Anne Frank and my daughter

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.