Candid retelling of a life extraordinaire

Each life is actually unique – but some lives, especially those in the public sphere, have been witness to events involving them – and many among them feel compelled to share their stories. But every individual narrative is also intertwined with the world it inhabits and incorporates changes that are taking place in politics, society, sports, movies, educational and health care institutions. One learns, for example, that in the early seventies, chemotherapy, which is today the standard treatment for cancer, was not available even in AIIMS, and that the only treatment back then was cobalt therapy and radium rays.

But I am jumping the gun. Let me revert to the extraordinary story of the intrepid Kulbhushan Kain who continues to be a man of many parts: a cricket, squash and tennis player, a Bollywood movie buff, a scholar of history, a lover of pets, and a committed educationist in all avatars – teacher, principal, administrator, advisor, and mentor. Well, our protagonist was born at Falaam, a small hill station in the Chin hills of Myanmar (then Burma), where his father was a civil surgeon and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Prime Minister U Nen and Gen Ne Win, but the political turmoil of the mid-fifties saw the exodus of most Indians from Burma, a migration which did not occupy the mind-space like the partition of 1947.

Be that as it may, his father joined the cantonment hospital at Clement Town as the Chief Medical officer and the family settled down to a life of idyllic bliss which was broken when his mother passed away in 1970 and then his father two years later. By then Kulbhushan had joined the St Joseph’s Academy on the Rajpur Road which had ‘Labore Est Orare: Work is Worship’ as the herald. This was the institution which shaped his life, and even before this book came out in print, stories about the legendary science teacher GC Gupta whom he calls the ‘the Amitabh Bachan, the Lata Mangeshkar, the Sachin Tendulkar and the Roger Federer of the teaching professions’ had started appearing in the gazetteer of Dehradun – the Garhwal Post.

He then takes us back to the seventies when anyone who was reasonably bright felt that it was his solemn duty to ‘attempt the civil services’. Thus, it was that he opted to study history – and when he could not make it to St Stephens and Hindu, he joined Hans Raj, where he made lifelong friends with Rusty, who unlike him did not enjoy cricket or tennis but was passionate about flora and fauna, of which Kulbhushan was not. We also get an idea of the ragging scene when freshers were stripped down to their underwear and made to walk up to the gates of Miranda House in the middle of the night. But within a few weeks, his academic excellence and prowess in cricket, besides fluency in English and the generally genial nature allowed him to dig in his heels. He played cricket with the likes of Bishan Singh Bedi, Ram Guha, Arun Lal, Mohinder Amarnath and Surinder Khanna. The famous broadcaster Vinod Dua, a senior of his, took his interview in which he confessed to having doped with marijuana – which made his civil servant brother wild — after which he quit smoking.

What is an autobiography if it is not frank! He talks of his early, uncomfortable exposure to cabaret, his first love Anneliese about whose death in a plane crash at Gibraltar he was unaware of for several decades, his night out with Michelle, the streetwalker in Paris, his attempts at securing anticipatory bail after being accused of celebrating Pakistan’s Independence Day, the non-issues which Unions could rake up to shake the confidence of a young Principal, the failed attempts at teaching in two colleges (Satyavati evening college and DAV college Chandigarh) before moving over to the Sports school at Rai where he really found his bearing: this was a school which laid equal emphasis on sports and theatre and elocutions as it did on the academic syllabi.

And then there was the DPS, an institution which connects our family to his – for Krishna Prasad of the ICS of 1921, Rashmi’s great (maternal) grandfather was one of the founding members of the Naveen Bharat school which was started on the President’s estate in 1947. It was this school which later morphed into the DPS Mathura Road, and has now become the ubiquitous DPS brand with over 200 schools across the world.

We learn from him that the DPS society runs schools in three-layered categories. The first are the core schools – like Mathura Road and RK Puram which are run by the society itself. Then there are DPS schools set up by PSUs, like the NTPC at Farakka which was getting established when I was the DM of Murshidabad. And then there are franchisee schools which are set up by women and men of influence. These second and third category schools are ‘supervised‘ by the Central committee but have a local management. Now of course there is the DPS(G) as well, where G stands for Ghaziabad!

Two chapters are a must read. The first of these is his own recovery from a near-death experience when he was airlifted from Jaipur to New Delhi under the care of neuro physician Dr. Kohli. After being on the ventilator for over a month, he got up on his own two feet to resume playing cricket, and when he sent an SMS to the doctor dedicating one to the three runs to him, the reply from the other end was ‘This single is a century’. The other two runs were dedicated to Sangeeta, his better half, and their son, Pratique. ‘Fairies took him away’ brought tears to my eyes for while one is prepared to cope with the loss of elders, losing someone much younger is excruciating.

I strongly recommend the book, for each of the 71 chapters can be read, and reread at whatever pace, and although each one is independent in itself, it is these parts that make a whole, which in itself is part of the larger cosmic reality – for no man is an island!

In the last chapter, Looking Ahead, Where Will It End, he says: be happy with what you are good at – even if you can cobble shoes... the problem will arise when you try to be like someone else, without their skills... a rabbit must skip, and a tortoise must swim. If they interchange roles, both will fail, and again ‘we expect life to move at our pace – but that does not happen… at times it moves at breakneck speed, and others, like a snail. But we need to take greater pride in how we have adjusted to its ‘speed-ups and downs’. We need to stop at places and take rest and appreciate the beauty that life offers, enjoying with relish the sugarcanes, and the occasional cane.

The writer, a former Director of LBS National Academy of Administration, is currently a historian, policy analyst and columnist, and serves as the Festival Director of Valley of Words — a festival of arts and literature.