I always lost my way to find myself

I always lost my way in order to find myself in life. It may sound preposterous to the well-heeled and successful, however, for me, it always sounded like manna from heaven. The catchphrase ‘if you know your way around, you are bound to make it in life, has had a mortifyiing(ly) opposite effect in my thoroughly dramatic life. I never ever found anything that I set out to look for; I always found everything by losing my way in it. So when I was finding my feet at the age of four, my grandmother found that I was losing my ‘right hand’ in society because of my pronounced left-hander pre-disposition. Having been born into a traditional South Indian Brahmin family, I was made to realize that my writing and eating with the ‘left’ was a slur on our society. That is because the left hand was not God’s hand; it was the potty hand that smelt of the scum of this earth. Sooner than later, my hand was tied with a bandage of turmeric and red chilli powder, and I knew I was ‘lost’ as soon as I was born. Within a fortnight, I learnt to ‘force-feed and write’ with my right hand. I later came to know that I was a right-brain driven individual and psychologists pointed out that one should not mess with nature, when it came to matters of the brain.

Well, I now realized I had lost the plot since the signals in my mind were crossed. Being a short circuited thinker, I thought up solutions to problems that others were not wired to deduce. That my friends, is not a formula to succeed as I was to later realize in life.

As I turned a teenager, I decided to become a cricketer but the right-hand batsman and left bowler in me could never come to terms with each other. I found myself a great left-arm spin bowler but my poor batting skills got me out of the reckoning of the school cricket team. I then realized if team sport was not cut out for me, then I was determined not to lose the plot as a sportsman. I then turned to Badminton as my sport of choice and carved a niche for myself as a state school badminton player. My deft net play, my supple wrists and my drop shots became my visiting cards, my feather in the school girls’ caps. I then found that my lungs were not strong enough and my coach told me I needed daily jogging and yoga exercises for building my stamina and muscles. It was during one such yoga session in Humayun’s tomb in Delhi in the late sixties that I ran into a bunch of school boys dragging deep from a ‘lumdigo’ for that is what a cigarette was called in Lutyen’s Delhi.  One of the ‘smoking’ boys suggested it was a great way to strengthen your lungs, and I simply fell for it. Maybe I wanted to fall for it. Ever since, I became a chain smoker and unwittingly blew my ‘badminton’ career up in smoke. It was then that I came across the works of classical western poets and was particularly enamoured by what the French poet Mallarme said in one of his poems. He had pompously declared that there must be some smoke between me and my world. I was now happy to lose my way in the throes of hippiedom that had begun to rare its head in downtown Nizamuddin where I stayed. The Flower Power children had started to stream into the first Tourist Camps that sprung up adjacent to Humayun’s tomb in Nizamuddin. My weed-smoking ways helped me lose my soul to Sufidom and the Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia’s dargah became my tipping point in life.

One on of these smoking expeditions, I fell off a park bench and was taken to a doctor for first aid. Here I found another anecdote to lose my way in life. When the doctor asked me to get a blood test done, it soon emerged the next day that I tested B-ive. The doctor exclaimed that my blood group was rare and that I needed to live a positive life, in every which way.

By now, I was in senior Cambridge in school and was trying hard to find a way out of this maze of physical and intellectual negativity, so to speak. It was when I was class 11 in Delhi Public School I came to learn that I was a very insightful and gripping essay writer. This was the greatest positive feedback I got from my class mentor who was also a brilliant English teacher and her name was Dr Sanyal. She was deeply suspicious of my weed-smoking ways and would often taunt me in class about my deviant streak. One day I distinctly remember that she had given us an essay topic asking us to write an open letter to the older generation telling them about the widening generation gap. By then, I was tripping high on the ethereal sounds of Bob Dylan belting out the iconic song of our generation, “The Times they-are-a-changing.” The whole school held Dr Sanyal in great reverence since she was an authority on Shakespeare and her husband was a nature painter of international repute. More importantly, they lived in Nizamuddin, the emerging cultural repository of the country.

When on the following week our essay copies were distributed in class, I found that I had scored 8 out of 10. (The highest in class).  However, the 8 was struck off and replaced with 6. Dr Sanyal’s remark on my copy stunned me further. She wrote, ‘two marks deducted for negative thoughts’. Now, what seemed like my moment of glory had suddenly had me stumped. I ‘lost my way’ in the public humiliation and so I strongly felt. I then decided to come clean and put my point across to me mentor, however, biased she was towards me. What followed was a high-strung argument following which she fainted. As the girls in my class turned to me disdainfully with a collective ‘Oh, no’, I knew I was lost forever. The outsider tag hit me hard and the next day in class, Dr Sanyal caustically commented that she would not hesitate to ruin my life if I continued my wayfaring ways. I didn’t think she would follow-up on her threat and I left it at that. When I finally passed out of school and turned up to pick up my transfer certificate and Character Certificate I was in for the shock of my life. Dr Sanyal had issued me a certificate stating the following: “Chander Mahadev is a brilliant young man with negative tendencies in life.” This corrosive remark brought my life to a halt. I had hit a brick wall when it came to my university admission. No Delhi University college was willing to give me admission and in the process I lost one year in my pursuit of higher education.  The next year in 1972 I gave a good conduct undertaking and managed to get provisional admission in Hansraj College, in the English Honours course.

By now my dream to turn a writer had begun to take shape. The heady flower power era was beginning to consume the creative youngsters of DU, and I too was sucked into what became the hippie movement.  I didn’t realize it was time to lose my way yet again. My Professor who taught us Shakespeare told us about the bard’s negative capabilities. I was enamoured by the thought that a stable hand could write such classical plays while he was back home after a few stiff shots of barleycorn.

By the time, I graduated I was convinced writing was the way forward. It was 1975, and the black clouds of emergency hung across the Indian firmament. I lost my way in the restoration for democracy and volunteered to work for an underground English resistance newspaper named Subterranean Sun. This was my first foray into journalism of courage and I found my calling. Once the Emergency was lifted, I had done time in Tihar jail and became a rebel without a pause. Soon, I got a break in a leading English Daily and it was then I found my real self. After having spent nearly four decade as an Editor I realized I had made a positive impact in chronicling life in India. My negativity bore my fruits and even as, doom, death and devastation shook hands with me in the newsroom on a daily basis, it became my daily handmaidens to success.

At crucial turning points in my life I lost myself only to find my intuitive purpose in life. Whether my projections match your perception is something I leave up to you