Gurcharan Das looks back at his life and choices

I was born in undivided India, in what was known as Lyallpur (Faisalabad) named after the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab John Leyland. We were a middle class family and my father an engineer in the Indian government, involved in building the Bhakra Dam. When I was 13-years-old he was transferred to Washington DC to defend India’s interest in the canal water dispute—the Indus Waters Treaty. Thirteen was an important milestone in my life—it is when my pucca Punjabi childhood ended. More of that later. Before I entered the teenage my maternal grandfather was an important influence in my life. After the India-Pakistan partition my father who was an engineer with the Punjab government moved with his family to Shimla. Till my Washington days started, as I said, I had a pucca Punjabi childhood. I spent most of my childhood with my mother’s family, as often happens in India. My maternal grandfather was a lawyer and a prominent influence on my life. However, when I look back I see that my father, too, had left his imprint on my beliefs. He was a mystic—a mystic engineer if you will! Jokes apart, he was a deeply spiritual man. While my peers travelled to Missouri or Dalhousie for their summer holidays, we (my brother and I) headed with our parents to an ashram. My father and mother would engage in meditation whilst my brother and I would play cricket. I remember several afternoons spent rushing after a deuce ball to prevent it from going into the chamber where the satsang was being sung. Instead of rebelling against my father’s mysticism, I ended up with a fair amount of respect for people who are religious although I am not a religious person. I developed a deep respect for Hindu philosophy and religions. I believed that the mental experiments of seers and rishis—mentioned in the Upanishads—were mind boggling. At the end of the day, I am an agnostic. I have not given up on the possibility of god but I have seen very little evidence of it. I spend as much time thinking about God as an ordinary person does (which I realise is a small amount of time). I am really a humanist, I have been influenced, too, by the old fashioned liberals such as Ram Mohan Roy of Bengal. However, when you are abroad you start asking questions about your culture, tradition, history and religion. My interest in Sanskrit was a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that I was abroad and that I was an ambassador, of sorts, of my country; at least I felt that way sometimes. So when I received an opportunity to study in Harvard after school, I was interested to explore as many papers, subjects as I could. I started out at Harvard with the full intention to study engineering. I told as many people as I could that I would be an engineer, then moved very quickly to chemistry. Because one of the professors in the chemistry department was a gentleman called James Watson—a Nobel prize winner and the Watson of the Crick-Watson Helix duo. But one summer in India reintroduced me to the idea that I came from a poor country and I shifted to economics. Afterward, I discovered architecture. I took a course on comparative literature and also on Greek tragedy. I read Proust and Madame Bovary. The luxury of doing undergraduate studies in Harvard was that there was the luxury of doing as many papers as possible. My parents were rightfully driven crazy by my shifts and after a while I stopped telling them about what I was doing. My mother thought I had gone nuts. Finally my degree was in western philosophy and I wrote my thesis paper on Aristotle. I think I had a good liberal arts education—I read a lot not only the stuffs you were sup-posed to read but other stuff as well. I was very lucky to get the chance at Harvard and the scholarship. If you are an Indian then you are grounded in the philosophy a little bit—maybe it goes back to my mystic father. I was about to do a doctorate in philosophy when that summer I asked myself whether I wanted to inhabit that stratosphere of thought, divorced from the mundane realities of life. I came back home, unemployed at the age of 20. Every day someone would ask me to get a job and one day I landed a job working for a company that made Vicks Vaporub. Mid-career I revisited Harvard to get a business degree. The day I left college I knew I was going to write. In my twenties I did three plays. The first one won the Sultan Padamsee Prize of `10,000—a big deal to me! Theatre Group in Bombay performed it and Oxford published it. Meera—a mystical play about Meera Bai was produced in New York where my company had sent me. By then I had become a weekend writer—I would sell my product and write with equal earnestness. So, my third play was the longest running play by Yatrik. Sunit Tandon directed it and Bhaskar Ghose, Kusum Haider were also involved in it. In my thirties I wrote A Fine Family and then got too busy as I was also a CEO. But when my friends played golf, I wrote. If you really want something then you make the time— writing is as much a job as any other. Six o’clock in the morning I am writing at my desk and there I am in the study till noon. It is only after 2pm that I start my other life—after a swim, lunch and newspaper reading.