Ira Pande

These days many people are on nostalgia trips: some look back to life before the pandemic and the extended lockdowns, others to life in the last century, while retired folks like us revisit their early life. I often go back to our own past and try and remember lost friends, the bitter-sweet experiences of my professional life and those struggles that made me what I am now. The other day, I was transported to the time when my husband and I first came to Punjab in the early 1970s and found ourselves in a small kasba called Samrala, as he took charge of his first posting as an SDM.

My husband, like so many who had studied in the Sixties at St Stephen’s College and Delhi University, was a closet anarchist and sported a Che Guevara moustache as a badge of loyalty to The Cause. That he was now in the civil service was an irony that hit him every morning as he prepared to go to the ‘kutcherry’ and hear civil cases against the simple peasants of the region.

That is another story but what both of us tried very hard to do was identify with the people around us. Our Punjabi was halting but our hearts beat for the poor and downtrodden. We began to see the ‘pseud’ city slicker for what he/she was and pursued a brand of anti-pseud pseudry that had us all twisted in knots, because we were pseuds too, you see. Privately, we made fun of the small-town Punjabi life that we had been pitchforked into: but publicly, we maintained a strict political correctness. So, whenever my husband went on tour, we stayed in the Harijan dharamshala to the deep disgust of the old driver Babu Singh, who was denied the chicken-shicken the tehsildar would have brought for our dinner if we had stayed in the dak bangla.

Samrala then had one English-medium school, called rather grandly Holy Child Public School. Its principal, challenged in the department of spelling, called himself Solomon but spelt his name as Soloman. But even more shocking than a principal who could not spell his own name correctly was the fact that the board outside his school read ‘Holy Child Pubic School’. When I gently asked him whether he saw something amiss there, he replied soloman-ly, “Yes, madam, there is an ‘l’ missing.” And that was that.

Periodically, Mr Soloman invited us over to distribute prizes and on August 15, at the Independence Day celebrations, his school composed a special song for us. Even after all these years, I can still sing it: “Mehnat se jo padhega/ Vo Es Dee Yum banega/ CM bhi vo banega/ PM bhi vo banega…”

(He who works hard, will one day become the SDM. He will one day be the CM and the PM as well).

When we reached home, we collapsed with giggles: those poor children knew only the SDM, the CM and the PM. All the intervening hierarchies of the state were irrelevant to their lives. When I recall that incident today, I laugh not at those children but at ourselves. How vain we were to think we knew it all. Actually, the only Mr Know-All was the redoubtable Mr Soloman. He was prescient enough to have taught those children a lesson that 50 years later, my husband ruefully acknowledges to be the truth about the government.

That small town, with its small dreams and small joys, will always be preserved in our memories. All this came back when someone sent us a photo from those times. In the photo, the SDM is seated in the centre with the principal and the senior staff of the local government school on either side and in the front row in one corner is a solemn looking young man. This young man went on to join the state civil service and was promoted to the IAS in a few years. He recently retired and sent us this photo to remind us of the time we spent there, adding that he was inspired by my husband to work hard and join the civil service. How lightly we take the influence that we may have on those around us!

It makes me so happy to know that our civil services are now shedding their elitist public school mentality and recruiting those young men and women who will take our country forward. Many probationers now come from our small towns, villages and kasbas and they join the service because they want to do something for their own village, town or kasba one day. To be able to build a road, a hospital or a school: these are the dreams they have joined the civil service for. Perhaps one of them once studied at a school called ‘Holy Child Pubic School’ and sang a song that haunts me still.

The time has come for us to seriously reconsider our priorities and stop making fun of those who cannot speak glibly in English, or those who come from modest backgrounds and wear clothes that may not be to our taste. Is this any way of judging the worth of a person? How can we forget what happened to this country when we handed it to those who were to the manor born? I hope the coming generations will learn how to respect hard work and integrity.