Appa was simply an extraordinary man. He was somebody who was ahead of his times, he was somebody who was fearless, somebody who reinvented himself time and again throughout and right until his passing away. He was truly a lifelong learner and a self-made man.

He was also somebody who was short-tempered who could fly off the handle. People were equally afraid and respectful of him.

He was a fantastic organizer, could inspire lots of people to follow his ideas and to implement them, and equally burn his bridges and ruin relationships.

He was extremely perceptive, he had a great sense of humor, he could be the soul of a party. He was a great host when he chose to be, and equally he was completely withdrawn when he felt cut off.

He had jet black hair right until his passing day. It’s amazing that how black his hair was and he didn’t use any dye.

He would write these letters to my mother from Doha when he was living there alone and she was living in Chennai. And these would be detailed instructions on how to take care of the house. It’s incredible that he could write such long, detailed letters on, you know, the care of the house.

Equally that carried forward to his correspondence with me, for instance long, detailed letters both in terms of what’s happening in my life as well as what’s happening in his.

I think at the heart he loved learning and he loved kindling curiosity in others. He was a deeply curious man himself and I think being with children really brought that out in him. And he— his own first son, which was my brother, was his, I think, his pet project in some sense. He poured everything into him.

And Rajesh inherited the same sense of curiosity, fearlessness, and temper from my father.

He sadly ended up alienating himself from the family. And yet, when he passed away, a large group of people traveled across several hundreds of kilometers to come and attend his funeral. And these were what I would call his second family, part of a group that he started called Vidyarambam, and it was something that really touched people’s lives and they were obviously moved and came all the way. And they said, “Can you please wait until we get there before you cremate him?” And they landed just in time.

He was someone who was misunderstood and judged by his immediate family, but deeply loved and respected by his other family, so to speak.

As a father, he was extremely perceptive, forward-looking, and hugely empowering. He made both of us highly independent and self-sufficient very early in our lives and he taught us so many small, small things that made a huge difference in our lives.

For him education was very important, and as somebody who never went to college himself, he poured the last ten years of his life into building these small schools and study centers across Tamil Nadu. And it became a movement of its own. Quite a man.

Our relationship had several phases. I think the earliest phase in childhood was I think a typical son’s love for his father, where the father could do absolutely nothing wrong. Placed him on a pedestal, he was… this awesome man who could do anything and none of it would be wrong.

Of course, later on when reality caught up and I saw him in a more multi-dimensional aspect, as then it was… what shall I say… hard to come to terms with. Disappointing, maybe even a little confusing I think.

When I was really young, I used to I think love imitating him, sitting next to him, try and do the kinds of things he would do—his mannerisms, his way of speaking. He taught me how to fold clothes and I do them exactly the way he taught me even now.

He taught me how to fold a piece of paper to find its midpoint so that when you place it in the punching hole machine, the holes would be absolutely symmetrical and not lopsided.

I learned how to make notes as one read a book. All his books had underlined words and the meanings, so he would check the meanings of every single word that he didn’t understand. There were no word he would let go of because he didn’t understand it, and that’s a remarkable quality. And I think that was the case with anything in his life—he wouldn’t let go of something he wouldn’t understand. His desire was to understand it.

Very early on I became his listening post, his counselor of sorts. We would sit upstairs on the terrace of this house that he built and he would talk to me about his relationship with my mother, which was often one of being misunderstood by her. And this would be hours long—two, three hours at a stretch over several evenings over several years.

And I would just listen. I would just sit there listening to him talk about how misunderstood he felt in his marriage. So this clearly colored things because I came to see him as this rational man who’s trying his best and was misunderstood by his wife. And I came to start seeing my mother as this irrational person who was uncooperative and not helping to my father to support him in what he was attempting to do.

Clearly not something that a child should take on. He really should have found a counselor or therapist to go to to sort through these things, but he found a willing listener in me and he poured it into me, just as much as he poured his practical, creative, doing things into my older brother. He poured his misgivings, his feeling of not being understood and wanting to be listened to with me.

Fast forward all the way to the last few days of his life. He had a stroke and I was called because he was living alone and one of his staff noticed that he had fallen on the floor and they called me. And I went over, I picked him up and took him to the nearest hospital.

And it was a confusing time for me because I had to take charge and I had to be responsible for his care at that time. My brother was in the US and he said “Whatever decision you take I’ll support you, and you decide what you need to do.”

I saw that he was deeply uncomfortable in the hospital and there wasn’t any active care being given. So I pulled him out and I said “Okay, we’ll go to what I trust,” which is Ayurveda. And we went to our doctor who takes… who was taking care of us in all ways, the entire family, and admitted him in an Ayurveda hospital.

And he improved quite a bit over a space of 24 to 36 hours. And that time was also my time to physically care for him, nurse him. People came to see him and you could see the old Rangu, as he was called, emerge again.

And I think his face brightened the most when my brother landed up. When my brother heard that he’d had his second stroke, he immediately took the next flight. He sort of later said that “I figured that he was unlikely to survive a second stroke and he wanted to see his father,” he just took a flight and he came over. And immediately my father brightened up. I think some part of him was waiting for his son to turn up.

That evening, my brother and I swapped places in the sense that I went back home and he stayed overnight. And I got a call at some 3 in the morning saying my father had passed away in his sleep and his oldest son was next to him as it happened.

I think it was the most beautiful end for him, and I think it was the right thing for my brother as well. In a sense, my brother was his—the apple of his eye, and and later on in life, Rajesh was the one who challenged him the most. They had the most craziest of falling out and fights and and anger and harsh words exchanged.

Well, I would say to my father’s credit, he never really hit back at my brother. He absorbed it. He had this capacity to absorb this anger that came from my brother towards him later on. And his responses were: A, either very patient in—at one level, and two, maybe turning it into a lesson for my brother to learn from. And when none of that worked, to withdraw and protect himself.

So I’m really glad that it happened the way it happened. It was the right end for him, and for him to spend the last few hours with somebody that he loved deeply and whose respect he wanted and had lost. I think the loss of respect from his sons was the deeply injurious for him.

And I think he kind of licked those wounds in private, quietly, and maybe poured it into his work much later. But I’m glad that there was some healing of things before his passing away with both of us. What remains unfinished with my father? I don’t know. I’m sure there is something. I haven’t really written about him much in my blog. It’s something I’ve stayed away from. Maybe I’m afraid of what it might open up. And this is actually the first time talking so much about him.

If my father’s early…evening sessions with me… kind of… prejudiced me against my mother, I… think later on in life, in my 30s and 40s, both some of the things that he did and how my mother… held it… kind of turned me against him in some sense. So… in a sense I got turned against one parent or the other at two different stages of my life. And I found myself, despite that, not really taking sides, but… well, not quite true, I did take sides.

And it was… one particular instance of taking sides that really, I think, broke his heart. In some sense he brought it upon himself with some curious choices he made of… wanting to help people, turning that into… the choice of people that… he would help would be these young girls. By young girls I mean… you know… people in their 20s or… younger than him basically, and whom he thought he… would support in different ways… financially, emotionally… practically. And obviously in a marriage this is not something that’s understood or accepted.

I could see where the impulse came from: it was his deep desire to have a daughter which he didn’t, and that was the… driving force of what he did. But in a society those kinds of actions are… just… asking for trouble. And… he got into that kind of trouble, at least with his immediate family, whether it be his wife, his sons, his… maybe even his siblings or… nephews and nieces.

But the remarkable thing about my father was he was unapologetic about it. He was absolutely sure of the motive of his actions and he stood by them. And he said, “If the world won’t understand me, that won’t stop me from doing what I’m doing.” And there was this extraordinary clarity on his part, but there was also this deep injury from having his motive questioned.

And… confused as I was, I felt it necessary to support my mother through this, and… I wrote a letter which was not supposed to be read by him, but which my mother weaponized. She took it up, without my knowledge, and showed it to him, and that fractured our relationship forever.

There is this book called The House of Blue Mangoes written by David Davidar and… it’s a story of a father who… has two sons, and… if I remember right, one of them dies in battle, the other one… is more… sensitive and not somebody who takes to fighting, and is deeply misunderstood by the father or feels deeply misunderstood by his father.

This younger son comes back much later with his own son back to this house, and in his own interactions with his son… which are fraught… he… comes to this moment where he… says, “I have become my father.” And I think sometimes our life stories are like that: they come full circle through generations. And in many ways I find myself in a similar position as my father was… at this stage of my life.

I think the places where I would consciously have chosen a different path from him is one with regard to temper and anger. And that’s a very early decision when I saw both my brother and my father, that this is not how I want to be. So that has remained, though I do get angry, of course, and when I do, it’s a quick flash of temper and it can be very sharp. But so I’m not sure that, you know, the inheritance has been cut off. I think it’s come through in some way or the other, but it’s not the same and I know it’s not the same.

I’ve also consciously chosen not to burden my children with the troubles of my life. It’s been a very conscious decision again. And all of my inner work that I have done has been to take responsibility for my own self and not try and spill it out onto my children.

The third thing I wanted to end was end a cycle of violence in some sense. I have not spoken about it, but there was some domestic violence in the family as I grew up. And that’s something that I have been conscious of as these things tend to go from one generation to the other and I have wanted to be the one that would break it from my previous generation to the next.

What do I want mostly inherited from? A lifelong love for learning, a capacity to reinvent myself at any stage of life with resilience, an ability to see potential in the other and to empower them, and this extraordinary capacity to give generously. When he gave of himself, he was just overflowing and I think that is something that I hope would express itself in my own life in some way.