Mr. Nittur Srinivas Rao was the Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court, first chief of the Central Vigilance Commission of India and lived to be 101 – active and alert. You can read more about him at these links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nittoor_Srinivasa_Rau
Sometime in 2003 a school teacher gave an assignment to our daughters class to write about a person who was involved in the freedom movement of India. This made any target candidate at least 70+ yrs old and we were wondering who to find. An uncle said – “Go meet Nittur Srinivasa Rao, tell him your grandfathers name and he will surely talk to you. And by the way, he just completed his 100th birthday”. I had heard the name but beyond that did not know much about him. 100? I was not too sure what we would find, but 100 years old? That was enough of an attraction to make it a kind of “picnic” visit to "see" him. Imagined that he would be in bed, a frail old man, hard of hearing/speaking and god knows maybe senile.
When we entered his home he
greeted us with a clear voice to come in, sit near him and how happy he was to
see someone from “Raghu’s” family – my grandfather was named Dr. Raghavendra
Rao. The man was hale, hearty, sitting in a chair, alert, twinkling eyes, and a
ready smile on his face. He greeted us warmly and immediately got into asking
questions about others in Raghu’s family including my father and his memory was
sharp and better than mine. As we talked he remembered Raghu his old friend and
chuckled at some memory which he shared.
In those days the final pre degree school (10th/ SSLC) results would actually be published in the Government Gazette. That’s how important it was and you needed to get hold of that copy to know your results. The father of Nittur Srinivas Rao had come home holding the gazette copy and gave it to the young Nittur to locate and know his results. Searching quickly he located his name somewhere if I remember correctly between the 10th and 20th position. He then proceeded to move downwards trying to find his friends Raghu’s name and it was missing.
Anguished he told his father that Raghu’s name was missing and how could he have failed. His father told him that rather than go down maybe he should go up to search the name because he cannot assume that he was better than Raghu. He found Raghu’s name with a higher rank than himself. He was chuckling as he narrated this and said how Raghu had always ranked better than him in studies. That Raghu in his own life never came anywhere remotely close to what he himself has achieved is another matter but such was his humility and grace even in telling this story.
When we spoke about the rampant corruption, sleazy politics and asked if he was a disappointed man he brushed that away like a fly – it was irrelevant. He wagged a finger at us and said that we must look at the progress made, the vast opportunities of the internet, the ability to communicate with anyone across the globe in real time, see his family living half way across the world and virtually join them, the changes in transportation, telecommunication, healthcare, agriculture, the ability to feed a billion people and defend them…. The man listed so many wonderful achievements of India which he said we should be proud of and applaud instead of always seeing the negative aspects which would be there in any society. He said crime, corruption and such things were obstacles that a nation faced in its journey to become developed and if we adapted a pessimistic attitude we would slow down the progress. That mans optimism, positivity and love for life and pride at what India had achieved was immense.
Carrying on further he said the youngsters must be given the opportunity to carry these things forward to the next level, help in nation building and as long as we were moving forward not to spend time in discussing what obstacles we face. Maybe slower but that’s ok not everybody can come first he said very maturely. Th dignity with which he carried himself never once speaking ill of the past 100 years was a lesson by demonstration.
We came away feeling rather ashamed at his optimism, pride in India which we did not have enough of.
On the other hand we see today a whole bunch of senior experts – they may have retired from public service, the armed forces, judicial system, government, experts from other walks of life – you see a strong tendency to belittle the present and keep talking of a glorious past. I am not even remotely including politicians in this list.
Reading the opinion pieces of so many illustrious people you would think that India was a land of milk, honey and roses as long as they were in positions of authority but now everything is bad. They will pass judgement on so many things as wrong, needs change, affects the country that you wonder – what did they do for 30 to 40 years when they were in service? Didn’t we see those exact shortcomings decade after decade?
India must be self reliant, have a robust manufacturing base that creates millions of jobs, export to the world, have close friendly relationship with USA, Russia, China, neighbours, have no conflicts, peace but did we have this all these decades ?
There must be no nepotism, one should not lick the feet of the bosses including political, there should be no favouritism in appointing people to high offices and the list is endless and reading these experts and respected folks you wonder – didn’t these exist all these years ?
I think one of the reasons that India has lagged behind is that we are always stuck in the “glorious” past whatever that means. We refuse to let go. We refuse to accept the reality that 30 years back we had the same set of issues but at a different scale/orbit and 30 years from now we will still have the same issues at a different scale/orbit. We need to accept we didn’t solve all the problems, we created many problems and the current generation will do the same for a future generation to inherit. We need to stop thinking that except our own biological children all others are not smart enough to be trusted to lead this nation forward and all our “juniors” are far less competent than what we were. We must learn to let go, offer the benefit of experience as “information and knowledge” so that the present can use that to take better decisions, perform better.
As long as the plethora of experts realise that the intent of expert opinions should be to educate, of criticism to guide so that others do not make the same mistakes they did, it contributes to the nation. If the intent is to show that they were great and never made mistakes and the current lot are poor and always make mistakes then nobody will listen to them and they will come across as just bitter, frustrated old men to be ignored. If you still want to disagree - 100 years back we did not have a clue or cure for the Spanish flu & did the exact same things we are today doing with Covid and still do not have a clue or cure. So much for 100 years of progress.
Honestly reading many an illustrious Indian be it in media or social media one starts wondering – did we actually trust this person to hold the kind of high office they did? What damages did they do to the nation? Who trusted such people to be appoint them to such offices? And then you realise they are actually asking the same questions themselves in their opinion pieces but think they are pointing one finger at others when 3 other fingers are pointing back at them.
In short what I find is that many a illustrious name we grew up with seem to lack Grace Dignity Maturity Humility Positivity in their senior years.
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