 | Guest Column PG Rama Rao |
It was the most embarrassing, amusing and alarming drive in my life. I had just received Prof. J.T. Hansen and his wife, Sharon, at Bhubaneswar airport and we were driving to Hotel Oberoi. I had engaged a taxi from the local travel agency to go to the airport.
The taxi behaved normally on our way to the airport but the sight of the airport and the thought of the flying vehicles might have worked mischief on the mind of our ‘pedestrian’ vehicle, for the horn sounded incessantly all the way from the airport to Hotel Oberoi and the poor driver could do nothing about it. Everybody on the road looked at us with alarm and concern as if our car were a police vehicle or an ambulance. We laughed all the way to cover up or laugh away our embarrassment.
On our way to The Oberoi, I suggested a brief halt at our house in Acharya Vihar. The Hansens agreed enthusiastically. It was one of those days of religious significance when nice dishes are offered to the deities at the time of worship. My wife felt happy that we had guests and there were nice dishes approved by the gods, who had already tasted them during worship. I was apprehensive that the Hansens might not eat them on the ground of immunity consideration.
Lots of Americans carry their own mineral water and many NRI’s make a fuss of calories. I attended quite a few NRI parties, in which the hosts put up notices listing the items of the menu with the number of calories against each. It looked like a hospital menu prepared under the watchful eye of a dietician. I was a guest at any number of American parties where there were no such notices ringing alarm bells. Well, an Indian in England is more British than the British, and in America, he is not only more American than the Americans but far ahead of them into the streamlined scientific society of the future.
I was pleasantly surprised when the Hansens accepted our offerings even as our deities had. I asked Tim if they were not worried about problems of immunity. He laughed and answered: “Why should we? Won’t your deities grant us protection?”
“Rare faith! With such faith how could your immunity suffer? I said.
My wife joined in reassuringly: “In our country, the guests are treated as gods. This is God’s food and won’t affect your immunity.”
An hour later, our arrival at The Oberoi, trumpeted loudly and long, caused considerable commotion in the hotel and its neighbourhood
Prof. Hansen said good humouredly: “Thanks a lot, Rama Rao, for this royal reception. The whole city must have known of our arrival.”
I said: “Yes, Tim, quite true. It was like the bugles and trumpets announcing the arrival of royalty. Quite befitting your high level of academic excellence and noble nature. How could we give you a quiet reception as if you were of no consequence? Now the whole city has sat up and taken notice.”
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Two years later, in the last week of October 1993, I visited the University of Puget Sound to deliver a series of lectures and was put up in Tim Hansen’s guest-room overlooking the Puyallappa River and the Puget Sound, where the river joins the Pacific Ocean. It was an exotic prospect with Mt. Rainier, a volcano inactive for a hundred years, looming ominously at a distance, beyond the river.
At around 10pm, Tim came to my room and said: “Rama Rao, have you ever seen a racoon?”
I said, “No. Have you got any here?”
“Ya, in our backyard we see one or two now and then. Right now, there is one you can see in the nearest tree. Come on, I’ll show you,” he said.
There were several tall trees in the backyard and he pointed to the branches of one of them close to the balcony.
“Look there. You have a full grown adult in that tree and a ring-side seat here,” he said.
A fox-like brownish animal with a ringed tail was negotiating the branches of a tall tree nearby.
“Tim, I heard of an animal somewhat like this back in our country also. It is called maanu pilli (tree cat) in Telugu but I never saw one. I’ve travelled to the other side of the globe to see it or its kin,” I said.
Tim laughed. “If there’s nothing interesting here, you can always say that you’ve seen a racoon.”
“It’s like a movie star or a popular political leader, whom it is not easy to see in one’s own country but who is not known in a foreign country and, hence, just a commoner,” I said.
“Come on, Rama Rao, you’re raising the level of the racoon,” said Tim.
“My dear Tim, the level of the racoon is already high, in the branches of tall trees,” I said.Both of us laughed. On that note, our dialogue on the racoon ended.
*******
A decade later, I had a knee-replacement surgery. A few months before that, a similar surgery had been done on Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee, then Prime Minister of India.
When my friend, Shri P. Sundaram, who won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for his work on Shri Ramana Maharshi, came to know of it, he remarked jocularly: “So you’ve risen to the level of Shri Vajpayee?”
I answered: “Yes, up to the knee level.”
He laughed loudly and said: “This is what I call intellectual humour, a higher level of humour.”
I said: “I don’t know what you mean. Do you suggest that my brain is in my knee?”
Shri Sundaram laughed again and said: “It’s the other way round. You’ve raised the level of your knee to your brain.”
I laughed to cover up my confusion. Whether the knee ascends to the brain level or the brain descends to the knee-level, it is the brain that is confused.
A bizarre car-horn raised the level of our guests to that of royalty. Prof. Hansen said that I was raising the level of a racoon even though its level was already high.
Shri Sundaram says that I’ve raised the level of my patella to my brain.
Lord Krishna says in Bhagavad Gita: “Raise yourself by your self” (Uddharedaatma naatmaanaam) or “Raise your small self with the help of the Supreme Self.
