Published in Outlook, May 2001

THE MAGICIAN FROM MALGUDI

by HY Sharada Prasad

R.K. Narayan was born in Chennai and had his schooling there. And that is
where he returned to spend the last ten years of his life. But it is with
Mysore, where he lived for more than sixty years in between, and with
Malgudi, which sprang out of his imagination, that his name is linked.
Narayan could well have claimed, as Landor did about himself:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.


It is doubtful if Narayan would have achieved the quiet simplicity of his
personal life and the classical composure of his art if he had lived
anywhere else. As he wrote in one of his books, “Every time I go back to
Mysore, I feel thankful to Heaven for placing me there...The atmosphere is
placid and poetic and one is constantly tempted to enjoy the present,
setting aside all other thoughts.”

If, unlike other writers of his and subsequent generations, Narayan does not
wave an ideological flag or the banner of any literary theory or movement,
the reason is that his formative years had been spent in Mysore which was
away from the mainstream. As a young man he had no occasion to participate
in any political agitation. There was a cultural renaissance of sorts then
taking place in Karnataka but, as a Tamil who never mastered Kannada enough
to shake off his Tamil accent, he was not touched by it.

It is not only political passion, whether of the leftist or even the simple
nationalist variety, that is absent in Narayan. He also seems to eschew
every kind of ornament and rhetorical embellishment of style and technique.
He may have praised Mysore for its poetic atmosphere but he resolutely stuck
to prose and the virtues of straightforward narrative and set his face
against anything maudlin and mushy. In his writing there are no set pieces;
his English is nuanced and lithe but it is simple. There is no attempt to
impress readers with his mastery over idiom or his familiarity with the
polyphonic richness of English speech. He does not write for the scholar or
the critic. He writes for people who love to read a good story and he
invariably keeps faith with them. By staying away from the passing literary
fads and fashions he remains a writer of longer relevance.

But the most interesting aspect of Narayan’s work is the relationship
between him and the characters he creates. Some authors are like puppeteers.
The figures do not move unless the master moves them. Some others are like
stern stage directors, with the characters saying just what they have been
instructed or permitted to say. But the men and women (and children) in
Narayan’s novels and short stories seem to acquire a will of their own and
exercise freedom of action surprising the author himself. The guide Raju in
The Guide, Sampath in Mr Sampath, Margayya in The Financial Expert and even
the tiger in The Tiger of Malgudi carve out a little bit of immortality for
themselves.

And what about Malgudi? Alas, it cannot grow as it grew and changed in
Narayan’s lifetime. No new scamps and idlers and harried schoolmasters and
printers of signs and vendors of sweets will be born there. But Malgudi will
live as long as Hardy’s Wessex and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County will, as
mentioned by president K. R. Narayanan.

Like his style, Narayan did not draw people’s attention towards himself.
Among intimates he was forthcoming. If the group included people he was not
much acquainted with, he was reticent. But he was forthright in his views. I
remember one occasion when the old masters of Karnatic music were being
discussed. The talk turned to Tiger Varadachar. Someone waxed eloquent about
his profundity. Narayan cut him short. “Profound? He was just a humbug”, he
declared. The company fell into a hush for everyone there was aware that
Narayan’s knowledge of music was really vast. I have often wondered how it
was that he wrote no novel around a musician.


HY Sharada Prasad
Published in Outlooik, May 2001
================================================================
H. Y. Sharada Prasad
19 Maitri Apts., A - 3, Paschim Vihar, New Delhi 110 063
Phone : [11] 526-5439, hysp@lycos.com

Published in Asian Age, Wednesday Edit Page of 09 January 2002

PROBLEMS OF INDIAN SCIENCE
by HY Sharada Prasad

Some of our best brains have gone into science. The intellectual level of
scientists is incontestably higher than that of politicians. Yet how is it
that scientists are rarely in the news while politicians dominate newspaper
space and television time?

The reasons are many. First of all, there are more politicians than there
are scientists. Secondly, politicians’ capacity to do good or harm to our
everyday life is greater and more immediate, whereas it takes years for
scientists’ work to show results. Then again, the press is more partial to
politics, being itself a part of the political process. The media take note
of scientists only when a major discovery is announced or when a scientist
in a governmental laboratory is accused of graft or some other misdeed. Few
newspapers have special science reporters. The few that had them have
converted them into general-duty correspondents. As for television channels
they feel that when there is a channel dedicated to science (Discovery), why
should they exert themselves?

Last week some of the leading scientists of the country met in Lucknow for
the 89th session of the Indian Science Congress. Since Jawaharlal Nehru’s
time there has grown up a tradition of the annual sessions of this august
body being inaugurated by the Prime Minister. Nehru accepted the invitations
mainly to demonstrate government’s keen interest in science and also in the
hope that this interaction would give him ideas that might be useful to the
developmental process. Indira Gandhi also looked forward to meetings with
scientists. Several new scientific departments came into being during her
time. Some of the other Prime Ministers have attended the Science Congress
sessions more out of a sense of a traditional obligation than as an
opportunity for enlarging their own mental horizons. Even so the organisers
have persisted with the practice of having the conference inaugurated by the
Prime Minister, because that would give science a chance to get into the
news. But what the press does is to report the political luminary’s speech
and ignore the rest of the proceedings.

The same thing happened with the Lucknow conference this year. The
newspapers of 4 January reported Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s speech
highlighting his call to scientists to join the fight against terrorism. He
did not spell out how but he was topical. After all terrorism is the news
these days. Mr Vajpayee also dealt with several other important issues, such
as the importance of biochemical research in the country to enable us to
withstand the plans of western countries to take out patents. He also urged
industries in the private sector to invest more in R & D. Of the newspapers
I read, only The Indian Express mentioned these points but even that paper
gave “PM invokes science against terror” as the headline although the report
itself made no mention of the Prime Minister’s reference to terrorism. It is
significant that no newspaper cared to give the name of the general
president of the conference or the chosen theme or bothered about any
important paper presented there.

By the next day the conference had disappeared from the gaze of the press,
except for a report in one newspaper that Lucknow would be developed into a
biochemical city (just as Bangalore is an information technology city) and
another carrying the warning by Dr R. Chidambaram that too few of our
brighter young people were opting for science courses which were finding it
hard to compete with I.T. and management studies. The prospect of our
laboratories going empty is indeed worrisome, considering the fact that such
a large proportion of qualified young people are lured away by the developed
countries. This warning by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the
Government should be taken seriously, for our efforts to improve and enlarge
our performance in the food, energy and health sectors, as well as national
security, are so dependent on our own research.

Some years ago, if my memory serves me right, the scientific community was
concerned that the annual Science Congress sessions were becoming a ritual
and a formality rather than an occasion to throw up new ideas and devise new
forms of interdisciplinary collaboration for major research projects of
national importance. I don’t know what progress that initiative has made. At
the least the Science Congress should give some thought to the question of
improving its information set-up. We must be enabled to know more of the
discussions and conclusions.

In a recent interview, the publication of which coincided with the session
of the Science Congress, Professor M.G.K. Menon said that the main bane of
Indian science today was the stranglehold of the bureaucracy. Professor
Menon should know, for he has been both an eminent research scientist and a
science administrator. Most research in India is funded by government. The
scientists’ complaint is that the bureaucrats of the related departments
exercise too much control as they cannot get out of the belief that he who
pays the piper must call the tune. Instead of leaving the decisions to
scientists they are taken by the generalist civil servants who appoint
themselves to the various committees of an institution. This is largely
true. But we must not forget the fact that many scientists in governmental
positions themselves turn bureaucrats, and bad bureaucrats at that. I have
known of some scientists who have been accused of being arrogant,
unreasonable and totally unapproachable. The great C.V. Raman, when he
headed the Indian Institute of Science, was blamed for being too partial to
his own discipline, physics, and prejudiced against chemistry, which he used
to describe as the “dirty side of physics”. But it is a fact that the
average civil servant belonging to one of the central services is unable to
appreciate the concept of autonomy. Ministers appreciate it even less. The
civil servant cannot reconcile himself to the idea of decisions being taken
anywhere except his own ministry. He insists that since the report of the
autonomous organisation has to be submitted to Parliament through his
ministry, he is responsible for the organisation. He persuades his minister,
if persuasion were needed, to share the view. A few ministers think of
autonomous organisations as places where their protégés can be accommodated.
The whole question of the true meaning of autonomy deserves a national
debate. Any number of actual case studies should be available.

Meanwhile we must also find a solution to the point raised by Dr Chidambaram
of how to attract more young men and women to the science stream.

end

HY Sharada Prasad

Published in Asian Age, Wednesday Edit Page of 09 January 2002
================================================================
H. Y. Sharada Prasad
19 Maitri Apts., A - 3, Paschim Vihar, New Delhi 110 063
Phone : [11] 526-5439
hysp@lycos.com, hy@k.st, hy@r67.net, h@50g.com

Articles written by HY Sharada Prasad