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There is a particular
kind of madness that afflicts those of us who went to school together in a
small town, grew up sharing the same ‘Singadas’ and Chai, the same overbearing
teachers, and the same adolescent dreams — and then scattered to the four
winds, only to be reunited decades later on a WhatsApp group. The madness is
this: we actually believe that nothing has changed. That the boy who sat three
benches behind us is still that boy. That the girl who topped every examination
is still nervously checking her answer sheet. That time, that great leveller
and wrinkler of faces, has somehow made a polite exception in our case.
It hasn't, of course. But
the beauty of our little caravan — our Yaaron Ka Kaarvan — is that it
doesn't matter. Because what we share is not youth. What we share is something
older, deeper and considerably more indestructible than youth. We share a
story. And every member of this group is a chapter in it.
Allow me, then, to
introduce the cast. No names — where would be the fun in that? Besides, they
will know who they are. And so, I suspect, will those who know them.
The Caravan Sets Off ....
With the Generals who Defended our Frontiers
We begin, naturally, with
the man who holds the caravan together. A soldier by profession and a gladiator
by temperament, he is the kind of man whose opinion arrives before he does.
Fiercely opinionated, aggressively articulate, and possessed of a pen that cuts
like a ceremonial sword — he is the group's conscience, its provocateur, and
its unlikely glue. He will disagree with this description. Loudly. Which rather
proves the point.
Then there is his fellow
man in uniform — though this one, it must be said, wandered into the army
somewhat by accident. He is really an artist, a dreamer, a man more at home
with a paintbrush than a parade ground. He disappears for months at a time — one
suspects he is somewhere sketching a mountain or composing a haiku — and then
reappears with perfect quiz scores and a detailed itinerary for a group trip
planned precisely thirteen months in advance. The army made him disciplined.
Nature made him poetic. The combination is entirely charming.
The Admiral, The Adman, and The Ancient Reptile
No chronicle of this
group would be complete without its most beloved figure — a man who spent his
finest years navigating the seas as a naval officer, rose to the rank of
Commodore, and then, as if that were not enough, went on to command a large and
prestigious public sector organisation. What makes him extraordinary is not his
career, impressive as it is. It is his heart. He has attended every wedding,
every funeral, every moment of crisis that any member of this group has ever
faced. He arrives before he is called. He stays longer than he is needed. He
is, in the truest sense, the kind of friend that legends are made of.
Our adman, on the other
hand, makes legends of the present. If this group has a pulse, he is it. A
career in media and advertising has given him an inexhaustible supply of
content, positivity, and the curious ability to reply to every message
approximately four seconds after it is posted. On days when the group falls
silent, one only needs to wait. He will arrive, bearing links, jokes, inspiring
thoughts, and general exuberance, like a one-man festival that never quite
ends.
And then — ah, then —
there is the Crocodile. He earned this affectionate title not through any
menace but through a magnificent, unhurried stillness that has descended upon
him in his later years. In his prime, he was the class comedian, the most
enthusiastic organiser of reunions, a well-travelled businessman who had seen
more of the world than most of us had seen of our own cities. Now he basks. He
is content. He moves when he feels like it, which is rarely — unless the right
person calls. There is one member of our group who has the mysterious ability
to fetch him, rather like a faithful retriever summoning an ancient, dignified
crocodile from the riverbank. When he does appear, the group is always the
better for it.
No account of this
section would be complete without the First Lady — and I use that title with
complete sincerity. The wife of a distinguished public sector executive, she
presided over our group's gatherings in our shared hometown with the effortless
authority of someone born to host. When our caravan descended upon that small
town for a reunion, it was she who ensured that no one went unfed, unattended,
or unsmiled at. She shepherds a flock — our flock — with warmth, ebullience,
and a quiet efficiency that makes it all look entirely natural. Reunions happen
because of people like her. The rest of us merely attend.
The Global Brigade
A considerable portion of
our caravan has, over the decades, relocated beyond Indian shores — some to the
Near East, some to the Far West, and at least one who appears to be running out
of planet.
This gentleman — a
high-net-worth software professional turned businessman — has conquered so much
of the earth that one genuinely wonders what comes next. He manages hectares
farmlands that stretch as far as the eye can see, and yet he is simultaneously
to be found on another continent entirely, biking across countries or catching
flights. Mars, one imagines, is merely the next item on his itinerary. He may
even be dreaming about landing on the Titan on Neptune!
Then there is our man in what
was once a white Nation, now almost invaded by the peaceful; but deadly ethnic
group — a software professional who, after years of shuttling between homeland
and what was once considered an entirely diurnal empire, applied that most
ancient of Bania instincts — impeccable judgment about where to plant one's
roots — and settled firmly in the land of his country's former rulers. The
historical irony is delicious. He drops in at reunions like a visiting
dignitary, charming everyone, and then disappears back across the seven seas.
Our Maple leaf chapter is
represented by a man of many talents — a gifted mastermind and designer who
built beautiful things in India before deciding that the ‘True North’ suited
him rather better. He is a cheerful presence at reunions when he makes them,
and is distinguished by a hobby so magnificently unusual that one must pause to
admire it: he collects matchbox labels. Not stamps. Not coins. Not medals.
Matchbox labels. He is, apparently, the only phillumenist most of us will ever
know. In a world of collectors, he has found the road less travelled, lit a
match, and followed it.
Then there is the other
Bania — and here one must tread carefully, because to call him a Bania in the
conventional sense would be a grave injustice to the man. Where the community
is celebrated for its legendary prudence with money, this gentleman is its most
glorious exception. He is generous to a fault, gentlemanly to the core, and
possessed of a romantic sensibility that would make poets envious. He built
businesses, bought businesses, sold businesses — with the quiet, lethal
efficiency of a grandmaster who makes it all look effortless. And then, having
thoroughly conquered the commercial world, he retired to a life of magnificent
leisure — yachting, kayaking, trekking up mountains, dividing his time between
continents with the nonchalance of someone for whom geography is merely a minor
inconvenience. He is, by some distance, the most romantic member of our group.
To be shamelessly honest, I indulge in cadging him occasionally to cover my
fiscal deficits.
Our Detroit pioneer
deserves special mention — she was among the very first of our group to make
the leap to America, doing so in the late nineteen-eighties when such a move
required considerably more courage than it does today. She settled in the Motor
City and built a distinguished career in the automotive industry. The girl who
always sat in the front row of class went straight to the front row of the
American dream.
And then there is the man
in the Middle East — quiet, modest, and by all accounts one of the physically
fittest people in our entire group, which considering the competition is no
small achievement. He was a front bencher in class whose brilliance kept the
room thoroughly illuminated, did a stint with a public sector undertaking, and
then found his calling in instrumentation - a precise, demanding field that
suits his precise, observant temperament perfectly. He is a silent watcher, a
man who absorbs everything and reveals little. I have had a particular fondness
for him since our school days, and I suspect that those who know him well
consider themselves quietly fortunate.
The Ladies of Quiet Grace
Any honest account of
this group must pause, slow its pace, and speak with particular tenderness of
certain women whose stories deserve more than they have been given by the
world.
There is the one who was
academically brilliant beyond measure — the kind of student of whom teachers
say, in hushed and admiring tones, that she could have been anything. She
chose, instead, to be everything to those who needed her. An entire generation
of ageing relatives — parents, aunts, elders — found in her a tireless,
selfless anchor. The group has grown quieter for her in recent years. But those
who know her understand that her silence contains more wisdom than most
people's words.
There is the central
banker who carries within her the ghost of an extraordinary career that
circumstance gently redirected. Quiet in a crowd, razor-sharp in private
conversation, she was once spoken of as a future titan of Indian industry.
Life, with its habitual indifference to such predictions, had other plans. She
bears this with a grace that is, frankly, humbling.
And then there is the one
who refused — magnificently, stubbornly, inspiringly refused — to be confined
by the smallness of her surroundings. She nudged her husband out of their
semi-rural comfort zone, flew to the Far East, earned advanced degrees and a
doctorate in new age studies, and built a thriving healthcare practice from
scratch. She did not break through the glass ceiling. She simply walked through
the wall.
The Professionals, The Free Spirits, One Magnificent Baroness and a Vanished
Mystery
Our professional brigade
is formidable. A missile man — quite literally, a man who helped manufacture
BrahMos, one of the world's most feared supersonic cruise missiles — has
retired to tend to his elderly mother in his village and to sing Kishore Kumar songs
with a voice of surprising beauty. A man of absolute precision in his
professional life, he brings that same precision to his friendships and never
misses a reunion.
A distinguished IIM
alumnus who spent decades at the summit of Indian corporate life has hung up
his official shoes and now divides his time between consulting and music —
driven always by logic over emotion, and blessed with a tolerance for the
group's various eccentricities that borders on the saintly.
And then there is our Textile Baroness — and if the previous
portraits were studies in quiet grace, this one is a study in magnificent
presence. She began as a business executive, married into an entrepreneurial
family of considerable standing in the textile city of the South, and then —
with the calm deliberateness of someone who always knew exactly what she was
doing — became a formidable entrepreneur in her own right. She today commands a
large group of companies that are, among other things, in textiles. The 'among
other things' is doing considerable work in that sentence. Three words describe
her with complete accuracy: Affluence. Eloquence. Grace. She carries all three
simultaneously, effortlessly, and without the slightest suggestion of effort.
Then there is the RevOps
Romeo — a title he has thoroughly earned. He was, in school and college, a
young man of considerable charm and romantic inclination, which meant that
academics occasionally played second fiddle to matters of the heart. After a
period of finding his direction, he flew abroad — first to the Near East, then
onward to the United States — and reinvented himself spectacularly as a Revenue
Operations professional who now heads a Client Acquisition Team. The poetry of
this is not lost on those of us who remember him: the boy who spent his younger
years acquiring hearts is now, professionally and triumphantly, in the business
of acquiring clients. Some skills, it turns out, are entirely transferable.
Our ‘once’ melodious
pathologist is a woman of quiet, enduring grace. She was among the most
studious of our classmates in school, and possessed of a singing voice that
made school events considerably more worth attending. Her school journey was
interrupted in the late seventies — life has a way of rearranging one's plans —
but she persevered, went on to study medicine, and today runs her pathology
laboratory with the same quiet dedication she has brought to everything she has
ever done. She participates in the group with perfect calibration — never too
much, never too little, always exactly right. Universally liked is an overused
phrase. In her case, it happens to be entirely accurate.
And then there is the one
I think of as the eternal wanderer — a man whose academic journey was, shall we
say, non-linear. He began as our senior, became our junior through the
philosophical mechanism of trivializing examinations, visited our class for a
year, and somehow in the process became one of us permanently. He went on to
serve in the military, acquired considerable technical expertise, and has now retired
as an aviation MRO professional — maintaining aircraft engines and keeping
airports operational/ The boy who dismissed his exams as inconsequential, had
until recently, in the most literal sense possible, kept aircrafts in the sky.
There is a life lesson in there somewhere, and it is an extremely encouraging
one. We all learnt from him what to do in an exigency- Simply ‘Parget’
Our singing dynamo — and
there is no other word for her — has recorded somewhere in the region of three
thousand songs on a social media platform. Three thousand. She is ebullient,
dynamic, fiercely independent, devoted to social causes, and constitutionally
incapable of a dull moment. She is the group's permanent celebration. She seems
to alternate between ‘the overseas Doaba, Trumpland and Modiland. Last heard to
have tried a forcible entry into Mr Yedukondalavada’s abode! Wonder if she
finally met Mr Venkat!
And then there is the
mystery. A Silicon Valley veteran who blazed through the technology industry's
most exciting decades, lived a full and eventful life, and then — vanished.
Last reported somewhere in the California hills, possibly on a ranch, definitely
unreachable. Her WhatsApp ticks stubbornly remain single. Her LinkedIn has not
been updated. She has, it appears, retired not merely from work but from
visibility itself. We miss her. We also slightly envy her.
Those We Carry With Us
A caravan, to be honest,
must also carry its absences.
Two members of our group
are no longer with us. One — the class comedian, a mechanical engineer who
reinvented himself in the software world and lived with joyful, generous
abandon — was taken by the cruelties of the Covid winter of 2021. The other, a
senior government officer on the very cusp of a well-earned retirement, a man
who danced with his wife at every reunion with the unself-conscious joy of
someone who understood that life's pleasures are not to be postponed — was
taken on an ordinary Monday morning in January of this year, during a walk.
Just a walk. Fate, when it is cruel, is very cruel indeed.
They are not absent from
this caravan. They travel with us still — in the laughter that echoes a little
of theirs, in the dances we remember, in the spaces at the reunion table that
we set and do not speak of.
And Finally — The Hillranger
Every caravan needs a few to bring up the rear, keep a quiet count of the stragglers, and write
it all down afterwards. That, for better or worse, is me for one.
I am a freelancer in a
plethora of trades, revivals being one of them and a writer by compulsion —
though I am told I say considerably more on paper than I ever do in person,
which my classmates will confirm with some amusement. I am done with serious
work and am now on “AMC” mode in the revived entities. I have a village home amidst
lush green fields, a trust that tends to a temple and the children of the
tehsil, a humble hut up the hills near some prehistoric caves where I collect Jadi-booti,
and a blog called Meadows where I deposit my observations.
And we have this group.
This magnificent, improbable, irreplaceable group of people who went to school
together in a small town, scattered across the globe, and somehow — against all
odds, across all distances — kept finding their way back to each other.
The Caravan Goes On
यारों का कारवाँ चला, कारवाँ
चला.
The years have passed.
The hair has silvered. The knees have opinions. But the caravan — this
extraordinary caravan of soldiers and admirals, admen and crocodiles, missile
men and matchbox collectors, RevOps Romeos and melodious pathologists, singing
dynamos and vanishing acts, First Ladies and eternal wanderers, quiet heroines
and global wanderers — rolls on.
And it will keep rolling.
Because that is what caravans do.
Because that is what
friends do.
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