Babur ki Aulad

 Babur ki Aulad

(An incomplete note from early 2011)

In mid-December 2010, I took an early Indian Airlines (Air India now) flight to Chennai to attend a conference. After tumbling out of the plane with the one backpack I was carrying, I boarded a rickety bus, the doors of which were hurriedly shut before more people boarded it.  Seated near me was the only other occupant, a serious-looking man, white hair but thick black brows over his glasses, wearing a blue suit.  A small briefcase lay at his feet .  A vaguely familiar face, but not someone whose identity I was absolutely certain about, especially when I was still groggy.  He sat there straightening his suit, setting his face for what seemed to be a hard day's work involving people who were not his type.  As we stepped off the bus a couple of minutes later, a single bush-shirted flunky greeted him with folded hands, and dextrously thrust an unremarkable bouquet of flowers into his hands and grabbed his bag from him.  The bouquet was quickly handed back to the flunky.  At this point, I ventured to ask the gentleman if he was Salman Khurshid.  Yes, he answered in a quiet voice (very graciously I must say, for a Cabinet Minister).  I introduced myself, saying that I had met him when I was much younger and he had for a brief period been a colleague of my father.  He spoke warmly of my father, saying he (my father) was someone he greatly respected and admired.  He asked if I worked in Chennai or in Delhi.  I told him I taught at the IIT in Delhi, and he wrote down my contact details.

A couple of months later, one of his aides mailed us an invitation to the staging of his play "Sons of Babur", starring Tom Alter as the last Mughal Bahadur Shah Zafar.  We went to see the play the other day.  The play is written with an imagination and a sensitivity to history and the human condition.  While the acting may not have been all stellar, Tom Alter plays the role with a flourish but without overwhelming us with histrionics, lending a sense of poignancy to the life and death of the last Mughal.