Wise and Otherwise, by Sudha Murty

I had written in an earlier blogpost that I had become smitten with Sudha Murty ever since my daughter bought her little book How I taught my grandmother to read and other stories (for those who might not know, she is not only the wife of IT-tycoon Narayan Murty but a scholar, a teacher, a writer, a social worker and a philanthropist – a most remarkable woman in her own right). I had heard about another book, more ‘for adults’, which several people I like had urged me to try. I have just finished reading Wise and Otherwise: A Salute to Life (revised edition, Penguin India, 2006, Rs. 150). Here is my take on the book. I loved reading it for a variety of reasons, to wit:

· Her great regard for teachers, her enthusiasm as a teacher, and her great sadness that so many teachers are a shame to their professions these days.
· Her insistence, from vivid personal experience (which tally very greatly with my own), that people can be cheats, liars and frauds, and disgustingly greedy and ill-mannered, regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
· …that so many supposedly educated adults like to show off their possessions and attainments so childishly, and even invent them when there’s not enough truth available.
· …that people in our country are so eager to take credit for others’ work, and so loth to give credit where it is due.
· Her assertion that decency and wisdom and courage are far more likely to be found among ‘backward’ people (including women, tribals, children, old men and the very poor) than among the elite and privileged.
· Her love of books, her wide education outside the confines of computer science, in which she has specialized, and her candid admission that programming is no big deal – any intelligent hardworker can pick up a new language in a few months’ time (p. 163)
· Her admiration for charitable people, especially those who give silently, and her joy at having been of some help to some people in great need or distress.
· Her horror about how pitifully women are very often treated in this country, her sadness about the fact that far too many women accept their plight instead of fighting, her praise for those who do fight and change things for themselves and others.
· Her disgust for average ‘society’ women, and her scorn for all mothers who think that mollycoddling their children and being completely blind to the dignity and needs of everybody outside the family is both normal and good.
· Her awareness that her great wealth is a blessing – because regardless of how talented you are and how hard you work, things outside your control (luck if you will) determine how wealthy and famous you will become.
· Her earnestness about wanting to believe that though things are in a bad shape in this country, ‘it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness’.

That’s twelve items: enough, I am sure, to show that I have begun to like and admire this woman hugely. As she has said herself about someone in her book, I pray that her tribe may increase, and that she may enjoy a very long, healthy, happy life full of the kind of activity she loves. Indeed, I cannot praise her any higher than by saying that I wish I had met and befriended one woman like her in my whole life.

Now that I guess I have earned the right to crib a bit, here goes:

· I find it hard to believe that she, with her level of education and experience, took so long (she claims twenty years) to find out some unpleasant or tragic-comic realities about people in the IT-sector in India. If she isn’t right in the heart of it, who is? How could she have been so blind and so naïve?
· That she had to live to be middle-aged, and go to Sweden physically, to find out that the Scandinavian countries are where women are most respected, safest, and most free. I have known that, merely by reading books, since I was a teenager.
· I wonder how she travels around incognito so easily (as she has claimed she does, again and again…). I am not even remotely as rich and famous as she is, yet I cannot go anywhere in the town where I live without drawing a lot of unwanted attention!
· While agreeing that the old have always complained about how the young are going to the dogs for as long as we can look back in history, I cannot agree with the glowing impression she has sought to convey about how well-informed, clever and wise today’s youngsters are through a conversation that she once supposedly had with her teenage son. Given the kind of extraordinary parents he has, I don’t find it impossible to admit that he might have a very wise head on his shoulders, but – drawing on my 27-year long experience as a teacher myself – I will assert that such a youngster is rare indeed. Far from talking the way he did about such a serious subject (‘what do you think are the three most important revolutions or ideas of the 20th century?’), most young people in their mid-teens whom I coach simply gape foolishly at me or try to make themselves invisible among their friends when I ask them to speak extempore on even such ‘easy’ subjects like ‘my favourite fictional hero’ (it happened this very evening).
· Ms. Murty sounds sunny enough at the beginning as befits the writer who is trying to make her readers think positive and feel good, but her mood grows darker as one ploughs through the book, for indeed, any sensitive, intelligent and caring human being cannot help feeling increasingly tired, frustrated and even sick of all the badness, crudeness, pettiness and shamelessness one encounters at every turn in life in contemporary India (and behind a façade of culture, too!) – no matter how hard and often she tries to remind herself and us that we must never grow blind to whatever little goodness there is. This is especially the lot of people who try to do some good to others merely because they feel compelled to do so. People envy you and curse you even as they greedily take whatever you can give them. In Madam Murty’s case, her great wealth, I suppose, serves both to attract a lot of such bad vibes as well as to cushion her from them somewhat: not being endowed with even a tiny fraction of her wealth, power and fame, I have perforce had to decide to put a rein on the good that I try to do the world, having been cheated and badmouthed by beneficiaries far too often, and constantly to remind myself that even if I do good to anybody, it must be purely for the good of my own soul, not with the remotest expectation of remembrance and gratitude (the reader may care to hark back to my two previous posts, 'Living Selfishly', and 'Living Selfishly, part two')!
· I can empathize very well when she sadly muses on how much vile trash she gets via snail mail and email every day. I wonder, though, why she self-flagellates: surely she can afford one secretary who will just see to it that no garbage reaches Madam’s eyes?
· Considering all the true but nasty things that she has said about a lot of ‘successful’ professional people, the page-three sort of people and politicians, I wonder how popular Madam Murty has made herself, even in the circles in which she and her husband perforce have to move! The book has sold 30,000 copies so far, says the blurb on the back: I wish it might sell a hundred times more. It should be made required reading for all teachers and politicians in this country, and for all parents who claim to be educated.

I could have added a few things, I suppose, but let it go. I have read the book closely, and I would urge all my readers to do the same. And then reflect on what India really needs to dream reasonably of becoming a great nation someday. Madam Murty, at least, is clear enough that merely a bit more of technology and capital and ‘management skills’ won’t do it.

Finally, a word of thanks to Subhanjan Sengupta for making the book available to me. It is nice old boys like him who keep open the mental doors and windows of a lazy home-bird like me.