During one of our weekend meet-ups, my psychologist Kuldeep Datay asked of me what I thought was a simple question: Who is your hero?
I have two. Formula 1 racing legend Ayrton Senna and Christiaan Barnard, the South African doctor who conducted the first human heart transplant. From the time I was a boy, between the both of them, they epitomized everything I wanted to be.
Senna’s nickname was Magic. With good reason. He drove like magic. How could any human drive like that? I carried pictures of him everyplace with me. Car magazines that detailed stories of his exploits on the racing track against his rivals Alain Prost and the then upcoming Michael Schumacher filled my rucksack. My laptop had his image plastered as the wallpaper.
I would have given an arm and a leg to watch Senna go head to head against the clinical machine that was Schumacher. In the few races that they did get close, Senna’s driving prowess drove Schumacher’s crazy, and his car oftentimes into the wall.
Then there was Dr Barnard. I don’t think I will ever forget that one night I was up flipping through the pages of Reader’s Digest at my ancestral home in Fort Kochi. I stumbled across the story of how the first human heart transplant was conducted. As stories go, what a story it was. By then, it was clear in my mind when I come of age, I would grow up to be a surgeon in the class of Dr Barnard who worked magic like Senna.
Fate had other plans and led me to a fun pit called the newsroom. Here too, in my head, through all of these years, I tried to write and edit stories imagining myself to be somebody as crazy as Senna and Dr Barnard.
“Then” asked Datay, smiling. “Where is Charles Assisi? Have you found him?”
The question had me stumped. He went on to explain that people often latch on to a single personality or two. They idolize them and gloss over their own frailties. Why? Why not start on a clean sheet instead and find who you really are and what you stand for? Thought embedded, I went home.
It’s been a few weeks now. An exercise has begun. I haven’t concluded it. But I think I get the import of Kuldeep’s question. This exercise will last a lifetime. So, while Senna and Dr Barnard will stay in my head, more people need to be examined and added. Who knows? Some may have to be purged at some point as well as I go along. Senna and Barnard included. Now, there are no holy cows.
What follows is a list in no particular order. It is not a comprehensive one either. Just a few jottings around some people from my diary as I go about compiling traits I would like to cultivate and those that I want to cull out of myself.
Abraham Lincoln
The true measure of Lincoln’s greatness may well be known to most Americans. But to me, the magnitude of what he accomplished and the complexities he had to deal with were first revealed by K. Ram Kumar, who used to sit on the board of directors at ICICI Bank. He chose to give it up to pursue a personal passion.
Lincoln took over as president of the US at a time when the southern belt was opposed to his candidature for presidency. They threatened to secede from the Union and said a civil war would ensue on the back of a promise he had made if he came to office—that he would abolish slavery.
That Lincoln eventually managed to pull it off is one thing. But after he assumed office, he drafted the support of three cabinet ministers. The real story lies there. All of them had run against his candidature. It was political genius at its best and complexity at its peak.
Ram Kumar introduced me to the nuances of these settings through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Team of Rivals. Steven Spielberg made a movie out of it as well. It took Goodwin 10 years to research what could possibly have gone through Lincoln’s mind. How he managed the conflicts and put in place the foundations of what is now a superpower continues to keep me riveted and in awe of the man. While the movie is an outstanding one, may I assure you that the hours and days invested in the book will be time well invested.
Babasaheb Ambedkar
The more I read about him, the more I am convinced what an ungrateful lot us Indians are. Platitudes are mouthed in his name, but what has really come of his vision? Come to think of it, how does a man from the lowest strata of society—the Mahar community (or untouchables)—in 1891 grow up to earn doctorates in economics both from Columbia and the London School of Economics? How did he campaign and negotiate for India’s independence? How did he evolve into the statesman who drafted the Constitution of India in the finest traditions of democracy?
If Ambedkar had his way, India would by now had a uniform civil code in place. Article 370 of the Constitution, which he opposed so vehemently and which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, would never have been a contentious issue.
Way back then, he had the foresight to bluntly tell Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah: “You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply your food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India. But the Government of India should have only limited powers and Indian people should have no rights in Kashmir. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India and I, as the law minister of India, will never do it.”
Sheikh Abdullah circumvented him and approached Nehru, the ball went into the hands of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and between the both of them, they quietly acquiesced. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Patel, the so-called Iron Man of India, let Ambedkar down.
Worse still, while Nehru could see the merit in the Hindu Code Bill Ambedkar had crafted and that it held the potential to elevate the status of women in Hindu society, when the moment of reckoning came, he caved in to pressure both from the Congress and the emerging Sangh Parivar. Amedkar had the vision to see the fissures all of these issues could cause India. It was glossed over.
Nobody had the spunk then. Nobody among the current lot of India’s elected leaders has the spunk either. If only they had a fraction of what Ambedkar had!
Mohandas Gandhi
I am not a Gandhian. I refuse to be one. And I refuse to address Gandhi as Mahatma either. That out of the way, if my personal interpretation of him is correct, he was among the shrewdest men India has ever seen.
By the time the British had colonized India, Gandhi figured out that if India needed freedom, violent opposition was not an option. The British empire would have crippled the fight even before it started. That is why the non-violent movement. It was, for all practical purposes, guerilla warfare of the kind Sun Tzu would have approved of. The British, with all the arms and monies in their hands, hadn’t encountered opposition in this guise. They didn’t know how to deal with it.
And so, in spite of the ideological differences that existed between Ambedkar and Gandhi, much like Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, in a strange way, they worked towards the same goal. Like I articulated above, what I admire about Gandhi is not his so-called austerity or ahimsa as a principle, but the fact that he deployed it tactically.
Gandhi had the patience to frustrate the bollocks out of any army and the charm to beguile masses of people into following his perverted logic. I suspect, if in his reckoning taking up arms would have been a better way to go about things, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do that either.
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris
I know it is terribly unfair to club all three of these intellectual powerhouses into one bucket. But I do it because between the three of them, they challenged all of the notions I was weaned on as a young boy growing up in a traditional Catholic family. They compelled me to question all of the Abrahamic gods I was taught to worship.
One thing led to another until I threw all of the texts I was weaned on. They compelled me to question authority—obnoxiously so if required—and put me on the path to freedom from the oppression that is religion in all its forms.
Elon Musk
I cannot help but watch this man and his crazy ambitions with awe. After a string of failures, including one where he was ousted as co-founder at PayPal, this man thought up Tesla, an electric car that is now part of the mainstream. But what gets my attention, and pardon my expression, is that he has the gumption to put his monies into a projects that can potentially help humans colonize Mars. Incidentally, he happens to be the 83rd richest man now and is a darling in Silicon Valley. His ambitions and audacity are to die for.
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My list can go on and on.
But it’s time I pause and plant a thought. One of the most compelling lessons I learnt recently is that when somebody makes a point, imagine yourself to be a trial lawyer. Then argue against yourself to demolish your arguments. At the end of the exercise, does your position still stand? If you do, you got something to fight for. Else, go back and rethink.
If I were to do that, a few things emerge right away.
Senna died young. He needn’t have. What Senna fanatics like me think of as magic was actually reckless. Much the same can be said about Damon Hill, who was propelled into the limelight after Senna died and had to take Schumacher head on.
Their rivalry is legendary and I rooted for Hill. He was as crazy as Senna. Schumacher-baiters like me always thought of him as clinical. But it was actually a mind ticking away—learning from each failure. So much so that he thought Schumacher slammed Hill for “purely dangerous driving” while Hill laughed it off and claimed “I only made it hard for him to pass”. “Take that Schumi,” I would high-five with my pals.
In hindsight, there is no taking away that Schumacher is revered as among the greatest drivers that ever lived. A little after his retirement in 2012, a tragic skiing accident in December 2013 sent him into a coma and his fans sobbing with sorrow. And I confess to a lump in my throat now that we will never know if this man will ever walk unaided again. Since his exit, Formula 1 races don’t feel the same. His current condition is shrouded in secrecy.
Dr Barnard was a sex maniac. His personal life was miserable and he often used to taunt his third wife Karin about not being able to keep up with the prowess that Viagra conferred on him. He would go jaunting all over and bed as many women as he possibly could. He loved the limelight and the attention his exploits on the surgical table conferred upon him. He eventually dumped Karin for a 28-year-old Viennese medical student.
Lincoln had a penchant for dirty jokes and took his presidency a little too seriously. What popular history overlooks is that anybody who stood in his way was trampled over. So much so that he holds the record for any American president who shut the most newspapers, arrested political rivals, censored pretty much every mail and executed the most American citizens without trial.
As for Amedkar, in spite of his Dalit origins, he looked down upon Adivasi tribes. He thought them inferior beings. In his writings, his describes them as “the aboriginal tribes of India... Why has no attempt been made to civilize these aborigines to lead them to make a more honorable way of living?” These parts of history have been conveniently airbrushed. Surprisingly, he didn’t see any dichotomy in that.
While on Gandhi, like I said earlier, I refuse to call him Mahatma because he was plain stupid and perverse. He let his wife Kasturba die of bronchial pneumonia and adamantly declined to administer her with penicillin—but treated her with water from the Ganga and said “let god’s will be done”.
I would have forgiven him if he had applied the same principles to himself. But six weeks after she died, he came down with malaria and when wracked by pain, he didn’t let god’s will be done. Instead, he took the doctor’s advice and consumed quinine.
When it came to him, his “bankruptcy of my faith” argument did not hold. And how can we not deplore his shameful experiments when he slept naked with teenage girls to “test his chastity”? For that matter, how about his friendship with Hitler, to whom he wrote letters where he signed off, “Your sincere friend”?
As for the trinity of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, when looked at from a dispassionate prism, how different are they from any religious fanatic? Most recently, for instance, I tuned in to watch a conversation between Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, a New Age spiritual guru whom I personally despise as a charlatan.
I was hoping to watch a demolition. But to Chopra’s credit, for all of Dawkins’ aggressive posturing, he confused Dawkins with mumbo jumbo.
Waking Up, a book by Harris that I am now reading tries to explain why spirituality and religion need not necessarily be tied together. I am still to complete it—but whatever little I have isn’t impressive enough.
The problem with the trio is their posturing and is best exemplified in a tweet Dawkins once put out: “Religion is an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” What comes across as stupid to my mind is that the trio think it stupid that their ideas cannot be challenged. How much more arrogant can any human get?
I cannot speak for Hitchens now that he is dead. But Dawkins and Harris are certainly sexist and have on public forums implicitly stated men are more drawn to atheism than women—in language that is nothing but demeaning of women and their intelligence.
Then there is Musk. Sure, he now wears the crown of the next Steve Jobs. But he is as cranky as Jobs as well. Like most successful people, there are unsubstantiated stories of him leading a rather peculiar personal life. He takes criticism personally. When his stock prices take a hammering on Wall Street, it cuts him deep. He needs to be lavished with praise. When journalists who have test-driven his cars give it bad ratings, he comes out in the open and accuses them of having vested interests to drag his company’s stock prices down. Then there are other quirks that can fill a book.
Now that the trial lawyer in me has argued around the frailties of all these men, do they still stand to scrutiny?
Well, let me put it this way. They are human. They have frailties. I get Kuldeep’s larger point in that it would be rather silly on my part to revere or emulate one or two of them. Instead, what if I were to pick a few traits from each of these people that appeal the most to me and reject everything else they stand for? What if I were to stay at work on those traits and keep adding to my repertoire as I meet new people, and subtract the undesirable as I travel the distance that is life?
Eventually, I may just find the Charles Assisi I want to be. Or maybe I might just die trying. But at least it’s worth giving it a shot.
I know one thing for sure—the day my wife stops reading these pieces I write, at the end of which she shakes her head, looks at me and mutters “dongi” (fraudster), I will stop work on this series.
This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday. All copy rights vest with Mint and may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor
