Opinion
Interview: ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ offers a secular non-transcendental view of moksha, says author Gurcharan Das
‘This book ends a quarter-century-long search for a rich, flourishing life based on the classical Indian ideal of four goals—purusarthas,’ says the renowned writer
Akhileshwar Sahay December 17, 2023 17:46:04 IST
Indian author Gurcharan Das. Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Gurcharan Das is a rare gem, a unique Indian author. He studied philosophy in the early 1960s at Harvard and was well set to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Oxford. Instead, he took to selling Vicks VapoRub on the dusty streets of Indian cities. And when, at the age of 50, he left his flourishing career as a top corporate honcho at the multinational firm Proctor & Gamble (P&G). He left it all to enter the uncertain career of a full-time writer and author.
The self-depreciating Gurcharan, takes everything in life seriously but still lives lightly, in a long, one-hour forty-five-minute candid conversation with Akhileshwar Sahay, bares it all about his life, life influencers, love, career choices, and his latest memoir, “Another Sort of Freedom”.
Excerpts:
Sahay: What are the key messages from the 81-year life story of Gurcharan Das?
Das: My life has a number of messages. But overall, what I have learnt is to learn to live and examine life. I was like most others, who sleepwalk through life. I got lucky to pause and ask is this life all about and luckily, I stumbled on the purpose of life.
Another lesson from my life is finding the meaning of life through the pursuit of three Sanskrit words – Moksha, Laghima and Leela, all which help one live lightly, and that is why I have dedicated my memoir ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ to the happy few who don’t take life seriously.
Sahay: Which moments of your life, you cherish most and what are your life regrets, episodes which you wish had not occurred?
Das: The moments I cherish most are major changes that came about in life-giving up a promising academic career to turn a businessman, in early twenties my taking to weekend writing career and becoming accidental CEO before I turned 40. But the most profound moment was when the mask failed, I decided I was done with selling Vicks and Pampers, all good products and at the age of 50, I left a thriving corporate career as global Director Corporate Strategy of P&G, to become a full time writer.
My biggest regret is Meera, my sister, brightest in our family, who while studying Mathematics at Princeton turned severely mentally ill and could not carry on. My regret is that I did nothing to help her.
Even today I look after her, but I cannot really help her. And this reminds me of Tolstoy opening line Anna Karenina in “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Meera is the real tragedy in our family.
Sahay: You write early in your memoir: “One day I discovered that I could run, and I have been running ever since. It was the happiest of childhoods, until the partition of India, when our world collapsed. The lunacy of Partition — people ready to kill cheerfully in the name of their God — initiated me early into the modern idea of the absurd.” Can you elaborate on the ‘modern idea of absurd’?
Das: Well in my early readings at Harvard, I was introduced to existential philosophers including Camus, as per whom, the world has no meaning, the world inherently is absurd. And when people who were neighbours for hundreds of years, suddenly get ready to kill each other in the name of religion, what can be more absurd than this. Partition was the biggest absurdity that achieved nothing.
Sahay: Kindly tell readers about two incidences that had great impact on your young mind: First, the punishment meted out in Lahore school to your poor Muslim friend Ayan for no fault of his (the fault was all yours), and second, the senseless killing of a Muslim police officer by two Sikh teenage boys at Jalandhar railway station during the madness of partition.
Das: It was February 1947. I was five years old, in KG in Model Town Lahore. We all had a two-anna pencil box, except a poor Muslim boy Ayan who had none and a rich boy who had two, including a shining red one which was imported from the UK.
One day with class in recess, I put the rich boy’s red pencil-box on Ayan’s desk. When the class resumed, the rich boy shouted that his pencil-box was stolen. The teacher made us all standup and asked one by one who stole the pencil-box. Ayan on his turn said there was a pencil-box on his desk, but he did not steal it. When my turn arrived, I remained frozen and silent, while poor Ayan was punished. I have yet to get closure of the incident which even now gives me nightmares.
The second incident is of August 1947, we fled Lahore to save our lives and were in a train at Jalandhar station. There was a handsome police officer standing on the platform when two teen-age Sikh boys came running, stabbed their Kripan in the back and the police officer stumbled drop dead. The boys kept shouting Musselman Musselman!
Both the above incidents were what I call temporary insanity, complete absurdity of human life.
Sahay: You write in your memoir: “ As I try to make sense of early days, I feel a certain unruliness was innate in me. It may have been an early sign of my life’s script. My life would be an unending struggle for moksha for ‘liberation’ from social fetters and expectations, like a horse without harness”. Please elaborate on your struggle for moksha, including the type of moksha you have been chasing and whether you have achieved or are about to achieve it.
Das: My mother kept a diary. When I was one, she wrote I was a ‘restless baby’, soon I turned into a ‘difficult child’ and ‘troublemaker’ at ‘age two’. As I always asked questions in school, the teacher changed my name ‘Ashok Kumar’ to ‘Nahin Kumar’. The guru of my grandmother later changed it to Gurcharan Das.
All the adjectives above explain something in me trying to break out, a pursuit of secular moksha, away from expectations of family, friends, society and my own expectations. It was a pursuit to become nobody from somebody. But I say this in hindsight, I had not realised it till I started reliving life by connecting the dots.
My pursuit to moksha is still a work in progress, a struggle, I am yet to subdue my ego, not to asking for a premium treatment in life. I became a writer to become a good person. After 25 years, I realise businessmen are better humans, they depend on others for their success, while writers lead inward looking life.
Sahay: Your life for a long time was a duet between the pursuit of ‘making a living’ (the wish of your mother) and ‘making a life’ (mantra of your father). At what point in life did you decide to ‘make a living for the pursuit of making a life’. Which one of your parents had the greatest impact in your formative life?
Das: When I was five years old in KG, one evening I rushed home flashing a Green Report Card and my mother asked, “Did you stand first?” My father said it was the wrong question to ask and asked my mother to ask me what I liked in the school. For my middle-class Punjabi mother, good marks were a must for ‘Making a Living’ while my father was more interested in my ‘Making a Life’. Both my parents had an impact on my life, initially my pursuit was of making a living, but in the last 30 years the balance has shifted to making a life.
Sahay: Your first love, Alisha (a pseudonym), both in her rejection, subsequently in acceptance, and later in moving away, had some impact on the shaping up of early Gurcharan Das. What was her impact on your persona?
Das: It indeed had an impact. The rejection was a big jolt though I did not accept it. I fell for her. I was told flowers and chocolates, helped in wooing girls. I asked for money from my mother who refused. It gave birth to my first entrepreneurial venture, staging the play ‘Hamlet’ in the neighbourhood charging tickets from parents.
I used the money collected to buy flowers and chocolates for Alisha, but she refused and scorned me. I had also invited her to the play, but she did not come.
Later when I was working at Bombay we met again, became friends and intimate but soon due to family pressure Alisha settled for an arranged marriage. We met again when we were both grandparents and the chemistry was the same, and she had a deep impact.
At the end of the evening, I and Alisha went our separate ways. Although we did run into each other from time to time after that — and each time with mutual delight — we observed Kamasutra’s sensible advice. It is natural, says Kamasutra, for a man to be attracted to a beautiful woman. It is equally natural for a woman to be attracted to a handsome man. ‘But after some consideration, the matter goes no further.’
Sahay: In 1959, it was impossible for a middle-class Indian boy to get inside precincts of a top US university. But you got into the three best — Harvard, Princeton and Yale — with full scholarship. How did you feel particularly after the initial taunt of your vice principal — “In the US, coloured boys are not supposed to grow too big in their boots”.
Das: Admission to Harvard, Princeton and Yale with full scholarship and Washington Post carrying page-3 article on me, was revenge on the Vice Principal who humiliated my mother, when she found I was way ahead of class and prayed to shift me from vocational (that trained for blue-collar jobs) to prep section (that prepared for white-collar jobs).
Looking at my brown skin, the Vice Principal said, “Coloured boys are not s’posed to get too big for their boots in America.” He said if I worked hard and stayed out of trouble, I would graduate with a vocational certificate and would surely get a factory job. I was lucky, in 1959 there were less than half a dozen Indian boys in Harvard.
Sahay: Students join Harvard University to get a degree rather to get Harvard stamped, instead you got immersed in total learning there. You entered to study engineering and majored in philosophy. In between you dabbled in the Greek Tragedy, Renaissance Painting, the Russian Novel, Economic History and Sanskrit. What was your biggest learning from Harvard as a seeker?
Das: It is true, following my mother’s advice, who wanted me to study something useful like ‘engineering like my father’ I entered Harvard to make a living. But once there, I pursued making a life, my father’s mantra. When my mother learnt I was studying Sanskrit, she lamented ‘dead language’, and wondered if only the dead will give him a job. But my father prevailed. I totally forgot my mother’s advice as per whom I studied only useless subjects at Harvard.
Sahay: A major in philosophy from Harvard on way to obtaining a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, suddenly starts selling Vicks VapoRub in dusty streets of Indian cities. What made Gurcharan take up the mundane job and how difficult was the transition?
Das: When I returned from Harvard and had an Oxford scholarship for PhD in Philosophy, I asked a question: Did I want to spend life in the stratosphere of abstract academics? And I realised it was not my calling.
I wanted a life of action. And then there was the pressure of the embarrassment of my mother to answer nosy neighbours about the presence of a grownup unemployed son at home.
I started looking up job advertisements in newspapers. The very first I found in Times of India, was a firm manufacturing Vicks, looking for trainee officers.
Not knowing what it meant I applied and was selected. Probably my Harvard degree did the trick. And from a “High Thinking Brahmin’ I turned into a “Money Grabbing Bania”. But my mother was in a stratosphere with my then salary of Rs 750 per month, becoming her talking point to neighbours and relatives.
When I joined, I didn’t know how long I would last. But as karma would have it, I began to enjoy the rough and tumble of business life. Nonetheless, soon I started missing the intellectual life of Harvard and Oxford, then my father gave me the mantra of using my weekend to write.
Sahay: Early in your career, you met Kamble, a night guard in the office, whom you got lifted (without taking credit) from the station of his birth. Of your own volition, unassuming Kamble, with his lightness of spirit, taught you that self-forgetting was the path to high performance and happiness. Tell me about Kamble and what made him your role model.
Das: Kamble, a resident of a village in Akola was a semi-literate guard in my office, who by his sheer presence enlightened the office. He was of the category who did the work and did not take the credit. The unassuming Kamble taught me the big life lesson, that self-forgetting is the path to high performance and happiness. I haven’t been able to achieve it, but the aspiration has been liberating — a marker in my moksha journey. What drew me to Kamble especially was his lightness of spirit. He became my role model.
Sahay: In your early twenties one evening strolling in a bazaar of Hyderabad, you decided, it was giving back time, medium being your writings. With a full day of work, you turned into a weekend writer. Tell me about your early literary forays Larins Sahib and Mira, particularly the portrayal of Mira at Broadway.
Das: I was strolling in Hyderabad bazaar chewing paan after dinner, I bumped into an uneasy thought. I’d been reading all these years taking in knowledge. Wasn’t it time to take something out ? Maybe I could ‘take it out ‘ by writing. A way to pay back. And one Sunday morning, sitting in Sri Krishan Lodge, in Jalandhar, I began to write my first play, Larins Saheb. I told myself, Shakespeare too must have sat down one such morning to write Hamlet.
Larins Saheb got a prize, was published and was played on stage and now I had a second career as a weekend writer. And soon I wrote my second play — Meera, and to my amazement it was not only staged in India but also at Broadway (off Broadway) to rave reviews in The New York Times with the director putting Meera Bhajans to the rock music.
Then an idea came to my mind to quit the job and become a full time writer, but soon I met Bunu, then working in the UN, and was swept away from my foot, with love at first sight and I stayed put with my high-profile corporate career.
Sahay: Your memoir is full of catchy one liner. Can you explain some of them: First, ‘I like things as they are, imperfect and uncertain’; second, ‘Love makes you recover the present, bringing you alive to the present moment with your whole being. I had found in love a new state of awareness” and finally third, ‘Love a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.’
Das: I would just say I like imperfections in human beings and the world. I would not barter them for boring perfections. I am happy to be what I am, imperfect and livung in an imperfect world.
As regards love, a flaw in us humans is that we mostly live in the future, sometimes in the past but seldom in the present. Roman poet Seneca, advisor to the emperor said beautifully ‘When I was busy life passed me by”. Life is not in the past and future, its beauty lies in the present. And the moment of love between two connected people is beautiful because it is in the present. Life and love exist in the fullness of the present.
As regards the last one liner it is an epithet at the end of chapter of the book, yes love is insanity of a kind, where often one gets irrational, but marriage brings us to take note of mundane and cures love.
Sahay: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and your friend Mati Lal both were Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. But few know about Mati Lal. Tell me about his contribution to philosophy and also about his impact on your life.
Das: Mati Lal was a great philosopher particularly in the field of epistemology and Nyaya-Nyaya. Also, when I was writing the book — ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’ — his book on Ethics in Mahabharata had a great impact on me. Indubitably, though he died young Mati Lal is one of the greatest philosophers of India.
Sahay: Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Colombian writer says, ‘everyone has three lives: a public life , a private life, and a secret life,’ You realised that you too had a secret life. It was the secret life of an involuntary explorer of consciousness. It was secular, non transcendental moksha that you were after. But it was not clear to you where this third life was heading or if it was heading anywhere at all. Will you kindly elaborate upon it?
Das: All of us have different layers in our life. Many of us have both public and private lives. In my case, business life was public life, and my life as a weekend writer was private life. My secret life emerged because of the voices I began to hear, and which led me to pursuit of ‘reflective consciousness’ and that of pursuit to attain secular moksha.
Sahay: Business leaders consider Harvard Business Review their bible. Few are aware, there are four case studies on Gurcharan Das by Harvard Business School. Also, your piece ‘Local Memoirs of a Global Manager’ was published in HBR in 1993, merely three years after ‘Core Competency of Corporation’ by the management guru C K Prahlad.
Still in your memoir, except passing reference to your article you are conspicuously silent. Is it a pursuit of self-forgetting of you by you?
Das: (Smiles) 1993 article in Harvard Business Review was product of a short sabbatical in Harvard before taking up a higher role in P&G US Headquarters.
Sahay: Your four books are about Artha, Dharma, Kama and Moksha, it just happened that way or you consciously started on that path.
Das: It happened that way. In hindsight as I reflect now. I did not one day decide to sit and write about four Purushartha. It was not consciously planned that way; it was rather part of a journey of self-realisation where I write to educate myself.
Sahay: What is the central message of ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ to the readers?
Das: This book ends a quarter-century-long search for a rich, flourishing life based on the classical Indian ideal of four goals—purusarthas. Prior to this book, I had written about Artha or material wellbeing, in my first ‘India Unbound’ while in the second ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’, I examined the goal of dharma, the moral well-being. My third ‘The Riddle of Desire’ was a biography of Kama, the third goal of desire and pleasure. And finally, ‘Another Sort of Freedom’, the fourth of the quartet, although a memoir, in a true sense, is about the fourth aim of moksha, offering an all-natural, non-religious, non-transcendental view of freedom.
Sahay: You have written about the mental illness of your sister, genetic lability of mental illness in your mother’s side of the family, sadness the health of your sister has brought to the family and the difficulty and despair of handling it. With 16 percent of Indians suffering from one or other mental illness at any given point of time what is your message to sufferers and their caregivers?
Das: Beyond asking for absolute compassion for the sufferer and exemplary patience for caregivers I feel helpless to give any other message.
The author, a keen watcher of changing international scenarios, is a multi-disciplinary thought leader with action bias and an India-based International Impact Consultant. He is an avid reader and independent book Reviewer. Sahay works as President of Advisory Services in consulting company Barsyl. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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