Rambling remembrances

 It is indeed lucky to be born in a house steaming with aroma of literature, English literature, Tamil literature, Sanskrit and French literatures. My father Mr R Venugopal and his mentor friend Prof C S Kamalapathi, both made my early wake up surroundings team with characters from Shakespeare, songs of Bharathi, Will Durant, Kamban and Valmiki and what not. New and newer fields were opening always in their talks and a growing boy is already thrilled with so many dimensions of thought. Otherwise how can I explain a high-school going half trousers wrestling with Hamlet's soliloquy? Or with Prince of Morocco in Merchant of Venice? Or the meeting of Gandhi and Bharathi and the take off of the evanescent event? Should the poet be studied straight from his words or through the commentaries, if available and authentic? - why should this question be of such importance to a street playing boy, that he chose to forgo his street-outings and sat engrossed when the argument was in full gears between his father and one poet of Trichy, Tiruloka Sitaram? Of course there was a downside of it. I lost my natural play period of growth. But who regrets when the payoff was and is immense? When you become too early conscious of great values, you can afford to appreciate little tragedies with regard to regular life.

Will Durant's Pleasures of Philosophy, I happened to read by myself only much later. But I have heard it read and had been reading it to be heard by my father many and more times. Ursus of Victor Hugo's Laughing Man was an apparition of my day dreaming walking across West Chitra Street. And to make it more surreal wolf was always a kind animal and naturally I found the series 'Onaikkottai vaaliban' attractive. And another catastrophe was around the corner, my interest suddenly in reading the literature of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Starting with little booklets I was fond of buying in temple shops, some books by Swami Chidbhavananda and later to go running and walking to the Rock Fort shop to buy bigger books from the Chennai Math.

Sometimes when I measured myself by others' standards, I used to fight with, mentally, Sri Ramakrishna, 'why me of all other boys? my regular life lost, nothing have I got to balance off the other side, neither here nor there?'. Only passing moods, otherwise who am I to measure? To understand what he has done for me I needed to mature a lot and now no regrets. But he is terrible; when he catches no escape! Why am I rambling? Perhaps you need to sometimes. Otherwise what is life for? Perhaps all those who have gone away from my life and from this world, they.. they may also be thinking about me just I like what I do about them? Is it not? Or is it not so? Who knows? 'The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. So memory fumes sometimes and make good the distant land and there lies all the charm. Because the fumes of memory are occult and words are apt dry woods to keep it going.

Srirangam Mohanarangan

***