A letter to my grandfather in Vaikuntum.
Dear Thatha,
Why did you sacrifice your youth for this country?Why couldn't you not have continued with your lucrative law practise and thus not subject yourself , your wife and children to untold miseries , hardships and poverty,of your son's surgeries to be performed at home itself, of your daughters to deliver babies at home ,bearing the pain and losing several of their gains?
What made you to burn foreign garments paying heed to Ghandhiji's call , join the Congress and rally people around with your fiery , patriotic speeches against the alien rule that incarcerated you in jail for years together?
With your brilliance you could have amassed wealth that would have lasted for 7 generations .But look what you did instead,you chose to struggle and fight for freedom from foreign yoke ,individual liberties, and so on forgoing an enticingly comfortable life of wealth and ease that has only eased the way for totally unconnected and uncaring persons to amass wealth and power and not me your direct descendant.
The fruits of your sacrifice more so that of your pathetically patient wife and your children who bore the misery of the sudden slide into poverty in their youth has been snatched away by people who didn't shed a drop of sweat and in a strange twist of events and would i say that history is repeating itself ,are in power and are as alien as those against whom you agitated and courted arrests after arrests are now putting your grand daughter under constant surveillance, applying pshycological warfare and arresting her in her own house?
In your life time and for several decades there after your satvic influence smoothened many a wretch's wrinkles.You even used your good offices at the centre to bring back a bhai hailing from chitoor ,who had joyfully migrated to our neighbouring country in the Western side soon after the partition but who couldn't adjust with prevailing culture and language there and appealed to you to bring him back to this soil where his ancestors were born and had toiled long!
In the present set up ,dear thatha,tragically the very fact that i am your grand daughter , though i am not half as seeped in Hindu traditions and belief's as you were ,nay not even a quarter is like a mill stone around my neck!
Finally dear Thatha when you look down from your portrait adorning the parliament at all those worthies who are using the power and wealth that you sacrificed your health, wealth and comforts for, on your pet grand daughter to try and break and wear her down for being what she is ,do tears trickle down your eyes or is there a glint in those blue eyes ,that says my blood runs in her veins too?
Why did you sacrifice your youth for this country?Why couldn't you not have continued with your lucrative law practise and thus not subject yourself , your wife and children to untold miseries , hardships and poverty,of your son's surgeries to be performed at home itself, of your daughters to deliver babies at home ,bearing the pain and losing several of their gains?
What made you to burn foreign garments paying heed to Ghandhiji's call , join the Congress and rally people around with your fiery , patriotic speeches against the alien rule that incarcerated you in jail for years together?
With your brilliance you could have amassed wealth that would have lasted for 7 generations .But look what you did instead,you chose to struggle and fight for freedom from foreign yoke ,individual liberties, and so on forgoing an enticingly comfortable life of wealth and ease that has only eased the way for totally unconnected and uncaring persons to amass wealth and power and not me your direct descendant.
The fruits of your sacrifice more so that of your pathetically patient wife and your children who bore the misery of the sudden slide into poverty in their youth has been snatched away by people who didn't shed a drop of sweat and in a strange twist of events and would i say that history is repeating itself ,are in power and are as alien as those against whom you agitated and courted arrests after arrests are now putting your grand daughter under constant surveillance, applying pshycological warfare and arresting her in her own house?
In your life time and for several decades there after your satvic influence smoothened many a wretch's wrinkles.You even used your good offices at the centre to bring back a bhai hailing from chitoor ,who had joyfully migrated to our neighbouring country in the Western side soon after the partition but who couldn't adjust with prevailing culture and language there and appealed to you to bring him back to this soil where his ancestors were born and had toiled long!
In the present set up ,dear thatha,tragically the very fact that i am your grand daughter , though i am not half as seeped in Hindu traditions and belief's as you were ,nay not even a quarter is like a mill stone around my neck!
Finally dear Thatha when you look down from your portrait adorning the parliament at all those worthies who are using the power and wealth that you sacrificed your health, wealth and comforts for, on your pet grand daughter to try and break and wear her down for being what she is ,do tears trickle down your eyes or is there a glint in those blue eyes ,that says my blood runs in her veins too?
posted by K.C. Sujata at
9:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home