2. Father, Dear Father

In a letter V.S. Naipaul’s father writes him not to give in to his depression and exhorts him to be sincere in his writing. “What do you think literature boils down to?” he asks, “To writing from the belly rather than from the cheek. Most people write from the cheek. If the semi-illiterate criminal wrote a long letter ordinarily to his sweetheart, it would be what most letters of such people generally are. If the criminal wrote this letter last thing before his execution, it would be literature’ it would be poetry.”

This I quote from ‘Between Father and Son, V.S. Naipaul family letters’ edited by Gillion Aitken. This is a volume of letters between V.S. Naipaul, then a college student on scholarship at Oxford, and his family back home in Trinidad. The book contains well- written thought-provoking personal letters. But thinking man’s ideas are never personal. He always thinks big even in unfavorable situations and still maintains a balance between truth and reality.

So, at last the father decides to support his son after graduation from Oxford. ‘I want you to have that chance which I have never had,’ he writes, ‘somebody to support me and mine while I write. Two or three years of this should be enough. If by then you have not arrived, then it will be time enough for you to see about getting a job.’

And we all know V.S. Naipaul arrived with ‘A Room for Mr. Bishwas.’

Naipaul’s father succeeded whereas Dr. Ravindra Gujjula’s father could not. Dr. Ravindra, born in Kanigidi, District Prakashan in Andhra Pradesh, was an Indian born Mayor of Altlandsberg (Germany) two decades back. His father wanted him to become a poet and named him in honour of the great poet, Ravindranath Tagore.

Bowing to his father’s wish, Ravindra wrote a few poems but he was deeply shattered when his sister Bharati died at the tender age of five of an actually curable disease. This motivated him to become a doctor.

Destiny took him to Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University in Greifswald and then at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Ravindra became a doctor but his father’s meticulously planned upbringing did not go in vain.

In 1988, when the GDR was still in existence, Ravindra wanted to be an independent candidate for the municipal elections. But the chief of Elections refused his candidature on the pretext that ‘Dr. Gujjula is the only foreigner in Altlandsberg and therefore represents only himself.’ 

In 1991, in reunited Germany, he again stood as an independent candidate and was selected Councilor for Culture and Education and made a place for himself with his constructive thinking. The citizens repaid all his endeavors by giving him 81 percent of the votes in 1998 and ultimately Dr. Ravindra Gujjula became the Mayor of Altlandsberg.

So, a father’s endeavors never fail.