Now there is no need to get agitated because your child got it wrong. Obviously he doesn’t live in Bandra and hasn’t seen millions of adivasis from the above two States crawling all over Bandra in locust like formation.

It appears that over the years some dear and Rev. Sisters have found them jobs in hundreds of households as domestic help. They come in various shapes sizes and colors. But they are mostly young women and their mostly Catholic.

Opinions differ about them. They’re called rogues, scoundrels, immoral, thieves, lazy bums and dimwits. A few of them may fit these labels. After all they are uneducated village girls. Gold and cash lying around are a temptation. Holes in your expensive dress may be discovered after ironing. The dirty dog may land up in your washing machine and your wet slippers in your microwave oven.

But most of them do not deserve the labels I mentioned. They learn fast, are basically honest, extremely clean and very soon are able to produce a good masala “armlet” for breakfast” and some decent “cutlasses” for lunch

Statistics also reveal that liars, thieves, lazy and drunken bums, scoundrels and immoral characters among the sahibs and memsahibs out number the adivasi girls by 100 to 1.

Today I am writing about the time when the old girl had her kidney transplant. Her immunity was low and she was so fragile that we had to be very careful about infections and prevention of rejection of the transplanted kidney.

She was isolated in one bedroom and we had access to her with a masks on our faces and gloves on our hands.
Tina, our adivassi maid, was heaven sent. Heaven being the house of a friend of ours from where she came.

Thin, dark, strong, as clean as a pin, she worked hard, was thoroughly reliable and a splendidly quick learner. And when she laughed she tilted her head to one side as if the head was fixed on hinges

In the year of her retirement from the French Trade Commissioners Office the old girl couldn’t have asked for more.

So why does Tina want to go on a morcha? Well, that’s what she came to tell us one rainy Sunday morning.

She doesn’t know. She only knows that the Rev. Sisters have asked 1000 of them to assemble at the Azad maidan. Buses will be provided for the return journey.

Tina is scared. Will there be violence, she asks. I assure her that all will be well. I also tell her that I had once been a speaker at one such Morcha years ago. That brings a smile to her innocent face. I then explain to her all about the rights of domestic workers and the Industrial Disputes Act 1947. Her attitude to the ID act is the same as that of my German boss when I had explained it to him on his first arrival in India in 1970. Total dismay and disbelief !

But Tina doesn’t like any of the laws. The minimum wage figure would mean that her salary would be reduced. Did the phrase “job security” mean that she was not free to seek new employment at the drop of a hat or the drop a precious imported serving dish? What about tooth paste and soap, gold bangles for Christmas and sarees for New Year.?

I give her the bus fare, money for snacks and ask her to get answers to questions at the Morcha.

The old girl is angry, always a gentle anger, that I’ve shifted my Personnel Manager’s role from my office to the house. “You should not encourage the empowerment of domestic help. You never know what demands they will make” she says.

I know she’s not serious about what she’s saying. Nobody I know is more sympathetic to those who work for us as she is. Her nature is not to be demonstrative. I am over demonstrative and one such person is enough in a household of two.

Hours later Tina returns with none of her questions answered,

And regrettably, much more downtrodden than when she had left for Azad Maidan.

It seems it rained heavily and she was drenched to the skin looking as sad as a wet hen. The speeches were in Marathi. And to crown everything, a corrupt and nasty policemen had stopped the bus at Mahim Causeway and collected Rs 10 from each of the passengers before allowing them to proceed.

When they arrived in Bandra and got off the bus Tina had made a little speech as a result of which she was elected as the leader of the girls that had got off the bus,

She’s fascinated with Morchas. In fact she is planning a Morcha. Maybe more than a Morcha. One against The Rev. Sisters who wasted their holiday, and one against The Police Traffic Department

The old girl was all smiles. That’s the way to go she said.

Impotency after all is a subject which like death is a great leveler. May be Charlie Chaplin is an exception, but it comes to each one of us stealthily, leaving us confused and groping. It functions beyond politics and, all said and done, defies the reach of “Mandalization”

I can foresee busy husbands, on their way to office, cutting out this article with furtive and trembling hands for detailed study before bedtime.

I can also foresee wives serving their spouses their breakfast of eggs and bacon, or maybe puri bhaji, with the newspaper article right in their face, hoping it will turn out to be for them a mixture of 30+, ginseng and Chavanprash.

The fact is that of late, all kinds of people are getting involved in bringing my impotency to my attention in ways that would have driven a weaker soul to hanging himself from the ceiling fan. A major usefulness of ceiling fans which, strangely, ceiling fan manufacturers have not exploited in their marketing strategy.

Let me tell you something. There are stages in one’s impotency. You can use a scale of 0 to 10. At the peak of my career in Human Resources Management with a German organization my team was able to successfully influence the Vision and the thrust of the Organization in the direction of openness and transparency and fairness and justice and growth for all employees.

I don’t think the secretarial pool had an opportunity to identify my level of impotency but I gave myself a low score of 2 in the scale. The reason being that I was impotent only as far as being unable to convince the German Management to permit Managers to abandon suit and tie and be allowed to come to work dressed casually.

Let me move to an area where my inadequacy in the scale of 0 to 10 had almost reached 8. It is my membership, in fact a very active and committed membership, at national and international levels of the Catholic Church in India which I have loved so very dearly.

Not as the parish councilor, not as President of the All India Catholic Union, not as a member of the Asian bishops think tank and not even as a member of the Pope’s advisory Council for five years have I made any substantial progress in my goal in seeking transparency in matters that affect members of the church, in justice especially for women and dalits and a strong collaborative decision-making role for the laity.

Presence at seminars, conducting of countless training programs for the laity, religious and clergy including bishops and an assertive Christ driven presence in various committees and commissions have hardly created a dent. The impotency scale stuck at an all high figure of 8.

A rare moment of adequacy and power was the occasion when 150,000 people, cutting across many denominations, gathered together at the Azad maidan to protest the unjust withdrawal of recognition of St. John’s Medical College and the attempted introduction of the Tyagi Conversion Bill.

I tasted the sweet smell of success and the impotence scale hit 0.

I write this piece years after what I’ve described earlier

At my age, with the legacy of activism that has witnessed the election of our “citizens choice” as Municipal Corporator, the successful public interest litigation against hawkers, the retrieval of open spaces from greedy builders and corrupt politicians, the taking over of the entire sea-front along Bandra for providing amenities that cater both to the body and mind, for protecting open spaces at personal cost to activists and for the hope of flood free residential areas, I thought we had come a long way in regaining my potency the non-Viagra way.

On the contrary. A recent spate of scholarly, unprejudiced and well-meaning white papers from various sources has led me to believe that all hope is lost. That my “circle of control” has shrunk to the size of a little puddle inside a gigantic ocean of my “circle of concern”.

Well-intentioned people are asking whether India is in a coma. Is it a fact that the problem of corruption in India has assumed enormous and embarrassing proportions in recent years although it has been with us for decades?

Are we at a juncture in the life of the nation where tripping over the precipice cannot be ruled out?

If all the scams of the last five years are added up, are they are likely to rival and exceed the British colonial loot of about a trillion dollars?

India, says a commentator, is becoming a Banana Republic instead of an economic superpower. Special treatment is promised at the expense of the people. So Ms Mayawati who is the chief Minister of the most densely inhabited State is pacified when an intelligence probe involving millions of rupees is scrapped.

The multimillion rupee fodder scam by another Chief Minister wielding enormous power is put in cold storage. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presides over this kind of unparalleled loot.

European newspapers talk about, what every Indian knows, namely the shadowy financial deals of the Indian Cricket League. Some talk about some powerful entity in Poona who with his wife is operating a 1,000,000,000 Swiss account with the “sanction of the Indian regime”

Another story is about a former Chief Minister of Jharkhand who is reported to have funds in various tax havens that were partly used to buy mines in Liberia. There is no news about the progress in the inquiry of this case.

In the nastiest business scam in Indian records (Satyam) the government is accused of cleverly covering up the political aspects of the swindle predominately involving real estate.

Says an Austrian newspaper “If the Indian prime minister knows nothing about these scandals he is ignorant of the ground realities and does not deserve to be Prime Minister. If he does, is he a collaborator in the crime?

Says Mohan Murti in a brilliant piece written from Germany where he lives, “in the European mind the caricature of a typical Indian encompasses qualities of falsification, telling lies, being fraudulent, dishonest, corrupt, arrogant, boastful, speaking loudly and bothering others in public places. Not to mention spreading rumors and attempting to swindle if the slightest opportunity arises.”
Even if most of these are perceptions and only a fraction of these is true, I know I have lost control and my impotence meter has crossed the benchmark of 10 and crashed into 100 pieces.

The only consolation is that I am a powerless impotent. And I’m in the august company of the Indian Prime Minister the powerful impotent not to mention his remote controller the presiding deity of the Congress party…

What more could a person in the winter of his life ask for?

Godfrey Pereira, a journalist who once worked with Sunday magazine Kolkotta and India Today wrote a “no holds barred” piece on the Goanet chastising the laid-back Goans and literally tearing them to pieces in the same fashion as the mine owners are tearing up the rich Goan soil mindless of the destruction that is caused all around.

I have a suspicion that Godfrey Pereira is not an ex-journalist. He is an “agent provocateur”. He uses language that would not only make a sailor blush but the entire Indian Navy turn red like the setting sun on the beaches of Goa.

I like what Godfrey wrote. It is a wake-up call to all of us Goans even though he gets carried away and is not in touch with the present day reality of Goa. He also exaggerates the achievements of the East Indians in the Gorai- Uttan agitation in Mumbai.

About Goa he says “the Russians have been openly running drugs in Goa. Army deserters from Israel have put up signs in Goan clubs stating “No Indians allowed”.

“What have you, paowallahs been doing?” he asks “Eating last night’s curry for breakfast? Susegad.” Later he goes on to say that beach after beach is being decimated and not a “beep” from the bloody Goan men. In a colorful metaphor, as colorful as the cashew fruit, he asks “what happened to the cashew nuts between our legs? The Goan women don’t seem to care as long as the sons send money back home.”

In a voice full of anger he says “let somebody else revolt Bleddy pass the pao, men. Make sign of the cross, do the mando. It is God’s will.”

“At least the East Indians are trying. What have you Goans been doing while your hills are being raped and your fresh water resources plundered. What? Have another feni? Talk about how Aunty Mary’s daughter is now going out with that Bleddy German bugger? Or are you all fighting your sisters for property you don’t think they deserve.”

In contrast, Godfrey praises the East Indians: “In Mumbai
thousands of people from the ten villages of the Gorai-Uttan
belt have been fighting Essel World India’s “largest
amusement park” that’s coming up near Borivali. They are
protesting against the proposed Special Entertainment Zone
(SEZ) spread over 14,183 acres in the area. They know they
stand to lose the core of their culture if this happens and
so they are fighting this encroachment disguised as tourism.
At least The East Indians there are trying.”

Whether castigating Goans or praising East Indians, Godfrey has not done his home work as well as he should have.

The reality today is that Goans have, however slowly, turned into human rights activists. There are individuals like Sebastian Rodrigues, Venita Coelho, Padma Shri Norma Alvares. Hartman de Souza, Durgadas Gaonkar and many more.

There are Organizations like the renowned Doctor Oscar Rebello’s Goa Bachao Abiyan, Floriano Lobo’s Goa Su-Raj Party, Bailancho Sad, or the very recent Community activism through “Video Volunteers” at village level.

So many heroic individuals and groups, too many to name, not to mention journalists, artists, musicians, fashion designers you name it, who have actively supported most movements to save Goa from its multi-pronged perdition.

As well-known journalist Frederick Noronha writes “these stories hardly ever emerge. The meek of the earth shall not inherit the headlines, as Indira Gandhi once famously said. Their campaigns lack immediacy, is bereft of the drama, and above all, these are simple people!”

In any case, Godfrey needs to update himself although, as many Goa watchers would agree, the movements are not sustainable and are not able to dislodge the political people in power for the same reasons Indians everywhere are not able to do so on account of massive fissures among the common people. Namely caste, sub-caste and creed.

On the other hand Godfrey has no excuse in having got the Gorai Uttan agitation wrong.

I like the East Indians. I became their adopted son when I built a cottage at the far end of the Gorai beach near the lighthouse, almost having a private cove for myself and my family on weekends.

When thugs started to excavate the sand all along the beach and especially in front of my house, when cottages for love-birds were built on Customs owned property, when the bullock-cart owner, my friendly neighbor, was killed by Mumbai thugs forcibly grabbing property, when Essel World was built ,there was not a whimper from the people of Gorai. Not a “beep” as Godfrey would say.

I was advised to stop writing complaints and bringing my very senior police friends to have a look at what was happening. “Uncle” they said to me “you are here only on weekends. Your house is the furthest from the village. All they have to do one night is to burn it down”

Godfrey should know that the successful stalling of the special entertainment zone of 14,000 acres was not a movement of the East Indians alone.

In fact the whole community was splintered into two groups. One consisting of NCP politicians, East Indians of course, who wanted the SEZ. And the other group, also East Indians, who were against the SEZ.

This polarization would have cost the East Indians dearly if Medha Patkar who was fighting anti-SEZ battles along the coast had not extended it to Gorai-Uttan belt.

It became a national issue and was backed by Cardinal Oswald Gracias who issued a letter asking all parish priests and their flock to back the agitation.

The Bombay Catholic Sabha, the Christian Secular Forum, the news paper “Spotlight”, the powerful Vasai Human Rights Organization led by people like Fr Francis Britto and Marcus Dabre not to mention Abraham Mathai of the Minorities Commission all put their weight behind the agitation.

The beneficiaries are no doubt Indians in general and East Indians in particular. Do you hear me, Godfrey? In what you wrote, you did a good job either way.

Watching the disturbing details of cover-ups by clergy — even those at the highest levels — unfold during Holy Week, of all times, I can’t decide whether to cry out in despair or be ever-so-slightly optimistic that real changes may result from this tragedy. Most days, I feel both.

Tears come easily when I think of the abuse and the horrifying realization that some within the church clearly believe that protecting priests is more important than safeguarding children. When I think of Jesus suffering during Holy Week, it is the broken bodies of children, betrayed by their own religious leaders, that come to mind. They bear the crosses of the church’s abuses of power.

That said, I also weep because this latest sex scandal adds to our distrust of religious leadership in general and keeps us from remembering all the good work the Roman Catholic church does for the poor, hungry, and homeless, and has done for many decades. I am personally indebted to countless nuns and priests I’ve encountered over the years, who patiently taught me what it means to “stand with the least of these.”

Here I would like to quote extensively from a mail I’ve received from a very enlightened Protestant and President of a well-known seminary known for its commitment to progressive theology.

He talks about the great Roman Catholics of recent times. Thomas Merton and his outspoken protest of the Vietnam war. Dorothy Day and the Catholic worker movement that began during the depths of the Great Depression and which continues today to give care and comfort to the forsaken

He talks about the Catholic bishops who stood side by side with Caesar Chávez in his fight for justice among the farm workers in California. He remembers Archbishop Oscar Romero in the struggles of San Salvador for which he paid with his life. He applauds passionately the wonderful work done by priests, nuns and committed Catholic laypeople in the blighted neighborhoods across America (which are totally ignored by the State) who offered hope to the nearly hopeless through soup kitchens, schools and community centers.

For such people including women who are unjustly banned from priesthood that sorely needs them… the importance of justice making always exceeds the importance of collars and confessions, .he says.

Tragedies come and go; issues like labor and immigration burn bright in the public consciousness for a time and then are forgotten. Long after the rest of the world has moved on, however, often enough the Catholic Church alone continues to affirm economic justice, offer a moral critique of capitalism, and, most importantly, insist that a radical love of the powerless and marginalized is the truest form of faith.

All this, he says, at makes these latest reports of priests molesting children — and getting away with it — that much more upsetting. Will the faithful work done by so many Catholics be overshadowed by a church hierarchy that goes on the defensive when questioned about cover-ups and complicity? I pray this will not be the case. I also pray that the church might change for the better as a result of these terrible discoveries. And I pray, too, for the deep, ongoing grief — indeed, belly-wrenching lamentation — suffered by so many everyday Catholics who feel betrayed by their own leadership.

What more can I add to this wonderful opinion from a Protestant. I am terribly distressed and I feel I am drowning helplessly in a cesspool together with the Catholic Church which I have loved and for which I have, despite moments of anger and sadness and dissent, contributed the little that I could,

In the parish as a Councillor , as President of Bombay’s Council of the St Vincent de Paul Society, as National President of the All India Catholic Union, as a member for five years of the Pontifical Council for the laity and as a member of the Asian Bishop’s Think Tank,

More than that, the tons of articles I have written and the many protests I have led in defense of the Catholic Church.

In all this I’m also slightly relieved to think that we may finally have come to the end of the line. How much higher up can a scandal go, after all, than implicating those standing at the very top? And, I breathe a bit easier in anticipation that a chastening bright light may be about to shine into previously impenetrable realms of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

I am a also completely conscious that power corrupts everybody. Disregard for public accountability is dangerous, in any form. It is not only in politics that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. No church is immune. No person is.

The Catholicism I cherish — and the Catholicism that the world so desperately needs — is one that models an unguarded honesty about human failing, a gentleness of spirit that welcomes criticism, and a determination to hold all people, no matter their station, accountable for their actions.

This is the lesson of Holy Week, and it is one that Christians all — bishops, popes, and pew-sitters alike — would do well to consider carefully in the days ahead.

Finally, if the Holy Father is un-accountable, are we going to arrest the Holy Spirit ?

 I can publicly confess that I was not being sent up by my school for my matriculation examination because my marks in mathematics never reached two digit figures.

 It took me a long while to try to understand that leaving pages blank in the answer book and drawing pictures of the girls in my class who had good figures, was not the same as dealing with figures in the question paper.

 Even today, at a ripe old age when the word figure is uttered the only thing I can think of is 36-24-36.

My mother who was a very persuasive person especially when she carried her rosary in her hand, pleaded with the headmaster, to let me take the exam.

When the results were out and a crowd had gathered around the headmaster my requests to him to give me my results were brushed aside because obviously he was keen to find out how his best students had fared.

When the list of  subject toppers was being read he announced with horror in his eyes that I had broken the Bombay University record for the compulsory English paper by scoring over 80%, a common occurrence how but a phenomenon in those days. This information automatically led to the conclusion that I must have also passed the matriculation examination.

With the budget due in a few days, I realize that I should have schooled myself in the intricacies of at least arithmetic. I now realize that my ignorance of arithmetic and simple financial matters led to my family members taking advantage of my ignorance when the time came for budget allocation of the family.

Looking back, I realize that I could never understand how there were generous allocations for children’s pocket money, expensive clothing, chocolates and fancy kitchen gadgets which left no money at all for life-saving items like whiskey, rum and blood thinners like aspirin.

In later years I realized that my ignorance and elementary mathematics on financial matters was allowing my managers to take me for a ride (not to be mistaken for free Company transport) in an Organization that certainly gave high priority to people development but never at the cost of productivity.

If I have managed to survive it is because I am not afraid to ask for help or to admit to my boss that somebody from the lower rungs of my department had prepared my Budget, which my boss, said was one of the best budgets he has seen from any department.

 Although I started to notice that this low-rung financial wizard was suddenly being promoted on a regular basis I had enough self-esteem and feelings of security to realize that his wizardry had a narrow limitation and there was no threat of my being superseded.

As a result there are many things in life that I’ve never hesitated to delegate to people who I felt could do those things better than I could.

My children have always chastised me for never reading the instruction booklets of my Computer, my T.V. my Cell phone, or even some of the life-saving kitchen gadgets that we have. It has never caused me a problem because I always know whom to ask for assistance and I can be very generous in affirming such people and praising them for their skills.

After a time, I felt that my generous and helpful neighbours had started to wonder how my visits to enquire about their health always coincided with what restaurants call the ‘Happy Hour.’

I believe that the whole of Mumbai learnt to delegate and seek assistance on Budget matters by relying on the great expertise of the late Nani Phalkivala who used to dissect the Budget and go over it with a magnifying lens and even discovering a great amount of humor in the fine print. This was his annual offering free of cost to the whole of Mumbai and especially to ‘Budget Dummies’ like me.

When the Budget is presented in the Lok Sabha, at the time of writing this piece, I will as usual watch it on T.V. knowing fully well that I will not understand any of the figures but happy at the thought of watching the antics of other people in the Lok Sabha, who also don’t understand the Budget but make a noise all the same.

My special attention will be riveted on scamsters who are experts on the Budget and its loopholes, most of whom should have been sitting behind prison bars, instead of occupying seats in the sacrosanct premises of the august House.

I also wait with bated breath for the one thing I understand namely the allocation under the Head ‘Personal Income Tax’, as a result of which I shall become poorer than I have been in the previous year.

My written recommendation to every single Finance Minister that the allocation should find its place under the Head, ‘Highway Robbery’, has obviously fallen on deaf ears.

Yet, I am specially glued to the T.V. for those beautiful moments when the slime and dirt of politics is set aside, however temporarily, and the session is raised to an uplifting moment with an outpouring of poetry, from the verses of Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to the rare breed of politician cum poets like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and V.P. Singhji.

It is my dream that in the next Budget Session, the poetry will be accompanied with the soothing sounds of Sufi music.

Having participated in competitive sports till the age of 40, some cricket and a great deal of hockey, I carry broken fingers and damaged cartilages and ligaments as my old age baggage, and I have serious reservations about the state of these sports in my country.

More than 33 percent I can assure you.

I have reservations about the mockery called IPL.

Utterly shocked veteran cricketers and knowledgeable spectators and fanatic followers of Test cricket and even One Day cricket express their reservations about IPL’s “tamasha” by calling it “gilli danda”

I have more than 33 percentage reservations about a beautiful gentleman’s game which had courtesy and style and patiently honed skills converted into crass entertainment involving blind aggressiveness, grooming youngsters for membership of gangs specializing in hit and run techniques.

I have worse reservations about Indian Hockey. Does the body that controls hockey have a vision or even a game plan except to move downhill to the bottom position of the international hockey rankings?

I see no forwards and halves. Only defenders and they are all in the Committee not on the ground. They spend their entire first half making atrocious and biased decisions and the second half in defending them unsuccessfully scoring what is known as self goals. Or self-Gills.

M S Gill the Minister for Sports threatens but is unable to get KPS Gill the Head of the Indian Hockey federation to quit because KPS wants 100 percent reservation of the post for himself for life time.

And if we also have 100 percentage reservations about Joythikumaran Secretary of the same Federation, caught on camera taking a bribe to select a player for Team India, calculation of percentages will reveal that our reservations do not need a separate Bill but an urgent inclusion as an addenda to Pranab Mukerjee’s Finance Bill.

All said and done my greatest reservation is about the Bill for Reservation of 33 % seats for women in Parliament and Assemblies.

Fr Jerome D’Souza and other Christian members of the Constituent Assembly refused reservations of seats because they wanted Christians to retain their dignity and self esteem and participate fully and equally with other communities in the governance of a great, secular democracy.

Unlike in Pakistan where Christians have reservations but no voice or power, Christians, thank you, are doing very well in Bharat that is India.

Women in India do not need reservations. Already,the most powerful people in this country are women and thank God for it.

First, there is the very mixed pot of Sonia, Jayalalita and Mayawati. Try to dislodge them from their positions of power and the country will experience a tsunami from which it will never recover.

Look around. There are powerful women in politics, in industry, in business, in the bureaucracy, in the media, in every kind of NGO and citizen initiative.
You name it. They are giving our incompetent men a hard time.

And so we have a male plot to allow only 33% of seats in legislative bodies knowing that the writing on the wall says that many more than a measly percentage of women are ready or will be ready to govern the country and control other centres of power if we just let them be. Just let them be, for God’s sake.

They need empowerment not reservations. Deliver them from the clutches of a society that treats them as objects. Deliver them from a society that day after day, violates the sanctity of their womanhood in thousands of villages where they are in bonded slavery to their men folk requiring ptheir permission to even mensurate. Deliver them through the empowerment of education, through freedom where they can speak up and get justice and a even playing field, deliver them from outdated (for women only) cultural practices and watch them fly.

Keep the 33 % reservations for men and there will be fewer fisticuffs, microphone flinging, less walk-outs and more dignity in places where dignified behaviour is constitutionally mandatory.

Writers experiencing loss and unbearable grief.

I am haunted by a hundred questions. Is it too early to write this? Is it too late?

Should I write about it at all? Should I share with my readers something that is so

private and personal ? The triumphant return of my old girl to a place of eternal

peace and serenity in the midst of the silence of green pastures; broken only by the

sound of running brooks?

I know only one thing with certainty. I must write or I will die!

Are you listening to me, my loved one?

In your passing on, God gave me two precious gifts. The gift of “never

living in denial” and the gift “of always remembering all that is good and beautiful

in other people”

Hey. come to think of it, you must have asked the Lord to transfer your gift to me.

You knew I would need it. You had that great ability to anticipate the needs of

others and to do something about it.

I walk through the rooms of this beautiful house like a tenant. Everything we have,

we owned jointly. Today you own the house by your absence. How we fought over

every purchase we made. The Rajastani dowry chest that became a bar, the carved

ivory figure of Jesus on the cross that you loved so much, the “dwarpas,” wooden

sentinels of temples that became our lamp stands. I touch them in passing and

each time the memory makes me “whole”, knowing always, that the beauty of our

home was never ever in its contents but your magical, caring, effervescent and

truly spiritual presence.

I remember a line I wrote for you in my newspaper column on our 50th Wedding

Anniversary. It was a description of seeing you standing in a motley group of young

Goans at the Saligao Ball.

”She stood there in her yellow dress, a wild flower growing astonishingly in a field

of cacti, bramble bush and wilted shrubs”

You had grace and presence which always stood out as, I remember, it did on

India’s Republic day function in the year 1961.

We were standing at the entrance of the Indian Embassy in Paris welcoming our

guests. Our Ambassador Nawab Ali Yavar Jung and ten of us, wives included, who

served as diplomats. You, my dear, stood out for more reasons than one. Not only

for the grace with which you spoke fluent French but also because you were the

only one dressed in an elegantly draped sari. The other wives were all non Indians.

The guests literally swooned over you.

I remember our first date. Blue Air Force uniform with gold stripes on my sleeve I

rode up on my motor bike to the YWCA where you were studying to be an

Executive Secretary.

We went to Leopold Café. We have had many explosive situations in our lives but

that was years and years before 26/11. In 1956 Leopold Cafe provided privacy for

young lovers. Not targets for terrorists.

It had those little cabins with half swinging doors like bikinis hiding the essential. If

you recall, we only talked and joked and laughed and every time you laughed the

waiter came rushing in with a dirty towel on his shoulder as if in response to the

ringing of some distant temple bell. Such was your magic.

Alas, when the bill for “falooda” and “khara” biscuits arrived I found I was short of

money. We stopped laughing and you quietly paid the bill as you have done during

most of our married life.

On our way back home my jaded motor-cycle stopped dead thrice and you had to

push it to get it going. When it stopped a fourth time you turned round and said”

Is this what I am going to do all my life?” “Yes” I replied “will you marry me?”

You jumped in the air like a ballet dancer and started to scream. The crowd

gathered on the pavement soon realized what was happening and cheerfully pushed

the bike right up to the door of your house and waved us a fond farewell.

If today I live “fully alive” reborn on beautiful memories of you, it is because all

those whose lives you touched, hundreds of them who overflowed on to the roads

at your funeral service, remember you with joy.

Let me tell you about something unexpected that happened the other day. A kindly

Bishop came to visit me. Anjali our daughter who had come down from London for

a whole month was still around.

“I was a contemporary of your mother” he said to Anjali. “She was the most

beautiful girl who came to the Mahim Gymkhana. We Mahim boys competed for her

attention and were very upset when we heard that she was getting married to

much older guy from Dharwad”.

“Dad was 27 and Mama was 20”, Anjali said authoritatively”

“Would you really mind if I saw the Wedding album?” the Bishop said sounding like

a helpful yet curious Income Tax officer on a verification visit.

For the next half an hour he was still looking at the pictures his face full of joy on

discovering that the lovely girl from his gang had married a dashing young officer in

a blue and gold uniform of the Indian Air Force, never mind his “unda-gunda” accent.

“What a nice gold crown Mama is wearing” said Anjali. I was about to open my

foolish mouth and tell her it was made of cardboard, but better counsel prevailed.

I realized that as usual you would have liked to keep your simplicity and austerity

to yourself.

People whom I do not even know wrote how you traveled with them from Chembur

to Victoria Terminus. Some one wrote that you had gifted her a German sewing

machine and two French copper-base pans which she is still using in the USA.

Colleagues from your office wrote that if you happened not to turn up for work,

there was no noise of laughter in the office.

As I read slowly, one by one, the eulogies piled up on my desk, I realize how many

people of all walks of life loved you dearly.

Did I do you justice, old girl? In my proverbial inadequacy, did I care for you enough ?

God help me. It is far too late to ask.

I feel that pain now, right here as I write

My mother saved Francis for long years with her prayers especially during his courageous and life threatening march to liberate Goa.

My Dad saved him and made him strong by not allowing “grace marks” to condone his academic failure although he was Under Secretary Education at the time Francis appeared for his Matriculation exam.

Ada, my sister saved him by harnessing all the power of her faith and converting it into beautifully candid and frank letters that she alone could write.

Armida my youngest sister who was Dean of Sion Hospital  saved him by her warm and competent presence in his every illness, big or small.

Louis, Ignatius and Lenny my brothers were there for him materially some rare times, siblingly most of the time.

And I the eldest, the “morgado” the loved one of the family?

Let me take you to a time when as kids we found ourselves playing on the edge of the river at “Vitagem”, a pier off the Mandovi river in our ancestral island village in Goa.

 We had come to watch the arrival of the “gazolina”, the deisel engine driven boat that made its daily trip to Panjim and back.

Francis dared the river as he dared everything in life that were obstacles to his road less traveled on his journey of self discovery.

He dared and he slipped and he fell into the swirling waters of the Mandovi. As he was being carried away I grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled him ashore.

Many years later, differences of opinion led to a slanging match between Francis and me which was never resolved and ended quickly when my mother started the family rosary earlier than usual.

He asked me later, very seriously, whether I had ever regretted saving his life, denying the great Goan river its genuine victim?

How could I? Could I deny the family, the community and the nation he so loved, years and years of stellar and unaccountable contribution?

Could I let a mere river take him away when the waters of the Arabian sea were inadequate to embrace him and  the mountains of the Sayadiri range could not prevent him from planting the Indian flag on the soil of Portugese governed Goa ?

Francis was and will always remain an enigma. His towering scholarship was at times so childlike. His brilliance was often misunderstood for stubbornness and for inflexibility by pygmy brothers like me who found him uncompromising in his goals and yet gentle when he tried hard to “suffer fools gladly”

Could I have been able to deny his community and his beloved mother land a maverick genius who gave a new meaning and purpose to sensitivity training and the holistic development of people?

A dreamer of his own complex dreams and a ruthless and uncanny interpreter of the dreams of hundreds of disciples who grew tall and strong and hoped in their great love for him that his “guruship” would never end

They were right. His reluctant guruship will never end.

As we watch in utter amazement, two yellow butterflies settle on two sides of his bier. I hear one say “What manner of men are these who see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower?”

“I will tell you” says the other butterfly.

“The poet Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy wrote about them”

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

I have met several Gandhis in my life. Some of them I have tried hard to forget. One was a class mate and school bully. Imagine us calling him Gandhi. The boys called him  G****u, an expletive not to be found in the dictionary. Not even in the community developed encyclopedia, “Wikipedia”

Ironically many years later he came to see me after attending one of my  Management training  programmes. He had become mild mannered and was struggling to do well in his career as a Manager in a Pharmaceutical Company.

In some of the exercises we conducted I noticed that he was reluctant to push his point of view. He also had a high score on submissiveness.

Over a cup of coffee we chatted and laughed about our days at school. He confessed that he had lost two well paid jobs. He had realized that could not get away with bullying people at work.

In sessions the next day he was fascinated with negotiations skills. He was able to work out some “win-win” results in the simulated games we played.

He said Nelson Mandela was his role model.

Today we hear of the heated discussions taking place loudly and quietly in private and public arenas about the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi versus the other Gandhy, Kobad Ghandy from Doon School, St Xavier’s College, and a Chartered Accountant from London.

Most remarkably but not surprisingly the  discussion while it is subdued amongst  intellectuals, the elite, the leftists and human rights advocates, is loud and clear and unambiguous in the public domain of Government Departments amongst bureaucrats and Ministers including our mild mannered and revered Prime Minister.

It appears that our Government has informed its citizens that it will crush the Naxalites once and for all using all the force at its command. The plan is believed to be called “Operation Green Hunt” replacing the old and much discredited “Salwa Judum” where innocent tribals were caught between the fury of the Naxals and the fury of the State.

My information comes from news on television, the printed media and, most enlightingly, from a brilliant piece in the “Tehelka” by Shoma Chaudhury.

The news is frightening for a people already experiencing inexplicable levels and weird manifestations of violence.

I am traveling by train and sleeping on a lower berth in a coupe of four berths. All occupied. It is 11pm and the guy above me has put on the lights and is reading the news paper. The Army officer in the other upper berth requests the newspaper reader to put off the lights. He makes the request three times, the decibel level of his parade ground voice increasing with each request.

When the news paper reader does not respond the Army Officer pulls out his pistol and shatters the lights with a well aimed shot. Every one pulls their blankets over their heads and quickly goes to sleep.

The incident is not mentioned even when we reach our destination and go our individual ways as if shattering railway lights with a gun is expected behaviour and is recommended in some clause of our out-dated Railway manuals.

In Andhra an elected representative of the people finds he has not been invited to an inauguration of a project in his constituency and arrives with his followers and destroys the stone plaque with inauguration details and is feted by his constituency.

Relatives of patients dying at a hospital go on a rampage and destroy the place to which they had come for healing. Passengers are regularly thrown out of trains in the fight for space just as the occupation of road space by timid looking car drivers and muscle flaunting bikers lead to sudden death.

Fortunately we hear today that the Government is listening to saner voices. Influential people in the bureaucracy, the Armed Forces, their own political Party members and opinion Makers in civic life. Such people have learnt from past errors in Jammu and Kashmir, in Assam, in Manipur and from the lessons of other nations and from what they are watching in Pakistan.

The horror of civil war, the reality of understanding that we should not be fighting for territory but for the minds and hearts of disaffected people of our own country, our brothers and sisters living on the edge of despair because even a microscopic percentage of all the socio economic benefits of a prosperous India has not reached them all these many years.

Many years ago I had close encounters with another Gandhi. Rajmohan Gandhi. A grandson of the Mahatma. He was involved with the “Moral Rearmament movement” and I was invited to speak on my days as a member of the Laity Council of Pope John Paul 11, a truly great Gandhian.

In my speech I mentioned a special encounter with the Holy Father. He was receiving a delegation of young people from a South American country governed by a ruthless military dictator.

They told him of sisters and mothers raped, of male family members who had just disappeared, of writers, journalists tortured and maimed for life.

Of banned political parties and dissident student voices crushed under the boots of a ruthless Army. Of years of turning the other cheek, of internal and international attempts at dialogue all in vain.

Then they asked. “Holy Father, is violence and an armed revolution the only answer, now?”

Pope John Paul 11 knelt down, folded his hands in prayer and I could see that he was crying. In voice filled with emotion he replied. “What would Jesus have done in your place?”

Mahatma Gandhi may have replied “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” His context, though, was Capital punishment.

The Jet Airways strike hogged the headlines for over a week. So many questions. Should pilots be allowed to form a Union? Should pilots call a strike and create chaos for thousands of commuters who are exercising their legitimate right to fly from point A to point B for reasons that could even be urgent and compassionate? Can pilots go on mass sick leave?

No two people will agree on the answers. Our antiquated Labour laws permit “workmen” to form a Trade Union and manage their relationship under the “Industrials Disputes Act”

Broadly speaking a “workman” is an employee who is not accountable for the work of others except his own. He does not sanction anything and has no authority to make decisions as is the case of Supervisors and Managers.

Strangely, years and years ago, the Air India’s Pilots Guild was recognized as a Union. But then Air India was a public sector organization and Governmental appeasement was a well entrenched Management style of functioning.

As is well known Air India had to pay a heavy price for this bringing a truly great Maharaja flying on a magic carpet crashing, almost dying and needing bailouts from tax payers money.

In those days I used to write a column called “By George” for the Indian Express and later for “Midday”. I wrote a piece called “Pontius Pilot” in which

I also mentioned the pre-arrival scene of all the “goodies” including miniature bottles of alcohol being loaded into the bags of the crew, some part for family members but mostly for sale. The article was illustrated by Mario Miranda and depicted a terribly obese pilot with a big paunch struggling to get into the narrow door of his cabin.

Not surprisingly I received threats from members of the Guild and the Cabin Crew’s Association saying that if I ever dared to travel by Air India I would be chopped to pieces and served as mince-meat to the passengers.

Non vegetarian passengers, I presume. With a the contents of a raw egg to top it, making it into a French delicacy called “steak tartare”

If I did not ever travel by Air India it was not because Lufthansa offered discounts to German Hoechst Pharmaceuticals for whom I worked and Al Italia almost gave away tickets to members of the various Pontifical Councils of the Vatican, but because Air India became the most unreliable Airline in the world !

Let me say categorically that I am not against trade unions. I have worked with them successfully for 25 years including with the late Dr Dutta Samant. Hoechst Pharmaceuticals whose Human Resources I managed did not have a single day’s work stoppage, including before my time and after it if I may say, honestly and modestly.

The scenario has changed drastically. Globalization, market driven economies, the demise of internationally powerful unions, and recently one of the most frightening recessions in history.

By no stretch of imagination, at least today, would a pilot earning an astronomical salary and having leadership roles in critical decision making for the comfort, safety and security of his passengers and crew be defined as a “workman” and therefore entitled to be a member of a “trade union”

But I strongly advocate that all groups vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of Management decisions, especially in the area of fairness and justice, should band together to be able be a strong, collaborative stakeholder and partner in the Organisation.

Mr. Goyal who manages his power equations with so many stake holders so admirably would surely know that his Pilots and everyone of his Managers are vital stakeholders and sharing power with them must become his top priority.

In the final analysis all relationships are governed by the sharing of power.

When a party loses power a vacuum is created. The powerless seek the help of outsiders (non stakeholders) to restore the balance or it uses they use unconstitutional means, including violence, to restore parity. No one is more dangerous than a powerless person.

Your son or daughter, ill-treated or neglected, run away from home in an act of such powerfulness that you have to shamefully advertise “Come back, all is forgiven” or “Mother serious, return at once”

Humiliate your wife and wonder why she is having an affair with your neighbour.

Remember the frail, old lady who was changing the tyre of her car when the jack collapsed? She was pinned under the car on a lonely road. Utterly powerless she called up all the energy she had and with one mighty heave got out form under the car.

Remember the teenager villager confronted by a tiger in the forest? Totally powerless, with his back to the wall and the tiger with its paws on his chest, the villager summoned unknown resources of strength and choked the tiger to death.

Think of our Naxalites. Think of the Palestians deprived of their Statehood and the land that rightfully belongs to them

Nothing generates violence as much as powerlessness

Powerlessness corrupts and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely!!