Five
years ago I wrote a post about how my daughter had been invited over to
Amsterdam by the Anne Frank House organization for an all-expenses paid
international students’ conference. I still feel bitterly sorry that I had to
refuse permission – because I was too scared to let her travel absolutely
alone. The memory rankles. But there has been a wonderful sequel.
Gillian
Walnes Perry, co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK and its executive director
till 2016, got to hear about Urbi’s work as a peer-guide trainer and
contributor to the Anne Frank House newsletter, then read Urbi’s blogpost on
the subject of her experience, got in touch with her, and has mentioned her
extensively in her new (2018) book, The Legacy of Anne Frank. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the book
(Chapter 27, Anne Frank in the Indian Sub-continent, pp. 249-252), a signed
copy of which Ms. Perry has been kind enough to send over to us:
“Urbi
Chatterjee was another one of the peer educators trained in Kolkata. She
described reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a
Young Girl in primary school (at my behest, it goes without saying – SC),
and how she still sees the book as an important part of her childhood. However,
the Peer Guide training workshop gave
her the opportunity not only to learn more about one of her favourite
characters from literature, but also the larger, social, economic and political
situation of Anne’s era, ‘such an important and infamous time in history’. When
I read Urbi’s blog and saw that she wrote very much in the spirit of Anne
Frank, (my highlighting – SC) I emailed her to get to know more about
her experience of the Anne Frank project. She did not disappoint…. (and then
Ms. Perry goes on to quote extensively from my daughter’s blogpost, concluding
with the following lines – ) Am I alone in thinking that Urbi writes in her
blog in the spirit that Anne wrote her ‘blog’ of seventy years before? Anne,
described by her maths teacher Mr. Keesing as ‘an incorrigible chatterbox’ and
who by her own admission loved to chatter, and Ms. Urbi Chatterjee, whose own
childhood was so marked by Anne’s writing. I believe that these two girls, Miss
Chatterbox and Miss Chatterjee, living nearly a century apart and a world away,
could have become the firmest of friends.”
My
daughter is, to a very much larger than common extent, my lifelong and singleminded labour of love. And,
to a very much more than common extent, I am today a proud father. I brought
her up to believe from the bottom of her heart that getting a real and good
education is supremely important, that it is meant for things infinitely more
important than doing well in exams and getting decent jobs early in life – and
look! I have been totally vindicated, in the sense that not only has she done
excellently in academics right till her post-graduate course and got several of
the kind of jobs that tens of millions of parents in India are willing to kill
for, but also, at the age of 22, been mentioned in the same breath with a
world-renowned and revered figure. Maybe I have managed to be a real teacher to
no one except her, but I shall still sleep content.
