LIFE LESSONS | PHILOSOPHY | RELIGION
Prayer, according to Khushwant Singh
(More lessons from very old human beings)
Many of my readers know that I have never stopped counting my blessings to have been able to be alive in this world as a much younger contemporary of two very old men in particular.
Two very old men
One is Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), who against all odds maintained a lifelong love-affair with his native Bengal. Of Chaudhuri I read The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) in my student years — and I have never read even a single Chaudhuri sentence ever since, that wasn’t either merely beautiful or sparkling with unusual insight, or of utmost interest. In the course of a remarkable life as a late-starting writer (he debuted when he was 54), Chaudhuri first moved from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Kashmiri Gate in Old Delhi, and from there to Oxford, UK, where I tracked him down on a memorable hiking trip I did when I was still very young, walking all the way from Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery to Southall and Ealing, and hence, over Wycombe and Tetsworth to Oxford — equaling for me, like for most of the world’s university students, reaching the gates of nothing less than paradise.