Laxman's age

 I  am puzzled by the media reporting that RK Laxman was born in 1921 and died aged 93/94.  I attribute this to laziness and using Wikipedia as a source.  (Encyclopedia Brit says 1924, as did The Hindu, whose byline initially  had (1924-2015), but it was changed to be consistent with the obit written by Meena Menon).

Laxman was one of my father's close friends from their teenage days in Mysore, neighbours in fact in Laxmipuram.   Laxman was a year below my father in college.   Keeping in touch over the years, they  were part of a   "gang of four" close college friends:  Kittu (the well-known filmmaker MV Krishnaswamy, b August 1923), TS Satyan (the famous photographer, b Dec 1923), Shouri (HY Sharada Prasad, b April 1924) and Laxman (b Oct 1924) -- laugh a minute conversations, often quite quite wicked about their friends and others. 

For some reason, perhaps as late as 2011, Laxman's family seems to have told a journalist that he was actually born in 1921, which makes little sense in relation to the timeline of his classmates' lives.

On the Death of Steve Jobs 2011-10-05

I was really tired, and didn’t think I had anything particularly profound to say about Steve Jobs, so I turned down a request to appear on TV to speak about him.   There was this media hype and over-the-top coverage here in India too, and I was in no mood to be party to it.  However,  I was rather amused by this great Indian middle-class need to identify in some way with  this genius who combined good taste, innovation and commercial success to an extraordinary degree  --- the CEO of the second largest company in the world, someone whose rise from the depths of commercial failure to the pinnacle of glory inspired a veritable fan following of millions.  It is perhaps some deep-seated desire in our elite to identify with success, to announce that we too are part of the world elite, that we share this experience, that some of the stardust of celebrity will rub off on us.  But watching the various shows,  I was quite disappointed since there wasn’t anything insightful in what the talking heads and the over-eager anchors had to say.    So I felt that I should perhaps put down what I might have said had I been a talking head¹.   (Some print articles have begun to appear that make more insightful points, relevant to India and to how Apple products are affecting lives.²) 

 

Steve Jobs, who can best be described as a digital impresario, certainly was charisma personified. I greatly admired (it is difficult to use the past tense, since his work lives on) his work, for it brought an elegance and a simplicity to technology. Computer technology naturally tends to manifest itself in complexity, often making complexity its badge of honour.    In the mid-late eighties, I wrote a handful of research papers during my graduate school years on a Macintosh, and greatly appreciated the intuitive interface and ease with which a newbie could get started on the machine.  I have always held that a device is well designed if you do not need a user manual to get started.   Most consumer electronic products fail on that count. I currently work on two iMacs, a Mac mini, a MacBook, having put to pasture an earlier Mac laptop, not counting an iPad on the way, and have several iPods in the house.  I abandoned the PC running the politically correct Ubuntu because of the needless complexity in installing software, which happens ^“out of a box” on an iMac, thanks to Jobs’s understanding that users will willingly install trusted software if the system is end-to-end secure.  And I had never really warmed to the lax security and bewilderingly crowded user interface of the Microsoft stable.  So count me in as an Apple addict even if I don’t sport an iPhone³.

 

Steve Jobs presented a refreshing alternative to geeky, clunky computing technology.   Yes, the man was a genius.  But let us make it clear that he wasn’t a Leonardo, the kind of polymath who comes once a millennium, an artist, scientist, inventor, and visionary whose ideas were centuries ahead of their time.  Nor was he an Edison, the other personality to whom he was being likened.  Edison’s inventions went way beyond the light bulb, extending to the entire system of electricity generation, distribution, standardisation and consumption.  All this apart from his phonographs, cameras, projectors and a thousand other inventions.  Jobs’s innovations are unlikely to affect us on such a grand scale a hundred years later.  Nor is it even accurate to say that he affected more people with his technological innovations than anyone else in our times.  Such accolades can only be given to the scientists who have multiplied our food production, through the use of nitrogen fertiliser or hybrid crops, or those who have defeated disease through vaccinations or the development of disease-combating chemicals and medicines.   

 

While Malcolm Gladwell has noted that Jobs and Gates happened to be at the right place at the right time, Steve Jobs was nonetheless someone special --- apart from seeing the potential of a technological invention, he had the farsightedness to see how a user could relate to it.    He was able to take an artistic concept, marry it with an artisan’s realisation and then produce a device with mass market appeal on a grand scale.  Not just once but over and over.  A true Modern. (Let’s not call him “post-modern”, a term which usually carries connotations of a stance where  scale, quality and precision associated with industrial-level production are deprecated in favour of the artisanal).  

 

For this reason, I would call Jobs a great designer.  Not just an obsessive CEO who developed good looking products that everyone aspired to own.   He was indeed one who belonged to the tradition of  American design embodied by Charles and Ray Eames.  For Jobs, as for Eames, form comes from function.  As Jobs did with the mouse and the graphical user interface and the  personal computer (none of which concepts he invented) integrating them into a system with an intuitive user appeal,  Eames (with Eero Saarinen) took the technologies for moulding plywood (pioneered by Alvar Aalto) and materials such as plastic, fibreglass, wire-meshes and applied them to chairs (which needless to say, he did not invent).  And he was able to scale this innovation to mass production levels for Herman Miller.   Charles Eames revolutionised furniture, and seating in particular, the way Jobs would later make his ding on personalised computing, communication and music.

 

In the world of mass communication and entertainment too, Jobs followed the tradition of the Eames couple.  Charles and Ray Eames produced stunning innovations such as the exhibitions “Mathematica:…”  for IBM, the Nehru exhibition, then “A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age” and “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” (1975–1977).  And  extraordinary movies such as “Powers of Ten”, “Tops” and “The Toy Toccata”.   Jobs would take the late great musician Frank Zappa’s idea of selling songs over the internet, marry it with the WebObjects technologies developed in his wilderness years at Next, and build iTunes and the Apple Store.  And Jobs innovated with Pixar, which produced some of the most durable animation films of recent days.

 

What was it about the products of Jobs and the Eames couple that so strike a chord among the masses, while not compromising on quality and beauty?  It is the way that they mercilessly applied Occam’s Razor (even as Jobs did not apply the razor to his face) to  everything they did, stripping a concept down to its basic functionality, and letting the form evolve from it, clothed in the right selection of materials.  This minimalist design paradigm comes not just from good taste but an internalised deep philosophical position of getting rid of clutter.   Even the way Jobs dressed was minimalist — simple, contemporary, modern urban.  Black mock turtle neck (St Croix), jeans (Levis 501), sneakers (New Balance 991).   All simple and mass-produced in a thoroughly modern milieu.

 

The anchors in various TV shows then got round to voicing the question why India has not produced a Steve Jobs.  The short answer is that the socio-economic environment prevailing in our country does not encourage innovation, and the investment and economic structures do not make production on a mass scale easy.  There is a great deal of risk aversion, and failures are not looked at as learning experiences but are frowned upon, and the person is labelled for life as a failure.  This is in stark contrast to Jobs’s country, where you are not branded a failure forever if one of your ideas did not succeed.  The phoenix can rise there, not here.   Indeed, for almost every one of his successes, Jobs had a failure.  But he took the good parts of the failed product or idea, and turned it into something that could drive or hold together his next innovation (for example, the important role played by WebObjects and NextSTEP in the Apple Store infrastructure).  

 

Let us look at education.  The important message in Jobs’s education is not that he was a college drop-out, but rather that he was able to “drop in” on various courses that interested him at Reed College, while officially not a student.  In his Stanford speech, he mentions the central role that typography played in shaping his sense of taste.  Would you find a single university in India where a great liberal arts education meets the world of technology⁴? Unfortunately, we in India have taken CP Snow’s Two Cultures too far, and therefore shortchange ourselves.   We have designed universities where we have over-regulated what a young person can study⁵.  So our youth cannot “drop in” on what interests them, as Jobs so eloquently spoke about in his Stanford commencement speech.   When Ashok Vajpeyi was Vice-Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, his liberal vision allowed my colleague Wagish Shukla to enlist my help in devising an IT curriculum for a true liberal arts programme.  That vision was sadly abandoned to the orthodoxy of keeping it a university for the propagation of Hindi.

 

Oh, and another thing we should learn from the extraordinary success of Jobs:  Apple doesn’t do market surveys, it propounds and follows a vision.  It isn’t timid in doing so.  There are some inevitable missteps, but the next version of the product is an improvement. As the company’s history teaches us, most tellingly in the years when Jobs was exiled by managers, the traditional management culture is not just pernicious, it can rob an enterprise of its soul.

A padyatri who was not pedestrian (Remembering Dinesh Mohan)

“Every university needs a crazy professor,” my uncle Prof. Mohan Ram used to say (referring to his colleagues Prof. JPS Uberoi and Prof. CR Babu).  In my first year at IIT Delhi, when I was biking on campus, helmet on head and child-seat behind me, I was flagged down by a khadi-clad gentleman with a Mahishasura-style moustache, who proceeded to examine the child-seat and helmet carefully before voicing his approval and letting me go on my way. 

The next several encounters with Dinesh Mohan were of a very mixed nature, where I’d either be intrigued or totally put off by a contrarian view he would voice, or a peculiarly aggressive challenge to what I regarded as a completely rational opinion.   He could almost always be counted on to throw in something “from left field”.  His pronouncements could exasperate and shock (“I am a scientist, so therefore what I do is science”).   Over those next few years, I heard more views about this person, from friends and others,  some very positive, many very negative.  Here was a man about whom no one did not have an opinion.

The BRT project amplified those opinions.  Every driver in Delhi had an opinion on the project and on those who were the brains behind it.  The experiment was eventually wound up and branded a failure, but is a reminder that urban planning, transport, safety and environmental policy need far more expertise and inclusive processes in their conception and execution than they are accorded in this country.  I personally was unconvinced by some of the traffic models that Dinesh and his colleagues had studied because of limitations in the lane-driving model underlying the simulation software package they had used.  Or the idea of placing the bus lane in the middle of the road (I called it “a very dangerous place”).  It took several discussions over cups of tea for me to understand that we had important lessons to learn from Bogota and elsewhere.  I don’t know if Dinesh came to terms with the reality that while it helped the residents of Ambedkar Nagar and Khanpur (and at a cost far lower than the metro could), the BRT system was not aspirational; it would not transform Delhi’s real estate equations.

It was over the years that I got to know him better through my senior colleague Sachin Maheshwari and others. I had my father’s wariness of people around whom “like-minded intellectuals” congregated.  It’s only when I found that Dinesh’s circle included very independent-minded people from diverse walks of life, and for whom I had a lot of respect, that I could see he was not the usual guru figure with acolytes.  I saw beyond his gruff exterior.  He guffawed loudly when I told him of a four-year-old’s reaction on seeing the effigies at the Dassehra maidan:  “They look like Dinesh Uncle”.  A couple of years ago, Dinesh and Peggy invited me for dinner with a few common friends.  The invitation was typical: “Thought we’d have a few anti-nationals get together.”

I found that there was a set of offices with very tasteful decor (very unusual!) atop IIT’s main building where one could always drop in for an enlightening and entertaining chat over a cup of chai.   On many occasions, he would recall what he learnt from my uncle when serving on many committees: to encourage young scientists and fund their research, not the well-connected senior professors.   His understanding of academia and public education systems was well beyond that of most of our colleagues.  He would cite practices at not only MIT, Stanford, Harvard or Oxford, but also those of large successful state schools (his alma mater Michigan), European public universities, those in Japan and Singapore, and most importantly those of China and Latin America.    He loved an argument, to provoke you out of your comfortable cocoon, and hopefully provoke you into thinking about important questions on technology and society from perspectives you had not considered.

Some years ago, Dinesh made an observation about the real cost that the country (and Delhi as a city) would pay for the direction it was taking.  He quite correctly foresaw the devaluation of science while outwardly embracing new shiny technologies.  “Expertise has no value for these people”. We have lost the ability to understand things from viewpoints that one cannot immediately appreciate, but which are ultimately in the supreme interest of the common people.  Perhaps Dinesh’s forceful personality distracted people, and perhaps his perceptions might have been more palatable had they been packaged differently.  But that would have meant a pallid character quite alien to his nature. 

Every university needs its crazy professor, my uncle had said.  It also needs a maverick, who is able to speak truth to power, who questions authority, and shakes the institution out of its complacency in settling for self-congratulatory mediocrity. Do we have someone to fill Dinesh’s shoes… or should I say sandals?

[We got to meet them socially too.  His wife Peggy on meeting me exclaimed  mock-accusingly, “You’re the one who knew that Brahui was a Dravidian language spoken in Balochistan, and upended my image of IIT students!”, referring to my appearance on a TV quiz show in the mid 80s.]

Fifty years ago, recalled on the centenary of a broken April, the cruelest month

(written in April 2019)

The Gandhi Jayanti year brought us into contact with many who had been associated with the freedom movement. Two of our house guests who had known Gandhiji himself were my mother’s uncle KS Acharlu, and Gandhi’s biographer DG Tendulkar. We learnt a lot about the freedom movement from them and from my parents, both of whom had participated in the Quit India movement of 1942 and been arrested. Another reason for us to have been doused in this knowledge was my father’s involvement in the organisation and design of the Gandhi Darshan exhibition, and another exhibition about the freedom movements from the mid eighteenth century onwards.  

The month of April 1969 marked fifty years since the horrific massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar.  I had just started school. At age six, I was no longer very young, and had become what my younger son would many years later call a “poemist”. Immature poet that I was, it seemed natural for me to take a rhyme written by the immortal Anonymous, and give it a topical twist:

"Fire! Fire!" said General Dyer;

"Where? Where?" said Colonel Dare;

“In the town," said Major Brown;

“Do some damage?" said Captain Savage;

“Kill them all," said Sergeant Hall.

 

My mother chuckled, and relayed it to my father, who repeated it to his colleagues at work. Before the end of the day, the verse was bouncing around the corridors of power in the South Block.  (Somewhat like the Scarlet Pimpernel doggerel.)

 

--

The Original 

 

"Fire! Fire!" said Mrs. Dyer;

"Where? Where?" said Mrs. Dare;

"Up the town," said Mrs. Brown;

"Any damage?" said Mrs. Gamage;

"None at all," said Mrs. Hall.

9th H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture (Gopal Gandhi)

 Welcome to the 9th H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture, which we are holding — in person — on what would have been his 98th birthday, after a pandemic-induced hiatus. Thank you all for coming here. 

Many of you present knew Sharada Prasad, or Shouri as we called him, in his lifetime. Others may only have known of him as the information adviser to three Prime Ministers, particularly Indira Gandhi. (I’d like to say here that if you need more information about him, please ask me; please don’t look up the Wikipedia article about him; it is — as Geoff Boycott would say — “roobish”) 

My father had several other facets to him: a student leader who went to jail during the Quit India movement, an editor and journalist, a writer, a translator (particularly of the works of Shivaram Karanth and RK Narayan), a teacher, someone deeply interested in music, culture, design, and nature, and someone involved in the cultural institutions of the nation, such as NID and ICCR. 

The Memorial Lecture is intended to celebrates these diverse engagements. And I can think of no better person who embodies all these engagements than today’s speaker, Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi. (Gopal-ji: Thank you for agreeing to deliver this lecture.) 

While email is generally a tedious medium, corresponding with Gopal-ji is to savour culture and scholarship at its best. I have had this pleasure — when serving as a typist to my father about his encounter with Harilal Gandhi on 30th January 1948, or a few years ago, about an intriguing photograph I found on the web of Gandhiji and HO Ally on their voyage to England. Gopal-ji should need no introduction to anyone here. 

The bio-sketch given is characteristically understated: that he teaches at Ashoka University, writes occasionally for newpapers, has held “administrative, diplomatic and Constitutional positions”, … and “has attempted two translations” — Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindi, and GU Pope’s rendering of the classic Tirukkural into contemporary English. 

The theme of Gopal-ji’s lecture today concerns the preeminent Indian personality of the 20th century, and the principal influence on both my parents: Gandhiji. “Sharada Prasad was a Gandhian first, and then a Nehruvian”, both temporally and temperamentally. The main figure of his formative years from whom he imbibed his values was his maternal grandfather Vajapeyam Venkatasubbiah of the Servants of India Society in Madras, and an associate of Gopalkrishna Gokhale. My father got to meet Gandhiji a couple of times, thanks to his friendship with Kanti Harilal Gandhi. (My mother Kamalamma, whose centenary was in February, also courted arrest in 1942. In 1948, at age 26, she was the official court interpreter for Shankar Kishtayya in the Mahatma Gandhi murder trial at Red Fort). 

Gopal-ji’s talk deals with a very significant period of Gandhiji’s life — his first prison sentence in India from 1922 to 1924 (coincidentally the years of birth of my parents) following a remarkable trial (or non-trial) for sedition that took place a hundred years ago. 

Please welcome Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi. 

The Cultural Vista

(written May 2018)

 

Yesterday I spent an afternoon at the (British) National Portrait Gallery just off Trafalgar Square and St-Martin-in-the-Fields.  A vast collection of paintings of royalty, nobility and their hangers-on.  Vile creatures, bold creatures, some ugly and some surprisingly handsome (Milton!)  The collection abounded with bounders and adventurers who had built the empire.  Many of those whose faces we saw hanging there had lost their heads. Literally. 

 

And then there was the unabashed, unapologetic portrayal of the colonists as heroes.  Clive, Wellington, the whole lot of folks whom we would arraign as war criminals today.

 

But the more redeeming part of the gallery was the large number of portraits of poets, painters, artists and scientists.  The people who made the British empire much more richer than a Brutish Empire.  

 

Wandering around the gallery, I was reminded of my father’s dream for the Central Vista in Delhi.  I think this idea had been in his head ever since the 50s, when he first visited Washington DC: after all the Vista is modelled after Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant’s plan for the Mall there.   

 

From what I recall, his vision grew out of a concept where the cultural heart of the nation grew around the intersection of the Raj Path and Jan Path down to India Gate.  Now that the new republic had democratised the two roads from being King’s Way and Queen’s Way (*),  and the (roughly west-side) area from Jan Path up to Rashtrapati Bhavan ceded to the political life of the nation, the part (roughly) to the east  could be devoted to the Cultural Nation.  

 

The National Museum had already come up on Janpath, next to the Archaeological Survey, and from the 70s and well into the 80s, it was to grow under the vision of scholars such as Sivaramakrishnan and dynamos such as Laxmi Sihare.  Nonetheless he chafed under the mealy objections of bureaucrats unwilling to give more space to a much larger museum, such as the one that Sihare had envisaged.  

 

On the other side of Raj Path, the National Archives had long been established, and the new parliament libraries served to record the political developments of our democracy.

 

My father saw the C-Hexagon as the natural location for a series of museums for the arts and sciences.  The buildings were palaces of the princely kingdoms, and could be repurposed.  Jaipur House had already become the National Gallery for Modern Art, though the gallery space would soon clearly become inadequate.  While the buildings carried the legacy of the princely states, their very names could serve to highlight the notion that this was a national project: Hyderabad, Patiala, Jaipur, Bikaner,...

 

He was for pulling down the unsightly little bungalows in Prince’s Park and reclaiming the ugly barracks of Raksha Bhawan to develop a National Portrait Gallery comprising mainly photographs and a few selected paintings focussing on the great singers, artists, scholars, writers (with a slightly less important but unavoidable space devoted to politicians).  On other side, he saw the need for a National Landscape Gallery to document the extraordinary variety and beauty of the land and sea of India.  The defence services of course were loth to give up any land.

 

My father had earlier influenced the inclusion of a larger set of exhibits documenting the various strands of the Freedom movement (from the 1750s to 1948) in Gandhi Smriti, but that exhibit had been dismantled and destroyed at the insistence of the Gandhians (during Morarji-bhai’s tenure as PM) who wanted it to be exclusively a museum to Gandhi. (The space has been occupied by tawdry tableaux and ersatz objects).  The corresponding scholarly record in documents about the freedom movement fortunately survived in the Nehru Memorial Library (despite efforts to make it exclusively a mausoleum to Nehru).  However,   this is now under severe threat, but, hell, from the Other Side. 

 

He also talked of  the need for National Centres for the Performing Arts (Dance, Music and Drama)  off the central vista, each with a carefully designed auditorium suited for the particular art forms -- apart from NCPA in Bombay -- and distinct from the various auditoriums around Mandi House.   The auditorium at Siri Fort, though, was to him an exemplar of what an auditorium should not be -- poor acoustics (I remarked how one could hear distinct echoes when Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic played there), and a relatively small lobby, where the entire audience could not be accommodated without jostling.  And the preposterous positioning of the lavatories. 

 

In the 80s and early 90s, my father got to see part of his vision realised.  He was involved in a very intense way in the setting up of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.  This came up on the northern side of the Central Vista, and was meant to house all the folk arts, both visual and performance, as well as our rich linguistic heritage. Kapila Vatsyayan has done a stellar job in giving this project a scholarly vision, although this enterprise suffered a rather rude disruption in the late 90s-early 2000s.   The building, a large and expensive project, when it did come up disappointed him for the sheer lack of large exhibition space.   My father had worked with Charles and Ray Eames, and from them had learnt the importance of space and light in exhibitions and for the movement of people through the them. 

 

There is a small group of people who want to preserve the Lutyens Bungalow Zone seeing it as a buffer against ugly modernity. I think my father concurred only slightly with them... he did not favour “a more efficient use of the space” for large office buildings or sarkari housing, but did not think that the bungalows had any intrinsic architectural value.  This view of his probably gained even greater resonance when he was delving through the papers of Edwin Lutyens when writing a book about the Rashtrapati Bhavan
(Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Story of the President's House, Publications Division), where he found that Lutyens in fact detested bungalows and PWD construction, and use to refer to them as “Bungle-Oh”.

 

(*) A friend of mine waggishly remarks that it is somehow apposite that Rajpath and  Janpath are forever at cross purposes.

The Untranslatable Essence of Being

 

In 1992, shortly after the great Hindustani classical musician Mallikarjun Mansur passed away, my father (H. Y. Sharada Prasad) penned an obituary in which he spoke about the great singer’s short 85-page autobiography “Nanna Rasayatre” (written at the behest of AaNa Krishna Rao and PuLa Deshpande).   In his article, my father said that the title could roughly be translated as “My Emotional Pilgrimage”, but that this was so inadequate  as there was no good English equivalent of the word “Rasa”.  

 

A couple of years later, when I returned to India, I pestered my father to read the book out to me. I can’t read Kannada, and so needed the help of someone who could not only read it out to me but also explain the words which I didn’t understand.  He still had his voice then, though that was soon was to be cruelly taken away from him by Parkinson’s disease.  Over the course of about an hour, he read out the book — and it was indeed a little gem.  What impressed me was the utter humility couched in the genius that was Mallikarjun Mansur.  He  did not attempt to document his whole life, or recount the honours.  Nor did he try to explain the music and the complexities.  Instead, in the simplest of tones, he conveyed the very essence of his being.

 

“Someone should translate this into other languages”,  my father would say.   I asked him why he didn’t translate it himself.  (He was, after all, highly regarded as a translator, especially between Kannada and English, having as a young man translated  RK Narayan’s “Swami and Friends” into Kannada, and then several of K Shivarama Karanth’s novels and the polymath’s autobiography from Kannada into English, apart from short stories by Masti Venkatesh Iyengar and others).  He replied that he couldn’t do justice to it.  For two reasons: first, while he could appreciate and follow Hindustani music, he did not possess the knowledge of a musician. Second, while he had grown up in Karnataka,  he really did not understand enough about the Lingayat faith.  It was a religion whose basic ethos differed in many significant ways from the various forms of Hindu faith with which he was familiar.  (My father was not a religious man, but there was not a lot about Indian culture, and particularly the cultural richness of Karnataka about which he was unaware).  

 

He then pulled out from his shelf “Speaking of Shiva”, written by his friend AK Ramanujam, arguably the greatest of translators.   He flipped through a few pages, stopped to read a vachana. Then another.   He struggled as he picked out another book, a much fatter Kannada tome, shrugged and then put it away.   “Ramanujam may have been able to capture the ethos of this extraordinary form of Shiva-bhakti,”  he said.  “Perhaps also the music. But he too has gone.”  I do not know why he did not consider Lankesh or Shivarudrappa.

 

A year or so later, I attended a concert by Mallikarjun Mansur’s son Rajashekhar.  I went up to him afterwards, and asked him if anyone was translating his father’s autobiography.  He replied that a student of his had embarked on a draft. Rajashekhar was a professor of English.  When I informed my father that someone was translating it, he responded that the problem was that people thought it merely was a matter of someone  knowing Kannada and English and writing well.  Eventually the book did find a translator who knew the writer, the music, the tapasya, the unusual religious ethos of the Lingayats, and both Kannada and English well: Rajashekhar Mansur himself.  However, the title he settled on, “My Journey in Music”, seemed as unremarkable as the clothes that Mallikarjun Mansur wore.