The autumn leaves of profound wisdom, intensity and integrity

Of all the four seasons that nature has gifted us, autumn is the most magnificent manifestation of its bounty. Spring is youth, the time of birth and mirth and gay abandon, summer is the time of challenges and winter is the time for frozen hibernation. Autumn has it all, a myriad of colours, temperate weather, delicious fruits symbolising maturity and fecundity, tempered by a sense of foreboding about the impending dark winter.

The essays of scholar, teacher, journalist, thinker and writer Ravindran Nayar, in his collection, ‘Essaying Life’, are rooted in the autumn of his life, even though some of them were written years earlier. The cover design of the book itself tastefully proclaims this. The impact of the pandemic on all human beings, including the writer gives poignancy to the concluding chapters. The themes of the essays are divergent starting with startling observations about God and ending with his toothlessness, which inhibits even hearty laughter over human failures he sees around him.

In between, the essays deal with philosophy, art, literature, science, language, customs and manners, politics and society. It has very little autobiographical content, though the writer reveals his wisdom, erudition, and even likes and dislikes on cabbages and kings. The style is easy flowing, gentle and with a touch of humour and irony. As the Foreword writer, K. Jayakumar, a gifted man of letters himself, calls the book, "Wisdom of a Life Lived with Intensity and Integrity."

The best chapters of the book are those on literature, particularly the ones on his guru and mentor, K. Ayyappa Paniker. His studies on Paniker are deep and perceptive, enriched by his many conversations with the poet and the courage he had to translate Paniker into English. It must have been hard for him to translate a poet, who is adept in English and Malayalam, but it was Paniker himself who prompted him to do so and approved his work. Paniker did not assist in the translation because he believed that the poet should not come between the poems and the translator. The three essays on Paniker, written on different occasions, the most recent one in ‘Ayyappa Paniker Forever’, published by the Ayyappa Paniker Foundation on the poet’s 90th birthday, are among the best tributes paid to the architect of modernism in Malayalam poetry.

As my contemporary in the University College, Nayar shares my view that we were incapable of absorbing lessons of Ayyappa Paniker when we were his students. We knew he was great, but we could not grasp his profound observations and subtle humour. I discovered him much later in my conversations with him in different parts of the world. As Nayar observes,"Many of us were, in fact, seeing a poet in flesh and blood for the first time and the poet in Dr.Paniker had something special, the aura of a pioneer."

Paniker did not crack jokes to enliven the class as some others did, but in the course of his lecture, there would be a word or a phrase or a sentence, delivered with deadpan seriousness, that would bring out, very subtly, the irony of the situation. We missed most of his wry humour then, but we laugh loudly now when we recall them in tranquillity. Humour was pervasive in his writings, even when he was dealing with serious subjects.

Nayar mentions 'Gopika Dandakam', 'Janma Parinamam', 'Gotrayanam' and 'Hey Gagarin' as his personal favourites. I agree, but nothing was more popular than 'Moshtavu' and 'Pookaathirikkan Enikkavathille'. Nayar quotes Paniker's last word on poetry:
"Good poetry is a conversation,
Sometimes only one person speaks,
Sometimes both
That is the enduring characteristic of poetry."

The chapter 'The Ayyappa Paniker who eludes us' summarises Nayar's assessment of the poet when he asserts that most of us have not fully understood the real Ayyappa Paniker, the man behind his prodigious intellectual creativity. All descriptions about him, Nayar says, is like the story of six blind men describing an elephant. Each one of their descriptions was correct, but no one grasped the full picture.

The chapters on God reflect a cynicism he acquired after many years of absolute faith instilled in him by his mother and the society around him. Many people become intensely devotional as they grow older as they feel that it would be the best way to reserve a seat in heaven. Some depend on their wives to pray and do poojas so that they can hang on to their sarees as they go on their journey upwards. But Nayar became a Doubting Thomas as he grew older and began asking questions about the many contradictions in the myths and legends of innumerable Hindu gods he heard right from childhood. For instance, Krishna was his hero as a playful and naughty child and as a young adult, playing his flute to admiring and amorous Gopis around him. Krishna was his hero when he poured out his wisdom to Arjuna through Gita, but he was disillusioned by his stealth and outright dishonesty in later years, particularly at Kurukshetra. "Why, my Krishna, why all these? in the twilight years of my life, I am at a loss to understand," Nayar asks in a heartrending voice.

Nayar has similar questions as to why many Greek and Roman Gods are seen only in sculptures and operas, while in India, the Gods are there in all their glory and the believers are unwilling to treat stories about them merely as myths. "Is it because of the power of Gods, the resourcefulness of the priestly class or gullibility of the people? No idea, " He cannot quite understand the concept of heaven and its precise location and wonders whether the souls have their own cafeterias there to meet each other. He recounts with horror the practice of abandoning old people in holy places to be taken care of by the Gods.

Nayar finds the legal rigmarole surrounding the Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram and its enormous wealth strange and wonders what will happen to the unopened vaults which are considered hazardous to open. Unmindful of all the turmoil, this Mahakshetra stands upright, in all glory and quiet majesty, its presiding deity continuing his perpetual, blissful yoganidra, he says. He quotes, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, a devotee as saying, "Whatever happened in the past or happening now or going to happen in the future could only be as per the will of the Lord."

Nayar has included in the collection his review of my book on the Shashi Tharoor campaign, published in 2011. He quotes my prediction in the book that we had not heard the last of him despite the twists and turns of his political career in the last ten years. The book also has a chapter on Tharoor's habit of flaunting big words and challenges his immodest claim that he virtually invented the word, 'prepone'. Apparently, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the word was in vogue since the 16th century! He felt that Tharoor was deliberately using bombastic words to make an impression and hoped that he will see the futility of using grandiose terms and come up with simpler, reader-friendly words.

Many other chapters of the book reveal the author's vast interests and his keen observations on them. Given his training and profession as a journalist, he has commented extensively on developments in Kerala. He extols the virtues of Kerala, but also condemns the evils like killings, addiction to alcohol and drugs in chapters like 'Fine Art of Killing', 'Oh God, Give us our Daily Pint' 'The Evil That Men Do' and 'How to Survive the Great Indian Channel Debate', most of them sad and funny at the same time.

The last sections of the book are autobiographical, with warm thoughts of his family and friends (I am among them) and the geriatric blues of a man in the seventies. He is increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of death, but he hopes to go gracefully and therefore recites a Shiva Sloka every night, wondering whether the prayer will help him or not. But his readers will certainly thank him for his legacy so well described in his book in his inimitable style, with honesty, transparency and wish him many more years of his literary pursuit.

(The author is a former diplomat who writes on India's external relations and the Indian diaspora)