My mother was sitting in the backyard of the large house working on the mortar. It is a back breaking work mixing rice, lentil, and water, and grinding it using the pestle. She poured the rice into the hollow of the mortar, put some water, and started to move the pestle round and round. Mind you, the pestle is heavy and is not easy to lift or move; it took good amount of effort to keep it moving. Also, she had to keep it centered on the little hollow in the middle of the mortar. Whenever her attention faltered as the four children ran about talking to her and distracting her, the pestle flew out of the middle hole and threatened to fall on the floor possibly injuring her. She had to juggle this and keep grinding until the rice was ground to a fine paste. Then she had to remove it and then put the lentil and grind it again in the same manner. Sweat was pouring down her face and she periodically wiped it using the edge of her sari. She had to grind a large amount of the rice-lentil mix since she planned to make dosa, the favorite of her children the next day. The four boys aged 25, 22, 19, and 14 would eat up all that in no time at all and demand more. The next-door neighbor saw her labor and said, “Hmm!! Why do you work so hard? Just go to the shop and they will grind this for a few Rupees.” Mom responded, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
The mailman came in at that time and shouted from the front steps, “mail.” I, who was sitting in the living room, reading a book, walked up to him and grabbed the mail. One of the mails was for me and was from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. It was a thin envelope and I was anxious to tear it open since it was possibly the result of my application, exam, and interview with this institution to join their master’s in business administration program. I had graduated that year from the Engineering College at Trichy, after five years of hard work. I had applied to the two Management institutes available during 1971 in India — Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. I did not even know about what these programs were but applied since a dear friend of mine advised that it was a good career choice. I had then taken two exams; I passed the IIM Calcutta one and was called for an interview. I had gone to Madras, the regional capital, to attend the interview and was waiting for the results of the interview.
My dad, who was a Magistrate, made a reasonable middle-class income, that was sufficient to feed and clothe him and his family. He neither had accumulated sufficient funds nor the ancestral properties that could help him fund his children’s college education. My mother had pushed him hard so that my eldest brother could get admitted in a postgraduate program after his bachelor’s degree. My next brother was also studying engineering at a local college and his fees had to be paid. Paying for these colleges were an expensive proposition and they had to borrow to pay the bills.
There were at least five or six other relatives who use to stay at our house and study in schools and colleges. It was a time when college education was unheard of — particularly for females — and my parents paid the fees, boarding, and lodging of a few of our relatives. They had to persuade the parents so that they could stay with us and pursue the educational opportunities. My parents were paying for the expenses for all these other children. I remember the quarrels between my mom and dad as the month ended. There were hardly any funds to purchase vegetables and groceries near the end of the month and they had to look forward to the first of the month for relief.
I became eligible to go to college during 1966 and applied to many engineering institutions in Madras State. I joined the Regional Engineering College, Trichy during May 1996. Little did we know that it was a compulsory residential college; therefore, in addition to the fees, my parents had to pay for the boarding and lodging expenses. Somehow, they managed to do it, and I studied reasonably well and graduated in 1971 with a First Class. The studies were so technical that I mastered them and was great analytically but did not understand much about the value of what I was learning or its application to the real-world. For example, in the final year, I took a course on gear design, where we spent a lot of time writing and deriving complex equations that simulated gears, but never for once saw a gear in actual operation. Many of the textbooks were those translated from Russian and it was difficult to understand the writer given the translation. In addition, I did not buy any of the textbooks since they were expensive and relied on notes taken during class lectures to answer the questions in the examinations. We were 250 students in the class, many of them from middle-class families, and the competition was intense. We fought with each other for getting half a point here and a half a point there and somehow, I did not develop warm relationships with other students. The future was uncertain when we graduated during 1971 and I had applied for a few jobs and had applied to the two IIMs.
My parents shifted to be at Trichy so that they can be near where I was studying. I used to go home on many weekends. My mother’s dad used to take care of his sister who had become crippled later in life and was abandoned by her husband. She used to complain constantly about lack of care and asked my mother to take care of her. My parents agreed and my aunt was a constant presence in our home since 1967. It should have taken extra resources to assume her care, but my parents never talked about it. My aunt had many bodily pains and used to complain constantly. She needed assistance to take a bath, go to toilet, and take care of her bodily functions; but her brain and tongue were razor sharp. She was very thin, just a sari draped around her body in a haphazard manner, in a bed all the time, and constantly talking about many issues dealing with her limited resources and how everybody was out to get those resources. In addition to managing the family of four, my mom had to take care of the elderly aunt. My aunt started yelling, “Paddu, Please bring me grapes.” Even though she realized that grapes were expensive and she did not have the funds to pay for them, she demanded that my parents get them since she had no teeth. My mom was about to get up from grinding the mortar when I approached her with the envelope.
I was very reluctant to open the envelope since there was a lot of uncertainty; even if I got admitted, would the family be able to send me to a far off city — Calcutta and take care of my expenses. I was wearing a slack and a full shirt as was the norm for most young men at that time and went to her with the unopened envelope in my hand. She greeted me and asked, “what is happening?” I showed her the envelope; she told me “Open it now.” I opened it with trembling hands and saw that it was a letter admitting me to the institute and promising to pay my tuition fees while at that institution. Even though her hands were full of the dosa mix, my mom got up, gave me a hug, and told me, “that is wonderful news. Now you go to Calcutta and get this education. Do well there.” I asked her, “how can we afford it? My eldest brother is still in college, my elder brother has joined Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and now I have admission to IIM Calcutta. We do not have the funds to pay for it.” She said, “Why do you worry about finances? It is for us to worry about it. Your task is to study well and obtain jobs that make you grow in life. Look, I had to drop out of school when I was in eighth grade, since I started having periods. I liked studies, but no opportunity; I want all of you to have that opportunity. I have worried and fought to educate many of our relatives when their parents wanted them to go to work. You are our son and we will somehow manage it.” I never understood how they managed to pay the fees or give me money when I was ready to go to Calcutta.
A few months later, I took the train from Chennai to Howrah with a tin box in my hand that contained my clothes and a few essentials. That was the first time I had travelled out of Madras State and the cacophony of multiple languages — Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, English — hit me hard as I got down at the Howrah station and saw a large number of people at the platform. I had never seen that many people in one place; people were walking purposefully here and there; I seemed to be the only person who did not know what to do. Somehow, I managed to get out of the station and got into a taxi.
The driver, a well-built sardarji, had a turban on his head and asked me where I wanted to go. I had never seen a sardarji before and I was surprised to see somebody wearing a turban in the head. I replied, “IIM Calcutta, Baranagar campus,” and he started to drive. I talked to him in faltering Hindi, that I had studied, when I a young student at Pudukottai. My mother, who saw the possibility that her children might travel to distant lands, had insisted that the brothers take Hindi classes and I had taken many of them passing up to Visaradh level. I knew the language but had never spoken it. Now I had to converse with the driver in Hindi. As he was driving along, I saw many people blocking a road and then a loud explosion happened right in front of our taxi. The driver quickly turned around and drove very fast; I kept asking him “what is happening?” but he refused to answer. As he dropped me off at Baranagar, I asked him again and he said, “Oh, it is the Naxalites; they are protesting against the poverty and are throwing hand-made bombs against the police.” I was perplexed since I had only read in newspapers about Naxalites and had never seen them in action.
I went to the admissions office at IIM Calcutta and they allocated me a room at Tagore Hall and I learned that my roommate would be a Bengali. I walked into the room, sat down dazed on the bed, unable to move. “What have we done? Where was I? Was my mom’s persistence that I go to any lengths to get quality education worth it? How do I manage to remain a vegetarian in a place where fish was the staple diet? How to converse with the other students in the campus who speak different languages? Most of the other students were wearing pajama — kurtas or lounging clothes whereas I was the lone person wearing a dhoti; many of them seem to be rich and well-off — how would I even interact with them? Were my mom’s extensive efforts for us to persevere in pursuing education worthwhile or foolhardy?”
Chetan Sankar 