My Father and I : P.Girdhar Gopal

My father's name was D.Padmanabhan. So my name per the Tamil custom is Padmanabhan Girdhar Gopal. It would have been Iyer, but my father dropped it as he was born, when the anti Brahmin sentiment was at its then zenith in Madras Presidency as it was called. And, the name
Iyer blared the fact that the owner of the name was a Brahmin. So for two generations, that of my father and mine, we did not have a family name. I have given my last name to my children. My father attended Presidency College in Madras and got a Chemistry Honors degree there and then went on to Jesus College, Oxford to join the Honors School of Chemistry and take the MA in Chemistry. While at Jesus, he decided to take the ICS examination in London, and so after a year at the college, he dropped out, without asking permission to do so from his father who was financing his studies at Oxford, As soon as he dropped out he moved to London, to digs(which was the English expression then used for a flat or a room) with a landlady and read for the ICS. This caused a lot of consternation with his folks at home in Madras, because he had dropped a sure thing at Oxford to take the examination that would be considered a lottery based upon the percentage of success especially amongst the Indian candidates. But the results showed that he had passed the ICS and had been assigned to the United Provinces(UP then and now). He went on to Kings College , Cambridge for his ICS training and returned to India as a Joint Magistrate at Rae Barelli.

He was a District Judge of Sitapur District when I was born and for the first few years of my life I was moved next to Bulandshahr and then to Agra and finally to Lucknow where my father became Law Secretary and Legal Remembrancer of the UP. This was a phase of my life that I mostly spent with firstly being taken care by an Anglo Indian nanny and then by servants. Though my parents spoke Tamil with each other, they spoke to us(my two brothers and myself) in Hindi as that is the language that we had learnt largely from the servants.

My father was an incurable romantic with a great interest in history. My romance with India began with him sitting with me and telling me stories about the great events in India. So before I could read, I was sitting on my father's lap and listening to his stories. Most of them were about India, Just a sample : He told me the possibly apocryphal story from the epic poem Prithviraj Raj Raso written posthumously(after Prithviraj's death and Chand Bardai passing by the latter's son)of Chand Bardai the court poet of Prithviraj following his master Prithviraj to the capital of Ghori after the second battle of Tarain(1192) and directing the blind Prithviraj(blinded by Ghori) ,in a couplet, to shoot the Sultan dead. This was when I was probably five to six years old.He also read excerpts from Kincaid's Grand Rebel, the little jewel of a biography of Shivaji. Also, from Carlyle on the French Revolution and Gibbon on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This early introduction gave me a love for history that I have had to this day.

As my father's first love was always books and he had books in profusion strewn all over the house, I started reading seriously at the age of ten or eleven. It is said, that the only way chidren read is by example: If they see their parent read, they follow suit. Thanks to my father, I devoured books between the ages of eleven to possibly twenty one. I started with simple books, but went to to a wide range of books, including probably at sixteen the massive volume of Havelock Ellis', " The Psychology of Sex", great writers in French, English, Russian and American fiction like the short story masters, Maupassant, O'Henry and Poe ,a great deal of Dumas and Zola, of Walter Scott and Dickens and of course, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gogol. Unfortunately because of the time and place I did not get a chance of reading Indian fiction. But at my father's direction, I did read some novels of Premchand and some English translations of Bankim Chandra and Tagore and also the writings of RK Narayan.Though my father started off reading science himself, he could not pass on to me any great reverence for science except for the inductive scientific method of collecting data and then arriving at a conclusion, that I have applied to a number of non scientefic pursuits which I owe entirely to my father. However, as I could write and my vocabulary was above average, I never bothered to learn grammar in the rigorous fashion, that I think is needed to impart the language to others.

Further, I have lived and worked in three continents, I can say with a great deal of certainty that I never had a problem in either written or oral communication either socially or professionally. I would attribute this ability more to what I learnt outside college,in large part from my father.

In addition to giving me an avenue for intellectual advancement, the greater gift my father gave me was to impart to me a moral compass that I have been ever so grateful for. They say that the only way you are imparted values is not on the basis of what you are told but what you see happen in day to day life. Even though my father held high office I have never once seen him take advantage of his position. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my father made it a point to refuse even small favors from people. He used to say that officials should not only be honest, but should be seen to be honest: thus I remember, the peons running after people to return baskets of fruits or boxes of sweets. When we went to the movies, we never bought the highest priced tickets, because my father wanted people to know that he had bought. This feeling that somebody(my compass) is watching over my actions has stayed with me all my life. And when he was forced to take early retirement, the only money he had in the world was his Provident Fund and his ICS pension.

My father fell ill on a trip to England that he took to complete his Barrister's degree from Lincoln's Inn when he was 40 years old. The convocation held by the Inns of Court, where where he had also received the Bar's Langdon Medal , for Hindu and Mohammadan Law, from Lord Goddard, the then Lord Chief Justice of England. The next morning after the convocation, my father was wheeled into the hospital paralyzed. Though he recovered enough to go back to work, he got an attack again when he was forty six, which then put paid to his career.

My father recovered again, but not enough to work. So I took full advantage of having him as a relatively young man ,the time he spent with me in my formative years in College.

He lived for over 26 years after his strokes and died at a relatively young old age of seventy three. A few years before his death, he fell and broke his hip. My brother,Siddharth went for the operation and after he recovered, I went and brought my parents to live with my brother and mysef. Though my mother adjusted to living in the US my father never did, but we were glad to have both of them with us.


I try to think what made him so special:

He taught be independent and adventurous.
He taught me to think for myself
He taught me that honesty was not the best policy it was the only policy.
He taught me that knowledge was available to be had and if you obtained it
you could compete with anyone
Most importantly, he taught me, I was as good as any other person
Not better, but as good.
He also let me do things for myself at a young age, for example, I got my pilot's license at the age of seventeen and he allowed me to travel all over India alone, when I was in my early to middle teens.
He allowed me to marry for love and did not insist on an Indian parent's privilege of choosing a bride for me. This was relatively unusual four and a half decades ago. His example and advice gave me the self confidence to tackle problems, the world over and manage people of varied backgrounds and capabilities.

For all these and more I will forever be in his debt, but for God's sake, he was my Father!