A tall order

When young, I could not separate the greatness of a person and his height.

As a boy, I was greatly fascinated by tall people, even those who were just above average height. Whenever I saw them, I stopped in my tracks and stared at them admiringly, wondering what their height could be.  

Back then, I could not separate the greatness of a person and his height. I had an impression that all our leaders – Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel, Bose et al – were tall. It took quite a while for me to get over this misconception. I soon realised that greatness and tallness need not go hand in hand. I learned, too, that some of our leaders were only of average height, like Gandhiji, Sardar Patel, or even shorter like Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Nehru was an exception, though. At 5’10” he was quite tall for an Indian.
When I thought of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, images of superhuman beings popped up in my mind. But I learned later that they were not tall, but short by European standards – 5’6” and 5’8” respectively. Incidentally, the Fuhrer shared his height with, Genghis Khan, the marauder.

India, once had an enormously tall envoy from the United States – John Kenneth Galbraith – merely four inches shy of seven feet. The ambassador loomed well over all the towering presidents of his country, contemporaries and otherwise. Even the tallest presidents, Lyndon B Johnson and Abraham Lincoln were no match for Galbraith.

The envoy’s visit to Kerala gave rise to proliferation of newspaper cartoons. His great height was grist to the cartoonists’ caricature mill. In one of the cartoons, a minister was obliged to lend his shoulders literally to the ambassador to support his feet, as he turned in for the night, for they had overshot even the longest bed-stead specially arranged for the dignitary.

It is usually assumed that Americans are tall while Japanese are short. But mathematician and author Jacob Bronowski says in his book, ‘Common Sense of Science,’ that once during an interaction, he noticed that among the audience an American was the shortest of all and a Japanese, the tallest!

A man never wants his prospective wife to be taller than him, not even as tall because superiority complex bugs him. Envy and man were born twins, you may say. A couple of weeks before my wedding, a friend told me that he had run into the girl I was to tie the knot with. He had a disconcerting piece of information for me in that he felt she was taller than me. I panicked. Not that I had not met her. I had. Perhaps I overlooked the aspect of height, I feared. Only after being assured by my friend that he was only pulling my leg did I regain my lost peace of mind.

You often come across ads about medicines that promise to increase your height. One had better regard such ads as being unworthy of consideration because they lack credibility. For, to a considerable extent, the height of a person is genetic. So, the answer to the question, “How to be taller?” is to choose your parents! But that is not merely a tall order, but an impossible task.