The Passing of a Generation

My grand-uncle (paternal grandfather's brother) passed away at 2:10 am today morning. Since I am myself almost 50, this isn't at all surprising. Yet, it is a passing away to grieve about. He has been the pater familias for longer than I have lived. As the 9^th of 10 children (7 brothers and 3 sisters), he was the last torch-bearer of his generation. His passing marks a passing of baton acrosss generations in the family. All his siblings have lived up to ripe ages, 65 upwards. Even in this family, this grand-uncle was unusually long-lived – he was 101 years, 5 months and 19 days when he passed away. The only one in his family to come anywhere close was his mother, my great-grandmother, who passed away at 99.

Longevity, continued good health and sharp mental acuity even at age 101 were remarkable aspects of his life; but more remarkable was the fact that he lived life in exemplary fashion. He was well-off by the standards of his time; but never really rich, but yet, he commanded a “following” among his friends and family that could not be explained fully. His house has been an open house for the extended family for well over 5 decades. I have always felt closer to him than any of my other grand-uncles, because I lost my grandfather when I was 6 years old; I remember seeing him only about twice or thrice.

I remember hazily his recounting of his experience in the 1944 Mumbai docks blast, where a ship berthed in Bombay (as it was then known) Harbour blew up – I recall his telling me (along with a few of my wide-eyed cousins) that one of his office colleagues had a huge bar of pure gold land with an almighty thud in his living room balcony, a few kilometres away from the docks. That story was quite riveting – almost like an eye-witness account. I must have been, perhaps, 5 or 6 years old at the time. I later read a story in an old Readers' Digest magazine issue about that incident that lent great credence to that story. On second thoughts, I can say that RD became more credible in my mind because of this article, rather than the other way around. So strong was his influence on my mind. A few years later, RD thereafter really shaped my eclectic reading interests – I became addicted to reading and would read no less than 15-20 issues of the magazine every three months (by picking up old copies from raddiwalas) for several years. The only other relative who shaped my reading habits was my late uncle, Chaitanya D Haldipur.

Among my earliest memories were attending my grand-uncle's 60^th birthday celebrations, in 1970. We went by BEST Bus No.85 from Shivaji Park (a 12-15 minute walk from our home, then) to Tardeo, where it stopped just by the gate of the building where he stayed. There were so many people that I was a happily anonymous 8-year old having the run of their vast (so it seemed to my eyes then) apartment that day. I had a close look at a bouquet of 60 red roses sent by his office colleagues (he must have retired from service that day (I now guess) in a wicker basket, covered with crinkling cellophane – probably the first time I had seen a bouquet.

For a few decades, he did a great deal of social work in our community, and I gathered that he was as liked as he was disliked, for his forthright views and actions, though I was never very aware of what he did. All I know is that for a few years, he was the full-time Manager of our community's Math at Shirali in Karnataka State, where he was credited with quite a lot of reforms, that resulted in the Math becoming financially self-sustained and less dependent on donations from the community. After that, I gathered that he was one of the founder-trustees of the Shree Trust, which set up a Math in Karla, between Mumbai and Pune.

My grand-uncle was headstrong, but managed a remarkable partnership of marriage that lasted exactly 75 years, with my my grand-aunt, who passed away just 6 months ago. As long as she was alive, he complained and chafed because his immediate family would not allow him to go out of the home by himself. Read this in the context of the fact that he had won a WIAA safe driving award many decades ago, and till he was past 92, he drove himself around in the Mumbai traffic. For this, he became some kind of a hero in the eyes of the extended family and his friends and well-wishers, but his immediate family would be on tenterhooks whenever he made off with the car riding over every objection raised by them. The family eventually decided to end these “escapades” by selling off the car. All this time, he looked perhaps 20 years younger than he actually was!

Indeed, an anecdote is shared by many in our family circles about one of his visits to Shirali, when he was around 85. He travelled alone by bus to Bhatkal (the nearest town where the bus stopped), where a car was to pick him up. The car driver was told to look out for an 85-year-old man travelling alone, and instructed to take special care of him. AtmaBappa got down from the bus, not looking much over 60 at that time. He could not see any car or placard-waving driver waiting for him, so after waiting a few minutes, he took a taxi and went to Shirali on his own, while the driver waited in vain, looking out for a frail-looking 85-year-old !

When he was 100, when I once visited him, he was spiritedly holding forth when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he asked me, “Where is Revati?” Only when I assured him that she was in the bedroom, talking to my wife, did he continue. It was a remarkable bond. He was physically fitter than she was, throughout their life together. Revatipachhi, as I called her (meaning Aunt Revati in Konkani, my mother-tongue) was the complete opposite – she was cool and frail; AtmaBappa (Uncle Atma) was mercurial, oozing health and energy. She was about 5 ft tall; he was almost 6 ft tall. She could barely be heard; his resonant baritone voice boomed across three thick walls of his home for over 50 years. They became the longest living couple in India as reckoned by sum total of their ages (using dates of birth as recorded in their passports). I like to think that they both lived so long because they both did not want to be the first among them to die, leaving the other alone.

While he stayed independent till the very end, he appreciated the lifetime of dedication of his daughter-in-law, Rekha, to her family. Rekha has been the one strong, steady feature in their domesitc life. At one time, there were four residents in that home, and three of them were unable to walk without support. Rekha took care of their every need selflessly. On his 99^th Birthday, he announced to me in Rekha's presence that from now on, Rekha is the Boss of the House. He then told me sotto voce, that he was only saying it now, but that has been the case for quite a few years already!

When Revatipachhi passed away 6 months ago, something was snuffed out of AtmaBappa's life. While earlier, he was impatient with everyone because they restricted him and did not allow him to go around without a walker (which he was forced to use after a hip bone fracture when he was 99), now he had fallen silent. The last time I met him while he was up and about, which was probably a month ago, for the first time in my memory, he almost looked his age. He seemed lost, as if in some distant thoughts. It now took him 12-15 minutes to walk in tiny steps using a walker, from the living room divan to the dining table. But yet, he refused to be touched or assisted by anyone. He insisted on walking on his own, his streak of independence undulled by the ravages of Time.

His 101^st birthday (just a month after his wife passed away) was a quiet, normal day, in June this year. I went to greet him. I touched his feet, and no sooner had I said, Many Happy Returns, he said in his usual stentorian tone, “No! Don't say Returns! I don't want to see another Birthday!”. I returned home with a slight feeling of despondency. At 99, he refused to undergo cataract surgery in one eye, saying,”What do I need better eyesight for? What will I see?” That seemed like his usual pragmatic self. But this was different – I had seen a person waiting to die.

The end came, for all practical purposes, about 2 weeks ago, when he got up to walk when nobody was around him, for a few seconds, and fell to the ground, with his head hitting the ground hard. The resultant blood clot and brain swelling pushed him into a coma, from which he never really came out. Doctors were amazed to see that his vital parameters were all perfect till the very end. They actually expected him to emerge from his comatose state soon. But that was not to be. After 2 weeks in the hospital, they brought him home. His wife had insisted that she not be admitted to a hospital, because she wanted to die at home. He probably wanted the same – because, within 24 hours of his returning home, he breathed his last.

Atmaram Ganpatrao Haldipur, RIP.

Lessons in integrity from Bharat Ratna Sir M Visvesvaraya

Please read on till the end! 
Bharat Ratna Sir M. Visvesvaraya (15 Sep 1860- 14 April, 1962) was one of India's finest sons. The breadth of his achievements mark him out as the Leonardo Da Vinci of India.
He was a Civil Engineer par excellence. He devised innovative techniques that were well ahead of his time. Among them,

• The Block System of Irrigation – to optimize, control and evenly distribute water supply to agricultural lands over many villages. The supply was rotated within “blocks” in each village to curtail misuse and water-logging. This system, devised in 1899, is still used in Deccan Canals.
• The "collector well” in Sukkur in Sindh province (Pakistan). The area was hot and arid, and they had to pump water from River Sndhu to a hill nearby, filter it and supply water to the town through pipes.They did not have enough money for filters. Visveswaraya solved this ingeniously by digging wells in the river bed itself close to the river bank to obtain spring water through percolation. Thus filtering was achieved without installing filters. To increase supply of water, a tunnel was driven from the bottom of the well under the flowing river. This is now standard civil engineering textbook content under the Heading, “Collector Wells”.
• He designed and patented Automated Floodgates, which permit flood water to enter a reservoir without water level exceeding full reservoir level, thereby reducing risk of submerging surrounding land. The gates are automatic because they open and close at the rise and fall of water in the reservoir for flood control. He designed water supply schemes for many towns in Bombay Presidency, Hyderabad and later as Chief Engineer of Mysore State.

As Dewan of Mysore State, he established many rural industries and set up basic education for small shop owners in the fields of book-keeping and commerce. Agricultural schools were opened to help with modern agricultural practices that reduced farmers’ overdependence on rain and good luck. Many industrial workshops and training institutes were set up. Public libraries were established. The Kannada Sahitya Parishat was formed. Many books on science were published in Kannada. The University College of Engineering (now known as University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering) and Maharani’s College for Women came into being. He established the Mysore University, as until then, all colleges in Mysore State were under Madras University. He established the Bhadravati Iron and Steel Works, The Mysore Sandal Oil Factory, the Mysore Sandal Soap Factory, the Metals Factory, and the Chrome Tanning Factory. He started the Bank of Mysore (now State Bank of Mysore) and The Mysore Chamber of Commerce. The Institution of Engineers (India) celebrates his birthday, 15th September every year, as Engineers Day.
He differed with Mahatma Gandhi whose view essentially was “Industrialize and Perish”, while Sir MV's motto was the opposite, “Industrialize or Perish”, but great men that they both were, both respected each others' views and capabilities.
Sir MV led a very simple life. He was known for his honesty and integrity. In 1912, Maharaja of Mysore appointed Visvesvaraya as his Dewan.

Before accepting the position of Dewan of Mysore, he invited all his relatives for dinner. He told them very clearly that he would accept the prestigious office on the condition that none of them would approach him for favours.

When on tour on official business, Sir MV carried a set of candles bought with his personal money, and used them for personal work like reading etc in the night after he was finished with official work.

Just think – this man lived a life of total personal integrity that we cannot even imagine today. It has taken another simple person like Anna Hazare to raise our collective anger against corruption. Across the political spectrum are ranged small minds who do not want to see corruption rooted out of this great country. They do not realise that because of their selfish interests, India is held back from fulfilling its rightful role in the world by the “hand-brake” called corruption. It is time to release the hand-brake and surge forward..

Steve Jobs, RiP

He was a technical AND marketing genius. I do not remember a single person who has had such deep impact over such a sustained period, as Steve Jobs has had, on the state-of-the-art in multiple consumer-facing industries. Personal computing, animation films, portable music players, music and entertainment marketing, smartphones, and hand-held tablet computers – all these are markets which he created, and in which he led his company to success at a level that can only be dreamed of by other companies. He did not make products – he made objects of desire. He changed the ways of working of every industry that he touched.

He built the first commercially successful personal computer in 1982 – the Apple II, after first developing the prototype in a garage, along with another technical genius, Steve Wozniak, whose autobiography is titled iWoz. This was the first commercial computer to have a mouse and an OS with graphical user interface. For several years – maybe 10 years, no machine came out on the market with comparable graphical OS. This probably represents the longest period of a technical monopoly ever.

He then went on to build the successors, called Macintosh computers, or Mac for short, which has been through several avatars. They became the gold standard for ease of use and stylish looks. Like every product that Jobs introduced, they were objects of desire, that sold even though they were usually far more expensive than the competition.

The famous story of how he got thrown out of the company he had founded is too well-known to recount, but genius that he was, he continued to develop cutting edge technology, in a company appropriately called NeXT. While the company never did come out with a commercial launch, several technologies developed there were incorporated into later versions of the Mac OS and other products. During that phase when he had nothing to do with Apple, he also bought and spent time on building a young startup company called Pixar Animation, where he learnt and taught the world how to to create full-length ultra-realistic 3D animation feature films using cutting edge computing technologies that his company used, as well as nifty software that it developed for internal use. The only other company that had successfully made animation films before, Disney, had made 2D films. Toy Story, Pixar's first film, was a blockbuster hit heralded a new genre in personal entertainment. It was inevitable that Disney and Pixar would merge, especially after Apple Inc reclaimed Jobs as its own. However, the success of Pixar and the deal with Disney made Jobs wealthy independent of Apple – an important factor that allowed him to dictate his own terms when he came back. Apple had become a basket case in the nearly 10 years that it ran without Jobs – to the extent that Jobs got arch rivals Microsoft into the company to continue to make Office for the Mac, and also a significant stake in Apple. This horrified Apple loyalists, and people felt that Microsoft had bought into Apple at a throwaway price, that allowed Apple to raise some much needed money and to stay alive, something that Microsoft also needed to defend themselves against charges of monopolistic behaviour. The reality was that Microsoft needed Apple to be alive, not kicking. But he had not contended with Jobs' steely determination to reinvent Apple.

Jobs' speech at Stanford's commencement, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, is an all-time classic with advice for anyone who aspires to be a creative success. It is a story of persistence and resilience, along with curiosity and willingness to question the weight of collective wisdom. It is something that every young person on the threshold of a career would be well advised to read and internalise.

Jobs' second innings with Apple has been even more exciting than the first, by almost any measure. He revived a moribund company to become the most valuable company on Earth by market capitalisation and profits. Jobs has left behind a company that has more liquid cash resources than the US Government. It sits on the largest cash pile in the world of any manufacturing company. It may be surpassed probably only by Berkshire Hathaway, which is mainly an investment company.

Jobs' second innings at Apple began with the i-Mac – with transparent plastic-encased monitors, computers and peripherals, not much functional difference, but great looks that evoked gasps at first sight made it the first hit product that gave Apple its second wind. Thereafter, there has been no looking back. i-Pods,i-Tunes, i-Stores, i-Phones, i-Pads, and the yet unheralded i-Cloud have all followed in monotonous succession; each redefining rules of the marketplace, and creating new standards to such an extent that Apple blazes the trail, and the entire world simply plays catch-up. It seemed as if Apple was unstoppable – till, cruelly, cancer took hold of Jobs. He battled on for a few years, but all the medical knowledge of humankind could not extend the life of this great man.

I don't envy Tim Cook – while he has been Jobs' close aide and confidante for several years, and been the de facto day-to-day head at Apple for a long time,  stepping into Jobs' shoes won't be comfortable – he will feel like a pygmy wearing three-league boots. The world will keep comparing him with Jobs. Like the i-Phone's latest version (4S) released a couple of days back, even though it has almost all-new innards, looks no different from the earlier version. Early reports suggest that Apple loyalists seem to be disappointed – quite possibly because it was the first product in more than a decade to be launched without Jobs' involvement, either at the launch or in its making.

Steve Jobs, RiP.