Memoirs of C.S.Venkatakrishnan(Gingee) on D.Padmanabhan

D. Padmanabhan by C.S.Venkatakrishnan(Gingee)

I have been told that I saw Sri Padmanabhan many times when I was very young in New Delhi. He was an avid bridge player and often played with my grandfather and father. I have no memory of it. However, I will never forget my later intraction with him. I was in Chappaqua for a few days in 1982 when I had just come to the US for studies and talked quite a lot with him. This was a few weeks before he passed away. He walked slowly, and his hand shook, but his mind was sharp as ever and there was a permanent twinkle in his eye, magnified by his glasses.

The most immediate impression of his, Sri Padmanabhan, was his scholarship. He would talk knowledgeably on every subject and speak in very simple terms --- even a know-it-all teenager was in awe. After he finished his puja, he often watched on TV a radical mullah rage about the "enemies of Islam". I thought it quite comical but Sri Padmanabhan was utterly earnest. He gave me a lecture on religious fundamentalism that would be regarded as prophetic today. Sri Padmanabhan distinguished between the innate goodness of all religions and the sameness of their adherents (some are good, some are bad), on the one hand, and the excesses of religious fundamentalists on the other. He would not at all have been surpised at what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. The greatness of Sri Padmanabhan's scholarship was that it was effortless and had no affectation. By watching him you would never have guessed that he had had impressive academic achievement and held high Government office. Most importantly, you could see the keen joy he felt in his family --- from the open affection for his grandchildren and children (and children-in-law) to his incessant verbal jousting with Kalpakam Mami, which was no less a show of love.

My father often told me of a trip he made to various temple towns in Tamil Nadu in the late 1960's with Sri Padmanabhan and Kalpakam Mami, and his face glowed at the memory of their companionship. That then is a measure of any man --- the fondness with which he is remembered, and how many of those good qualities ("gunam" in Tamil) have so obviously been passed to his descendents. By that measure, Sri Padmanabhan was peerless and his centenary will give us the appropriate time to savor his memory.