How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and other Stories Read online

  A few years back, I was invited to a reputed company in Bangalore to deliver a lecture on Corporate Social Responsibility. Giving a speech is easy. But I was not sure how many people in the audience would really understand the speech and change themselves.

  After my talk was over, I met many young girls and boys. It was an affluent company and the employees were well-off and well-dressed. They were all very emotional after the lecture.

  ‘Madam, we buy so many clothes every month. Can we donate our old clothes to those people who are affected by the earthquake? Can you coordinate and send them?’

  Some of them offered other things.

  ‘We have grown-up children, we would like to give their old toys and some vessels.’

  I was very pleased at the reaction. It reminded me of the incident in the Ramayana where, during the construction of the bridge between India and Lanka, every squirrel helped Sri Rama by bringing a handful of sand.

  ‘Please send your bags to my office. I will see that they reach the right persons.’

  Within a week, my office was flooded with hundreds of bags. I was proud that my lecture had proven so effective.

  One Sunday, along with my assistants, I opened the bags. What we saw left us amazed and shocked. The bags were brimming over with all kinds of junk! Piles of high-heeled slippers (some of them without the pair), torn undergarments, unwashed shirts, cheap, transparent saris, toys which had neither shape nor colour, unusable bedsheets, aluminium vessels and broken cassettes were soon piled in front of us like a mountain. There were only a few good shirts, saris and usable materials. It was apparent that instead of sending the material to a garbage dump or the kabariwala, these people had transferred them to my office in the name of donation. The men and women I had met that day were bright, well-travelled, well-off people. If educated people like them behaved like this, what would uneducated people do?

  But then I was reminded of an incident from my childhood. I was born and brought up in a village in Karnataka’s Haveri District, called Shiggaon. My grandfather was a retired schoolteacher and my grandmother, Krishtakka, never went to school. Both of them hardly travelled and had never stepped out of Karnataka. Yet, they were hard-working people, who did their work wholeheartedly without expecting anything from anybody in their life. Their photographs never appeared in any paper, nor did they go up on stage to receive a prize for the work they did. They lived like flowers with fragrance in the forest, enchanting everyone around them, but hardly noticed by the outside world.

  In the village we had paddy fields and we used to store the paddy in granaries. There were two granaries. One was in the front and the other at the back of our house. The better quality rice which was white, was always stored in the front granary and the inferior quality, which was a little thick and red, was stored in the granary at the back.

  In those days, there was no communal divide in the village. People from different communities lived together in peace. Many would come to our house to ask for alms. There were Muslim fakirs, Hindu Dasaiahs who roamed the countryside singing devotional songs, Yellamma Jogathis who appeared holding the image of Goddess Yellamma over their heads, poor students and invalid people.

  We never had too much cash in the house and the only help my grandfather could give these people was in the form of rice. People who receive help do not talk too much. They would receive the rice, smile and raise their right hand to bless us. Irrespective of their religion, the blessing was always ‘May God bless you.’ My grandfather always looked happy after giving them alms.

  I was a little girl then and not too tall. Since the entrance to the front granary was low, it was difficult for grown-ups to enter. So I would be given a small bucket and sent inside. There I used to fill up the bucket with rice and give it to them. They would tell me how many measures they wanted.

  In the evening, my grandmother used to cook for everybody. That time she would send me to the granary at the back of the house where the red rice was stored. I would again fill up the bucket with as much rice as she wanted and get it for her to cook our dinner.

  This went on for many years. When I was a little older, I asked my grandparents a question that had been bothering me for long.

  ‘Why should we eat the red rice always at night when it is not so good, and give those poor people the better quality rice?’

  My grandmother Krishtakka smiled and told me something I will never forget in my life.

  ‘Child, whenever you want to give something to somebody, give the best in you, never the second best. That is what I have learned from life. God is not there in the temple, mosque or church. He is with the people. If you serve them with whatever you have, you have served God.’

  My grandfather answered my question in a different way.

  ‘Our ancestors have taught us in the Vedas that one should,

  Donate with kind words.

  Donate with happiness.

  Donate with sincerity.

  Donate only to the needy.

  Donate without expectation because it is not a gift. It is a duty.

  Donate with your wife’s consent.

  Donate to other people without making your dependents helpless.

  Donate without caring for caste, creed and religion.

  Donate so that the receiver prospers.’

  This lesson from my grandparents, told to me when I was just a little girl, has stayed with me ever since. If at all I am helping anyone today, it is because of the teachings of those simple souls. I did not learn them in any school or college.

  The Real Jewels

  The district of South Canara in Karnataka is very different from any other. The literacy rate here is high, people are enterprising and hard-working. They have travelled all over the world in search of employment. If you see any Udupi vegetarian restaurant in India or any part of the globe, it is sure to have been started by a person from South Canara.

  The Infosys Foundation has a project called ‘A Library for Every School’. We donate books mainly to government school libraries, so that children have easy access to a variey of books. For this, I travel extensively in rural areas and donate books written in Kannada on various subjects. All the travelling has helped me to understand what children want to read in different places. During my travels, I frequently stay in the houses of people I meet, as often, there are no hotels in the small towns and villages I visit. Most of the time I stay with the family of a teacher from the school I am visiting. Some times I stay with people I had never met earlier.

  In India, a guest is always treated with a lot of love, affection and respect. An old Sanskrit saying is ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’, meaning God comes in the form of a guest.

  I have felt this to be so true, especially during my stay in villages. The poorest of the poor have treated me with so much love and affection. They have given me the best hospitality possible without knowing who I am or expecting anything in return.

  In 1998, I went to a village in South Canara for a school function. It was the rainy season and the small village was on the coast of the Arabian Sea. It was pouring and there were no hotels in the village. The schoolteacher was a bachelor and lived in a rented room. He told me, ‘Madam, the chairman of this school is a fine gentleman. He has asked me to tell you that you could stay tonight with his family. You cannot travel today because of this rain. Even the bridge has gone under water.’

  I did not have much option. I felt a little uncomfortable staying with someone I had never even met. By that time the chairman, Mr Aithappa, came with an umbrella to call me. He had been caught up in some important work and not been able to attend the function.

  His house was huge. It was functional without much decoration. There was a big granary room and a storage place for coconuts and vegetables. It had red oxide flooring and was like many traditional houses of South Canara where there was an inside courtyard. Water had to be drawn from a well at the side of the kitchen. There were a few bedrooms on the ground floor and the first f