Interview: ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ offers a secular non-transcendental view of moksha, says author Gurcharan Das

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”. [caption id=“attachment_13520442” align=“alignnone” width=“643”] Indian author Gurcharan Das. Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Excerpts:   Sahay: What are the key messages from the 81-year life story of  Gurcharan Das?

Das: Overall, what I have learnt is to learn to live an examined life. I was like most others, who sleepwalk through life. I got lucky one day and learned to pause and ask myself, is this life all about? And so, I stumbled on the purpose of life.

I have learned to find the meaning of life through three Sanskrit words – Moksha, Laghima and Leela – all of them have helped me to live lightly. This is why I have dedicated my memoir ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ to the happy few who don’t take life too 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 related to the major changes that came about in life – giving up a promising academic career to turn a businessman; in my early twenties, taking to a weekend writing career; and becoming an accidental CEO before I turned 40. But the most profound moment was when my mask fell and I decided I was done with selling Vicks, Ariel, Olay, Pantene, Pampers –  all good products. And at the age of 50, I left a thriving corporate career when I was Managing Director, P&G Worldwide (Strategic Planning) to become a full time writer.

My biggest regret is Meera, my sister, the 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 not do more to help her.

Even today, I do look after her, but I feel helpless because I cannot really help her. And this reminds me of Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Meera is the real tragedy of 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, who says, the world has no meaning, the world inherently is absurd. And when people who were neighbours for hundreds of years, suddenly were 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 the two incidents that had great impact on your young mind: First, the punishment meted out in a 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, ‘Who stole my pencil-box? The teacher made us all stand-up 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 came,  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 in August 1947, when we were fleeing 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 suddenly stabbed him in the back with their kirpans. The police officer fell and died. The boys kept shouting ‘Musalman! Musalman!’

Both these 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 or ‘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 that I was a ‘restless baby’. Soon I had turned into a ‘difficult child’ at age 2, and I was a ‘troublemaker’ at ‘age three’. As I asked too many questions in school, the teacher changed my name from ‘Ashok Kumar’ to ‘Nahin Kumar’.  The guru of my grandmother later changed it later to  Gurcharan Das (which is another story).

All these adjectives above explain something in me trying to break out, 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. Perhaps, it was the first stirrings of a struggle for moksha.

My struggle for moksha is still a work in progress. I am still unable to subdue my ego. I still keep wanting premium treatment in life. I became a writer to become a good person. After 25 years, I have realised that businessmen are better human beings. They depend on others for their success – customers, suppliers, employees. writers live in a bubble and don’t need anyone else.

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’? Which one of your parents had the greater impact in your 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 is the wrong question. Ask him what he likes in 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. Romancing the liberal arts in college was ‘making a life’; so was becoming a weekend writer. Finally, quitting the corporate life to become a writer was ‘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. She was my first love at age 12, and she rejected me. I wanted to woo her with flowers and chocolates. But I had no money. I asked for money from my mother who refused. It gave birth to my first entrepreneurial venture, staging the play ‘Hamlet’ in the neighbourhood, and charging tickets from parents.

I used the money collected to buy flowers and chocolates for Alisha, but she 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, Alisha and I 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 the 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 for their boots”.

Das:  Admission to Harvard, Princeton and Yale with full scholarship and the Washington Post carrying page-3 article on me, was my revenge on the Vice Principal who had humiliated my mother. When she found that I was way ahead of my class, she prayed to shift me from vocational section (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 that if I worked hard and stayed out of trouble, I would graduate with a vocational certificate and would surely get a factory job. I chose Harvard out of three.

Sahay: Students join Harvard University to get the Harvard stamp. But you got deeply immersed in the classical liberal education. You entered to study engineering and majored in philosophy. In between you dabbled in Greek Tragedy, Renaissance Painting, the Russian Novel, Economic History and Sanskrit. What was your biggest learning from Harvard as a seeker?

Das: Initially, I went to prepare to ‘make a living’ (my mother’s mantra) and ended in ‘making a life’ (my father’s mantra). When my mother learned that I was studying Sanskrit, she lamented ‘a 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 the way to obtaining a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, suddenly starts selling Vicks VapoRub in the dusty bazaars of Indian cities. What made Gurcharan take up a mundane job and how difficult was the transition?

Das: When I returned from Harvard and was waiting to go to Oxford, I asked myself one evening: ‘Do I really want to spend the rest of my life at that stratosphere of abstract thought?’

I wanted a life of action. And then there was the embarrassment of my mother to answer nosy neighbours about the presence of a grownup unemployed son at home.

I started hunting in 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 so from a “High Thinking Brahmin" I had turned into a “Money Grabbing Bania”. But my mother was in stratosphere with my 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, then my father gave me the mantra of using my weekends to make a life’. And so one Sunday I sat down to write my first play, saying to myself that it must be one such a morning when Shakespeare too must have begun to write Hamlet.

Sahay: Early in your career, you met Kamble, a night guard in your 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 us about Kemble and what made him your role model.

Das: Kamble came to us as a night guard from a village in Akola, and by his sheer presence enlightened the office. He was one of those persons who was happy to do his job without caring who got the credit. 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: How did you become a weekend writer? Tell us about your early literary forays Larins Sahib and Mira, particularly the portrayal of Mira off Broadway.

Das: I was strolling in a bazaar in Hyderabad bazaar chewing paan after dinner when 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  Sunday morning, sitting in Sri Krishan Lodge, in Jalandhar, I began to write my first play, Larins Sahib. I told myself, Shakespeare too must have sat down one such morning to write Hamlet.

Larins Saheb won a big prize, was published and was produced on the stage and now I had a second career as a weekend writer. And soon I wrote my second play — Mira, and to my amazement it was not only staged in India but also off Broadway to rave reviews in The New York Times and other papers.

Sahay: Your memoir is full of catchy one liners. 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 living 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. The 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 the 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,’ 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, my business life was my public life, and my life as a weekend writer was my private life. My secret life emerged because of the voices I began to hear, and which led me to the pursuit of my ‘reflective consciousness’ and that led me to the pursuit of a 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 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’s 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. I did not one day decide to sit and write about the 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 book ‘India Unbound’  while in the second ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’, I examined the goal of dharma, 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, is about the fourth aim of moksha, offering an all-natural, non-religious, non-transcendental view of freedom. Think of these goals as human capabilities. Fulfilling these capabilities is the road to a flourishing life.

Sahay: You have written about the mental illness of your sister, a genetic liability 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 interviewer, 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.