I only knew him as a very evolved and empathetic human being who was willing to talk and listen to a young man. I was neither his contemporary nor colleague. But in his own plain words I was a "new friend" who had in some ways become "family" over th
The Sharada Prasad I knew was the one who himself, always, opened the door of his Pashim Vihar home, dragging his frail body afflicted by Parkinson's. Despite his debilitating condition, I have seen him bend down to clean up his shoes and tie the shoestrings. He would walk down the stairs unassisted. He always gently resisted help. His proximity tohistory was never doubted, but he never showed even the faintest signs of self-importance. For a man who could have made a fortune out of his illustrious past and big associations-- by bending, recasting, manufacturing or even by simply stating them - he, by choice, lived strictly in the present. Nostalgia was never his cup of tea. He had led an upright life but was never self-righteous. There was never self-pity or diffidence about his physical condition. Only once in all my years of meeting him did he say that "old age was a punishment." But still, he never for a day wanted to be disengaged with the world. He would feel restless if he had not seen the day's newspapers. Once, he landed very late in Bangalore and had to urgently take his medicines and dinner, but he insisted that on the way home from the airport I find a shop that would give him all the local newspapers of the day. Life's seductive charm had a hold over him. Whenever he was critical and admitted to a hospital, his filmmaker friend of nearly 70 years, M.V.Krishnaswamy, would tell me that he is too "strong-willed" and will not give up easily. "His abiding interest and dedication to life will weaken the powers of death," he wouldclaim. That was an absolutely correct reading. In the last couple of years, the number of times he bounced back to life from a near terminal situation was miraculous. For this atheist,his will was his god.
For many who had seen Sharada Prasad from a distance, he was a stern-sinewed bureaucrat. But I found that perception to be incorrect. He could easily break into a song. He could ceaselessly chuckle recalling a naughty story from his 1942 jail days about a co-prisoner, who had escaped for a day to satiate his physical urges. In fact, in our very first meeting he had sung a Kannada poem of Devudu NarasimhaShastry, spiking the tremors in his voice. He could regale you with funny trivia about famous people, like howCarnatic music legend M S Subbulaksmi would first mildly pinch and then talk. He had a bottomless pitcher of stories and anecdotes that could have made many thick volumes in print.
Sharada Prasad was known to be a lucid communicator, yet, strangely, he didn't always know how to communicate a few things topeople, especially when it involved money. For instance, he wouldn't know how to handle a Kannada newspapereditor who had long defaulted on payments for his writings or tell a publisher that the meagre royalty he was offering for his book was not acceptable. Forsuch things, he would lovingly petition his old friend T S Satyan or me. He was generally disinterested in money and once recalled what Ramnath Goenka-- he would speak to Sharada Prasad in Tamil -- had told him about making money: "Only if you put your finger deep in a bowl of ghee will something stick on yourfinger."
Once when the topic of the Emergency came up, I asked what his relationship with Indira Gandhi was when she was out ofpower. I was surprised to learn that he had never met her or spoken to her even once during those days. But, within hours of returning to power, the first person Indira Gandhi sent for was him. She not only took him back into the PMO, but took him back with a promotion. He never addressed Indira Gandhi as 'madam' or 'Mrs.Gandhi'; he, in fact, used nothing at all to address her. Their communications would have abruptly polite beginnings and endings. He would joke saying that he carried the "vanity of a journalist to the PMO." Also, in all his years in the PMO, he never once got himself photographed with a prime minister. This should tell us something about his ascetic detachment from power. A quality that ensured that he survived at the top for long and a quality that ensured that his mind remained vibrant and his heart in the right place. He joined Indira Gandhi six days before she was sworn in PM the first time and stayed with her till her last day. When a slight unpleasantness was created in Rajiv Gandhi's PMO, he did not wait a minute to put in his papers nor did he allow himself to be persuaded to reconsider his resignation. He gladly severed ties with power, but allowed people who were the cause of the unpleasantness to correct themselves later. He quietly acknowledged their moral core. When they came back to him, he never embarrassed them.
There was another occasion when I asked Sharada Prasad what his relationship with Sanjay Gandhiwas. He said that he had never interfered in his work. In fact, when some people went to Sanjay to express their unhappiness about Sharada Prasad's recall into the PMO, he simply said that "mummy likes him" and could do nothing about it. Even a man with a notorious reputation for Emergency excesses had maintained a respectful distance from Sharada Prasad.
The respect for the man seemed almost universal. The obituaries, personal visits and condolence notices that have poured in proves that. When Sonia Gandhi "coaxed and cajoled" Sharada Prasad to accept the Indira Gandhi Sadbhavana Award in 2001, she had this to say: "This evening we honour a man whose life epitomises the very essence of Indian civilisation at its loftiest. A man who represents the noblest human faculties, who stands as a model of integrity, dignity and probity in public life. No wonder that some of his colleagues refer to him as 'Jagadguru.'" In fact, the conventional wisdom in Indira Gandhi's secretariat was 'when in doubt, do as Sharada does.'
It is appropriate in this context to mention the slim Kannada volume that Sharada Prasad published in the 90s with his six accomplished siblings, on his grandmother, titledMommakalu Helida Ajjiyakathe (A grandchildren's tale of a grandmother). The book serves as a great guide to the cultured and progressive family that Sharada Prasad belonged to. The book, although a personal narrative of the grandchildren, serves as a fine sociological document of the first half of Mysore's 20th century. In his foreword to the translated Kannada volume of his English collectionThe Book I Won't Be Writing and Other Essays, Sharada Prasad says that among the many dreams that remained unfulfilled in his life was his dream to become an author in Kannada. The Kannada title that he decided for his book is far more poignant than the English one. He called the first volumeYella Ballavarilla (roughly meaning 'there is nobody who knows everything') and the second volumeBallavaru Bahalilla (roughly 'there are not many who really know'). The lines are picked from a composition of saint-poet Purandara Dasa. Despite his rootedness, the one questionto which I never got a convincing answer from Sharada Prasad was on why he never came back to settle down in Mysore or Bangalore after his retirement.
His final months were painful. Having led such an eventful life, being confined to the bed was not a comforting thought to Sharada Prasad. The exemplary communicator could not express his predicament because his disease had weakened his body and strangled his voice His memory was also getting mixed up. When he managed to recover both memory and voice momentarily a few weeks ago, he made one final communication throughsheer grit: "What an end to a life." That regret was unlike Sharada Prasad, but it was still his characteristically chiseled, taut sentence. He was no longer battling death. He had loosened his iron will. That is the day when, for me, he was gone. What happened on the noon of Tuesday, September 2, was a mere formality.