when I turn to write an article in Bengali I feel a strong resistance within me. In fact, it appears to be an unpleasantly difficult chore. I have to remind myself that it is my first language and I have written a book in it before I can persuade myself to sit down and write a piece in Bengali. The reverse is also true. If I write a bunch of articles successively in Bengali, it seems an onerous, uncomfortable enterprise to write anything in English. Again, as I force myself to the task, the discomfort dissolves and my computer keyboard eventually
gets rattling.
 
I was mystified. What lay behind this persistent, powerful resistance?

​That made me ask a more fundamental question. Why do I write in two different languages? What makes me seek out a second language to express myself when I am already doing so in one?
 
The true answer is so clear to me that it amazes me that I had not realized it before. The two languages are two totally different media. I cannot do in the one what I can do in the other. I sense freedom and fluidity when I write something that intrigues me in the language of my choice. Were I to try and write the same thing in another language, I would feel constrained. The two languages seem to offer me two different spheres of operation. I would not dream of trying to do in a second language what I have done in the first.
 
This may seem farfetched, for in the world today things are constantly being presented in different languages. I have no doubt that a computer manual or a tourist guidebook can be prepared competently in two or more languages. A creative product, an essay or a novel, is rather a different thing. You might object that novels and even poems have been translated in many languages. Frankly, I would think of the original and the translation as very different products. A translated story or a poem – I have myself tried both – makes an impact quite different from the original, and it serves well those who cannot read the original. But the emotional charge of the one is a quantum leap from that of the other.
 
What I have realized is that, emotionally and culturally, I enter a wholly different realm when I move from one language to another. I have always hated changing homes, even when I am moving to a far better home. I find it more than uncomfortable; it is nearly traumatic for me. That is precisely the sensation I have when I switch from one language to another. It is distasteful. But once I have gotten into my stride and have written in a language for a while – in the way I have lived in a new home for several months and grown accustomed – I have found my place in a new universe and enjoy my stay in it. But the sensation of transition is discombobulating.
 
Even this characterization is superficial. If my language is a universe that envelopes me, it shapes the way I think and feel and write, it gives me pause to think of the helpless creature I seem to be in the face of the whole complex of my genes, my upbringing, my modeling on my parents, my sibling relations, my community, my city, my country, my school and university and my work in different institutions. If these have all covertly but comprehensively influenced me, what remains of my individuality, my vaunted objectivity or impartiality? Do I know which way I am turning inwardly and why? Am I helplessly, like a whirling weather cock, at the mercy of veiled, vast forces, to which I must bow, without even knowing when and why?
 
It gives me a clue to the vaunted impartiality of critics and scholars, who have to pretend to judge works of art or literature solely on their merit, and not on their appeal to surreptitious elements that lie alive but dormant within them, as much as in me.
 
Writing has sometimes been described as a journey of exploration. It has certainly been for me an adventure of disconcerting discovery.

Legend has it that King Janak of Videhi, better known as the adoptive father of Sita, encountered a young man, so overwhelmed by the opulence of Janak’s palace, that he made bold to ask of the sovereign, “How can you function as a wise king if you are always distracted by the pleasures of wealth and power?”
 
To Janak’s credit, he was intrigued more than irritated by the cheeky question, and responded with a challenge, “If you can make a full round of my palace with a bowl of oil without spilling a drop, I will answer you in detail.” 

​The bowl was full to the brim and the young man had to take exceptional care not to spill the oil. When he completed the round successfully, Janak asked him about design of the palace, its golden dome and frescoed walls, filigreed doors and grand chandeliers, and the multi-hued uniform of its many guards. The man couldn’t answer.
 
“How can I notice any of those things,” he expostulated, “my eyes were glued to the darn bowl lest the oil should spill!”
 
“Yes,” said Janak, “you had a mission to fulfill, and all else fell beyond the margin.”
 
He went on to explain that the mission of being a good king so absorbed his attention that everything else became peripheral.
 
I find the story unforgettable, for, like the youth, I tiptoe cautiously around the palace of my life, wondering what is my mission.
 
Most of us are defined by the work we do. The first thing we want to know about people we meet is what they do. Once we know a person is a lawyer or doctor, we put him or her in a slot that determine the person’s status with us. No matter that a lawyer can be a variety of things, from a criminal litigator to a corporate advisor to a university researcher, good or bad. A doctor can be a veteran emergency physician or a newbie consultant to insurance companies. We simply ascribe a value to the person based on our earlier notion of doctors and lawyers.
 
For years I was a corporate executive. My work changed greatly over the years, especially as I changed departments and locations and took on new projects that interested me. That made not the slightest difference to how people treated me. They just regarded me as an executive stereotype, who wears a suit and tie to his club even in summer, drinks whisky sour in the evening and plays golf. They would have been shocked to learn that I did none of those things, read Hegel and Shakespeare for fun and my abiding interest was relationship pathologies among my colleagues.
 
Later, when I moved to a UN organization, overnight my billing changed to that of international development specialist. I worked on different types of development projects to be sure, but my real interest continued to be relationship issues between expatriate consultants and local specialists – which wasn’t really all that different from what had fascinated me earlier. That did not matter. People branded me as a development guy and that is what determined my branding.
 
Then I joined the diplomatic corps. Once again there were differences and handled problems that looked and sounded very different. But, in its essence, I often found myself mediating relationship issues between the country I represented and the host country – or perhaps some other country or combination of countries. More than others, I found I took a more deliberate and academic approach to what I had to handle – I read more and analyzed documents much more – but my image in most eyes was that of a cocktail guzzling diplomat. Whatever the word, or its associations, meant in the mind of my interlocutors.
 
The strange part was that though I was the same person, often pursuing very similar interests in a slightly different but rather analogous way, my identity was vastly different in the eyes of the people I met and dealt with. This is strange, for a moment’s thought would tell us that each of us is an amalgam of many different identities. I am at any moment, a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a neighbor, a rival in chess or tennis, a cook in the kitchen, a guitar player in a band, a cricketer in a university team and, on a congenial evening, even a bar tender. I do very different things in these diverse roles, I do them with hugely different competence, and I enjoy very different satisfaction in doing them.
 
Like almost anybody else, I live a complex life, playing different roles at different places at different times. When people brand me, by quickly stereotyping me with single word, like executive or diplomat, they don’t really grasp my life, my goals or my values. They just bury it all under the rubric of a notion that totally misrepresents me.
 
What is even more dangerous is that I myself have been sometimes tempted to think of myself simply as an executive or a diplomat and forget what a complex bundle I really am. Those are the times I have tried to think of King Janak and his parable of the oil-filled bowl. And ask myself: What is really my mission?
 
I wish I had a simple answer.

The large crowd, spilling over to the street and blocking the traffic, caught my eye a warm Saturday morning. It mystified me, for I had heard of no planned political rally in the city. Our house faced a movie house and my second-floor room window gave a wide-angle view of its portico and entrance. What could it be? Could the winsome Nimmi, the heroine of the new release, whose giant cutout adorned the theater entrance, be the expected guest at the cinema? Would I be so lucky as to catch a sight of the ample goddess?
 
A school student, bursting with hormones and curiosity, I would not budge from my window. I ate my breakfast, the bowl of ginger granola mother had served, standing impatiently at the window and scanning the street. The crowd had multiplied, the traffic had stalled, and a police posse was trying bravely to keep things in order. People seemed excited, anticipating something special and periodically giving a shout, of annoyance or ebullience I wasn’t sure.
 
Finally, after more than an hour of waiting, there was a deafening roar, as a big black limousine slowly slid through the throng. A door opened, a person emerged, but the six surrounding burly bodyguards let neither me nor the people see the person. A groan of disappointment arose from the crowd. I returned to the last dregs of my granola in despair.
 
Then the remarkable thing happened. Suddenly, miraculously, on the extended upper-floor balcony of the theater appeared a lithe, smiling man, and a giant, spiraling roar of excitement rose from the multitude. It wasn’t really a man, it was Dev Anand, who clearly preceded the 330 million gods of the land. He wore a black shirt, tight black pants, a flamboyant vermilion necktie and an exaggerated pompadour that was his trademark. He also wore five large marigold garlands that must have been foisted on him the moment he entered the theater.

​Dev Anand edged closer to the front end of the balcony where his assembled admirers could see him better. He acknowledged the ceaseless successive waves of noisy adulation, not with the customary folded hands, nor with the prosaic uplifted arms, but with a strange mock-military style of sloppy salute. Once, twice, thrice – and each time a vociferous howl signaled the crowd’s grateful acknowledgement.
 
Then His Stardom played his master stroke. He took the first garland from his neck, bent low and threw it with great force to a section of the crowd. The crowd went wild. People ran, pushed, clawed, fought, grabbed, for a fraction of the garland – or even of a marigold. Before the scuffle was over, Dev Anand took the second garland, bent low again and tossed it in another section of the crowd. Once again, a ferocious pursuit, followed by a furious melee, as people jostled and struggled to secure the minutest part of the star’s cast-off gift.
 
The same scenario played out three more times as the star carefully and energetically, as if he was playing a board game, neatly lobbed a garland in a new direction and provoked a mad frenzy for a fragment of a torn and worthless garland. You saw a thousand hands stretch to touch a particle of a marigold that might have touched the holy corpus of the celluloid deity. Each time after the showy exercise Dev Anand stood erect again, watched the frantic race for a tossed garland and switched on a flashy smile. He seemed satisfied, like a master choreographer, that he had created precisely the denouement he had intended.
 
I was young and naïve, but by the fifth encore of the performance I had begun to feel a creepy sensation. There was something disturbing, in fact revolting, in the calculated game of using people’s adulation to tempt them into a humiliating scramble for a trifle. We all admire some people, somebody beautiful or successful or famous, but to race like hounds for a useless memento seemed demeaning for human beings.
 
Years later, I did some stints for the movie industry and got to mingle with some beautiful people both in the east and the west. I would talk to a few famous stars, be taken aback by their unalloyed confidence that they were the Chosen People who fully merited their place in the sun. They seemed to take for granted the affection and admiration that came their way. They appeared oblivious both that such exaltation was invariably fleeting and the people who offered it were also human, just like them. 

I hate snakes. I have hated them as long as I can remember.
 
My earliest recollection is of a snake I saw in Bihar where I lived briefly. It had rained and the football field was muddy. That didn’t stop me or my friends. We played lustily for hours on a warm afternoon and then sat down near a tree to chat.
 
Just then somebody shouted, “Look!” I saw a midsize yellow-green snake sliding forward in the grass. Its slithering movement gave me the creeps and I realized I would never be comfortable in its proximity. It disappeared in minutes, but I didn’t want to be there any longer and left quickly.
 
My aunt was very keen on plants and animals and she would take my brother and me to the zoo. I loved those visits and absorbed avidly all she had to say about whatever we saw. There was a separate enclosure for snakes of all kinds, large and small. I went along the first time, but after that nothing would persuade me to approach the area. My aunt saw my aversion and let me sit and wait on a bench while she went with my brother to see the snakes.
 
The aversion remained. I was even uncomfortable looking at photographs of snakes. My wife, Jane, loved the National Geographic magazine and subscribed to it. I loved its coverage of different countries and cultures and its extraordinary photographs of unknown regions. One month it had a special section on snakes and its cover had the vivid photograph of a giant python. I saw Jane reading it with great interest, but I couldn’t bear to look at the python’s coils every time I passed the living room center table.
 
Fortunately for me my daughter’s piano teacher, while waiting for my recalcitrant daughter to turn up, I hate snakes. I have hated them as long as I can remember.
 
My earliest recollection is of a snake I saw in Bihar where I lived briefly. It had rained and the football field was muddy. That didn’t stop me or my friends. We played lustily for hours on a warm afternoon and then sat down near a tree to chat.
 
Just then somebody shouted, “Look!” I saw a midsize yellow-green snake sliding forward in the grass. Its slithering movement gave me the creeps and I realized I would never be comfortable in its proximity. It disappeared in minutes, but I didn’t want to be there any longer and left quickly.
 
My aunt was very keen on plants and animals and she would take my brother and me to the zoo. I loved those visits and absorbed avidly all she had to say about whatever we saw. There was a separate enclosure for snakes of all kinds, large and small. I went along the first time, but after that nothing would persuade me to approach the area. My aunt saw my aversion and let me sit and wait on a bench while she went with my brother to see the snakes.
 
The aversion remained. I was even uncomfortable looking at photographs of snakes. My wife, Jane, loved the National Geographic magazine and subscribed to it. I loved its coverage of different countries and cultures and its extraordinary photographs of unknown regions. One month it had a special section on snakes and its cover had the vivid photograph of a giant python. I saw Jane reading it with great interest, but I couldn’t bear to look at the python’s coils every time I passed the living room center table.
 
Fortunately for me my daughter’s piano teacher, while waiting for my recalcitrant daughter to turn up, evinced some interest in the magazine and turned its pages. When she finished her lesson, I gave her the magazine, saying, “You looked very interested in the magazine. Please take it and read it at your leisure.” I even gave her a box of chocolates as a reward for relieving me of the python’s sight.
 
When Jane returned from her office, she noticed the missing magazine and wondered where it had gone. I embroidered the truth a little and said that our daughter’s piano teacher was so fascinated by the issue that I had felt compelled to offer her the issue.
 
Years have passed since then, but my aversion for snakes does not appear to have abated. I know a little more about them, and their legitimate place in the environment and realize that only a few of them are poisonous and dangerous. No matter. The very sight of them makes me uncomfortable and I certainly don’t want to touch a magazine that features a gorgeous snake, large or small.
 
That is why I can’t understand what happened in a Washington public park a few years ago.
in the magazine and turned its pages. When she finished her lesson, I gave her the magazine, saying, “You looked very interested in the magazine. Please take it and read it at your leisure.” I even gave her a box of chocolates as a reward for relieving me of the python’s sight.
 
When Jane returned from her office, she noticed the missing magazine and wondered where it had gone. I embroidered the truth a little and said that our daughter’s piano teacher was so fascinated by the issue that I had felt compelled to offer her the issue.
 
Years have passed since then, but my aversion for snakes does not appear to have abated. I know a little more about them, and their legitimate place in the environment and realize that only a few of them are poisonous and dangerous. No matter. The very sight of them makes me uncomfortable and I certainly don’t want to touch a magazine that features a gorgeous snake, large or small.
 
That is why I can’t understand what happened in a Washington public park a few years ago.

​We lived then in Egypt and had come down to the US for a brief vacation. A friend invited us for a picnic in a local park and we were enjoying a pleasant spring morning, talking and snacking, when something unusual happened. Suddenly all the eyes in the park seemed glued toward its entrance.
 
I saw the reason when I turned and looked. A young man in his thirty’s was entering the park with a large snake wound around his waist and its head held lovingly in his hand. It was quite a sight.
 
He came close to us, unwound his pet and gently placed it on the grass in a spot where it could enjoy the sun. All the children went running to take a close look at the snake that lay on the grass and moved only slightly, clearly enjoying its sunny repose. My daughter, Lina, was mesmerized and went closer and closer to the snake to see it better.
 
Meanwhile, its owner was explaining to his avid young listeners what his remarkable pet does at home (crawls and sleeps), what it eats (live rodents) and where he got it (Philippines, in the Mindanao region). The young man said it was a wonderful pet and very friendly. To prove the point, he let the children first touch and then lift and hold the snake. It was a huge snake and four children were needed to hold it well. To my great chagrin, Lina was the first to volunteer.
 
Lina was happy and proud to hold the front section of the snake. She kept caressing it. Then she said to me, “Daddy, it is beautiful. Why don’t you also hold it with me?” Then it happened.
 
Disinclined to disappoint my six-year-old, I held the snake in my hands. I looked at the design on its body and, believe it or not, I realized that it was beautiful. The snake seemed, for some incredible moments, a wonderful pet indeed, friendly and entirely worthy of caresses. Through all my aversion those moments endure as a vivid, vibrant mystery.

Narayan Gupta had taken a small workshop his father had started late in his life and turned it into a successful engineering company by forty years of unremitting work. He handed over the reins to his son, who had graduated from a reputed technology institute and interned under his dad’s watchful eye for fifteen years. The idea was that Udayan now knew how to run the company the way his father wanted it run and could always take his advice in case of a problem. After all, his father still served on the company board and lived in the same elite edifice, though in a different apartment.
 
It did not work out that way. Not once did Udayan seek his father’s advice on any problem. Nor did he consult his father on any key issue. His father’s role as a board member became insignificant, for Udayan soon ejected the old-timers and packed the board with his handpicked people. Udayan had always been attentive to his parents and close to his mother, Mandira. He visited them regularly, asked them about health issues and brought them gifts. But the visits started getting intermittent when he sensed a frostiness in his father and their duration became shorter.
 
I had known the family for a long time, for my mother had been in college with Mandira and I met Narayan in a management association. They knew Udayan had been briefly my student in Manila and they felt comfortable talking about him.

​“Udayan,” Narayan said over tea, “is a kind of a schizoid personality. He is very polite and deferential in person. Not just with me and his mother. I have noticed how courteous he is with you and his other professors. But he has run roughshod over my colleagues and friends who served on the company board. He has found a way to get rid of them, one by one. My deputy, Arvind, who should have been invaluable to him, he chose to retire early.
 
“In fact, Udayan has rebuffed any attempt to broach a discussion about the company for which I practically gave my life. I don’t know what kind of hubris it is. Why does he resist me, his own father, who only wishes his success?”
 
Udayan was not just polite but extremely gracious when I mentioned that I had met his father and found him rather unhappy.
 
“Father accomplished a lot with the little that he got from grandfather. I admire that. But he does not seem to realize that things have changed. Nor did his friends on the board. We needed a new direction, a new kind of leadership. I had to change the board. We are doing better, though we are not out of the woods.
 
“I can’t talk with father because he won’t help me to weigh options. He wants to make recommendations, and then he gets hurt if I can’t use or accept them. I don’t need that kind of backseat driving.”
 
I was sad to hear the two sides and was impressed when Mandira spoke in her husband’s absence.
 
“They both want to break the ice,” she said, “but they don’t know how. Every time they talk about the company, they get impatient or unhappy. Yet that is what they really want to talk about but can’t. Udayan naturally wants to avoid unpleasantness, and resists going in that direction.”
 
I agreed with her that they are likely to disagree, and even become disagreeable, if they talk about the company.
 
“But that is what they would really like to talk about,” she said.
 
“Right, but they are not ready for it.”
 
“What then is the solution?”
 
“The solution, if they are prepared to consider it, is to start by talking about a different thing: how they are going to talk about the company. They must both realize that, even with the best of intentions, they have reached a road-block. So, they need to talk about the road-block. Udayan can say: What kind of discussion will be helpful for him and what kind will not be. Narayan can say: I will not recommend actions, I will only suggest some perspectives and say why those may be useful to consider. They can agree at the start on a specific slice of time, say a half-hour, and see how it goes.”
 
Mandira thought about my idea and said, “Perhaps that could be a beginning. Perhaps I could mediate it.”
 
I was amazed, weeks later, when Udayan talked about his father with heart-warming candor, “It has taken me time to realize that my father can be many things at the same time. He can be tough and warm, stubborn and flexible, adversarial and loving. We couldn’t talk about the company without friction. Now, somehow, we have learned to discuss quietly. I think he understands the new problems I have. I also think he has some insights I can use. I was wrong to imagine he was a spent force.”
 
I was happy to hear him say so. I had to restrain myself, however, from telling him that nobody, absolutely no human being, is ever really a spent force.