What it takes to live a consequential life: Do good, love truly and keep trying

To negotiate with Sardar Patel the terms of equal coexistence with India, a three-member delegation was sent by the King of Sarangarh to Delhi that year. My Dada was one of the three. He would narrate this story frequently, with amusement about the delegation’s own delusions of grandeur.

The three of them waited in Delhi for 14 days. Forget the Sardar, even his secretary did not give them an audience. In those epochal days, these tiny states were simply sucked into India in the wake of conflicts and bargains with bigger states like Travancore, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Kashmir.

In the 1980s, when I first heard the story, it was obvious to me that the idea of an independent Sarangarh was ridiculous and its union with India was inevitable. How could a territory about 35km in width and 40km in length in the middle of India imagine independence?

That would make my Dada laugh. It was only after I lost him in 2005 that it occurred to me that they could have done nothing else. When tectonic plates collide and shift in an earthquake, what else is there to do but try and protect your own? Fated to fail, he still tried. But then he could see himself as a speck in the storm of history and laugh at the speck’s audacity to try changing its course.

He was equally amused by the memory of smoking 60 bidis each of those 14 days as he waited with other members of the delegation for an audience with Independent India’s first home minister.

My Dada was amused by most things. He was a chain smoker of bidis—till one day in 1950. That day, he had asked my father, then an 11-year-old boy, to buy him some bidis. My father returned, holding the bidis between two sticks. Dada asked him why he was holding them between sticks. “Bidis are dirty,” his son replied. “Ah, so you feel so,” he said. “Okay, get me a handful of peppermint,” he told his son.

With peppermints in his hand, he threw away the bidis, popping one into his mouth whenever he had the urge to smoke. He never touched a bidi again, nor tobacco in any other form, and that was that.

In 1977, a consequential year for many reasons, he came to stay with us in Delhi during the vacation period of the court in Sarangarh where he practised as a lawyer. We lived in multi-storeyed flats in Moti Bagh.

Every morning, he would have lunch at 10am and go and sit at the Moti Bagh traffic signal under a tree on the pavement. I was 9 years old then and went with him a couple of times, but ran back home bored. What was he doing there for two hours everyday, just sitting and watching the traffic and pedestrians and vendors? As I grew older, it dawned on me that what I saw as traffic, he had the sight to see as the ebb and flow of life.

He failed Class 7 and dropped out of school. He was not doing much in life in the early 1930s, when a petty criminal asked him if he would argue his case in court. “But I am not a lawyer,” my Dada said. “And I don’t have any money,” the alleged chicken-thief said. So, my Dada went to court and argued. He won the case.

By the early 1940s, he became the go-to lawyer in the court of Sarangarh. His gift of penetrating logic was intertwined with deep scholarship of the law. He was an autodidact, teaching himself law and Indian philosophy. It must have been his lawyerly abilities that prompted the king to send him to argue with that other lawyer—Sardar Patel.

Clients would decide what they could pay—that was his professional principle. So, he was always flooded with cases of the poor and forever short on money. In the early 1950s, the Madhya Pradesh government gave him a special licence to practise law, despite his having no law degree. It was a mere formality to acknowledge what was going on anyhow, but it was necessary as newly independent India was setting up its systems.

He practised law till he died at the age of 95. In his last two decades, the court of Sarangarh would rise when my Dada, a lawyer, entered.

Together we would be walking side-by-side down the slope of Char Imli in Bhopal, and he would suddenly swivel his slightly built frame to place himself right in front of me. He felt that the abstruse difference between Sankara’s and Madhava’s philosophy that he was trying to explain could not be done without looking me in the eye; the eyes of an 11-year-old. But that is the way he treated me—as his equal. That is how he treated everyone—from Panchoo the dhaba cook and Ibrahim the mechanic to the beggar at a railway station. He dealt directly with each human—not their caste, creed, age, gender or status.

He wrote us a postcard everyday from the early-1970s till the mid-1990s, when intercity calling became affordable and his house got a phone. Usually with just a single handwritten line, those yellow cards would arrive unfailingly in the mail. Everyday for 25 years.

I, an obsessive hoarder of memories, have not a single of those postcards. But his gaze has etched this into me—no time, place or status can stop us from leading a consequential life, so long as we try to do good and love truly.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.