27 December 2013, 10:03 PM IST
Allow me to share a tale of two youths. One is nine, bubbling with energy, eagerly waiting to enter a world of grown-ups. The other, 86, bowed out to silent applause from the game of life last Sunday. Seven decades apart in age, they shared the same spirit.
Emil, the nine-year-old, is the son of our neighbours in Washington. His mother is of Italian heritage, his father American. He speaks Italian and English fluently and is growing adept at a couple of other languages. He revealed one day an aspect of modern Indian culture that was novel to me. I learned from him all about Yo Yo Honey Singh.
Breaking into song with gusto, Emile delighted us over brunch one day with several of Honey Singh's rap numbers, in fluent Punjabi. His dad had brought a CD back from a trip to India and Emil had been mesmerised ever since. All the family heard in the car on a recent road trip through the Alps was Punjabi rap. He knows all the words which we mostly failed to understand but which my friend Uppi later said were not all kosher.
Emil didn't understand the words either. But he rocked his little body and swung his head to the beat with a happy grin lighting his face. To him it was just rollicking music.
Bachuda was, like the heroes of romance novels, tall, dark and handsome. Like most Bengalis he had a proper name but was known universally by a nickname that sparked smiling recognition in Bengali social circles as well as in wide sections of the Indian immigrant community in the US. He lived half of every year in India, the other half in a leafy suburb of Washington DC. He was a rare breed, a renaissance man.
He had elegant mastery over speaking and writing in his mother tongue, which he taught to Americans at the Foreign Service School in Virginia, and he sang Tagore`s songs, bhatiali and baul with his family band touring US campuses and folk festivals. He wasn't Yo Yo Honey Singh, but for those who heard him, his voice was pure honey.
He played the piano and the two-stringed folk instrument called a dotara, with which he seemed ever ready to play not only Rabindrasangeet or Bengali folk, he would enthral an audience with the American folk music of Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson as well as rock them with 'Gore, Gore' or other hits from the 1950s and Hemant Kumar love songs.
When he would address an audience in English, which he frequently had to as a stalwart of the Indian-American community, he did so with a quiet deliberation, his cadence and intonation hewing close to the echoing softness with which he spoke Bengali. His legions of American friends, several of whom were senior diplomats including the current US ambassador in Delhi, loved his sheer youthfulness and his amazing ability to adjust to conversation in any social gathering of any culture of any age group. He never grew old.
Emil will perhaps grow up into a global society in which his generation will not be self-consciously bothered by the myriad ethnic, racial and religious contests for dominance or exclusivity that Bachuda`s generation lived with. Watching boys and girls of Emil's age, you will find it impossible to detect in them any sense of otherness when they play with their friends from an expanding array of colours, cultures and ethnicities. My own grandchildren, for instance, would be utterly confused if we grown-ups ever referred to people as white or black and Muslim or Hindu as a way of distinguishing them from us.
Bachuda grew up in a different world. He was imprisoned by the British during the nationalist movement and lived through the horror of Partition. Yet he was a kind of rare Indian who never saw himself as a victim of western conspiracies or defined other communities with bilious hatred. A youthful curiosity about others was his credo. He was always learning and adjusting to a globalised world`s shifting circumstances.
Little Emil and the late Bachuda were not from the same country. They never met. Yet, they were similar in spirit, one a sprightly boy of nine, the other a jolly young man of 86.
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