At a lecture last month at the India International Centre in Delhi, Gurcharan Das spoke from the heart about the dilemmas of an Indian liberal. “I am the man in the middle,” he said, “with no one to vote for.” Neither side likes him, he explained. The Right hasn’t forgiven him for being critical of demonetization. The Left contemptuously calls him a ‘market-walla’, constantly ranting about the reforms. In today’s polarized India, he is neither bhakt, nor Congressia. “It’s a lonely place to be a classical liberal,” he said.
The same honesty characterizes Gurcharan Das’ new book, a memoir titled Another Sort of Freedom. His message is upfront, in the dedication: “To the happy few, who don’t take themselves too seriously.” His motto follows from it: “To live lightly, not like a feather but like a bird.” The book itself is funny, moving, and at times provocative. It is also filled with thoughtful introspection.
His story begins in Lyallpur, Punjab, in undivided India where he was born during the second World War when “Hitler, Churchill and Hirohito were bashing everyone around.” His life’s journey is never dull, mirroring in many ways the story of independent India. There are strange twists in his life from the chaos of the Partition to misguided attempts at winning over first loves. Setting out to become an engineer, he ends up studying philosophy with the great political philosopher, John Rawls, at Harvard University. He then abandons a promising academic career in ivy-covered halls to sell Vicks VapoRub in India’s dusty bazaars. This leads him to the CEO’s position at Procter & Gamble India. Then one day, at the peak of a successful corporate career, he walks away to become a writer and public intellectual.
There are two influences running through the memoir. One is his mother, who keeps reminding him that he will have to ‘make a living’ one day. The other is of his spiritual father, telling him to ‘make a life’. One of his early memories is of running home from his kindergarten class in Model Town, Lahore, brandishing a report card. Standing at the door, his mother asks if he has come first in class. His father, standing nearby, corrects her. “That was the wrong question,” he tells his wife. "Ask him what he enjoys in school. Does he like to draw? Does he like stories?”
At seventeen, Das wins an undergraduate scholarship to Harvard University. When he is boarding a flight at Palam airport, his mother, with tears in her eyes, reminds him to study something useful. She wants him to become an engineer, like his father. But the course catalogue at Harvard blows his mind and he forgets his mother’s advice. He takes courses in Greek tragedy, the Russian novel, Renaissance painting, Rise of Capitalism, Bauhaus architecture, Beethoven. He even takes a course in Sanskrit love poetry. When his mother learns that he is studying Sanskrit, she wails, “A dead language - only the dead will give him a job!” His father consoles her, saying that he is ‘making a life’ through books. The twists in his life, you realize, are a product of the two influences.
“What is that other sort of freedom in the title of the book?” we asked him. Speaking softly, Das explains that his life has been a struggle to break free from the expectations of family, society, but mostly of himself – from the burdens of vanity, of wanting to be somebody, not a nobody. Out of this struggle arose his aspiration to live lightly, not take himself too seriously. It is a novel interpretation of moksha. For the traditional, religious person, moksha is liberation from desire and from birth and rebirth. “But I don’t know if there is life after death,” he says. “Besides, I happen to like and enjoy desire, and so I settled for a modest, natural meaning of moksha.” Thus, ‘another sort of freedom’ is self-forgetting, living lightly with a diminished ego.
For Das, this other sort of freedom is also the secret of happiness. “When I’m absorbed in my writing, I find I quickly forget myself. (Sachin) Tendulkar once said something similar. When he was asked, how did it feel when he was approaching his famous double century at the end of his career? He replied, ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t even there. The ball had become so big and the bat had become so big, the bat just had to hit the ball.’ That’s another sort of freedom. If you can free yourself from expectations, from your ego, you have inner freedom.”
India's journey
While tracing his journey, Das maintains a parallel narrative, constantly commenting on the nation’s journey. He was a socialist growing up during Nehru’s age of hope. When he began working in the private sector, he realized the monstrous command economy that Nehru had unwittingly created. At one point, he became a victim of the Licence Raj. Then, he abandoned socialism, and joined the Swatantra Party, the classical liberal party. He comes down hard on Indira Gandhi – not just for the Emergency, but also because she did not change course economically. By the 1970s, the Asian Tigers had risen, and they had shown a different path to economic success. For him, therefore, 1991 was like Diwali: India had finally won its economic freedom.
After leaving corporate life, he travelled around the country. From these travels emerged, India Unbound, the first book to predict the rise of India. “And India has obliged by rising,” he says. “In fact, it went on to become one the fastest growing economies in the world. It was bizarre, however, to see prosperity spreading but the government failing to deliver governance and other basic public services. India seemed to be rising despite the state. India’s was a tale of private success and public failure.” So, he wrote "India grows at night when the government sleeps." It was going to be the title of his new book, but his publishers thought it insulting, and it appeared as India Grows at Night. This is when he realized the importance of the state, and shifted from a laissez-faire, libertarian position of the previous decades to become an old-fashioned classical liberal.
Das writes that he had grown up believing in Nehru’s idea of a plural India -- the opposite of a 19th century European nation-state based on a single religion, language, and ethnicity. But Nehru’s lot failed to appreciate that India also had an ancient civilizational unity, whose values resonated with the masses. This failure helped to revive Hindu nationalists. This is unfortunate, according to Das. While dreaming of a grand civilizational state, Hindu nationalists are, in fact, trying to create a narrow-minded, identity-based European nation-state – a sort of Hindu Pakistan.
This book brings to a close the author’s search for a flourishing life based on the classical ideal of four goals of life – the purusharthas. His earlier books explored the first three aims. India Unbound was the first, on the goal of artha or material well-being. In The Difficulty of Being Good, he examined dharma, moral well-being, and Kama: the Riddle of Desire delved into the third aim of desire and pleasure. This final one on the fourth aim of moksha, offering a natural, non-transcendental view of human freedom.
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