Lessons from Rajeev Taranath

Pandit Rajeev Taranath taught English in Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirappalli, for two years in the late 1960s. I was one of his lucky students. I still remember the informal discussions we used to have in his room. “Sit down, Bhashyam,” he would boom in his deep voice. He would then regale me on myriad subjects, starting from the politics of the day to the latest MGR movie playing in town. He was a die-hard MGR fan and would praise the actor for his earthy political messaging!

I kept pestering him to write an article for the students’ monthly magazine we ran, and he kept putting it off. One day he relented and said, “Okay, can you write it down while I dictate?” He then rattled off a full article running to almost a thousand words on democracy as it was being practiced in India, titled, Are the elections a picnic? I had trouble keeping pace but did as best as I could and later went back to my room to make a fair copy for his approval.

On another occasion I wrote out a long poem in what I thought was free verse and took it to him for his comments. It was a poem of roughly twenty lines about moving through a crowd of people I knew, with a fixed artificial smile on my face. He read through the lines and then intoned,

“The poet has said it in one sentence, ‘To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’ Why waste 20 lines in saying the same thing?”

With that, my poem had been summarily dismissed! It was much later that I realised that “The Poet” was none other than T S Eliot.

In later years I would visit him on and off in his house in Saraswathi Puram, Mysuru. His matter-of-fact style and wry sense of humour never left him. On one occasion, he told me that once when he was visiting Delhi, he was invited by the great sarod player Sharan Rani to her house for lunch.
He went with great expectation, looking forward to an authentic Awadhi-style spread, an expectation that turned to disappointment when she told him, “Knowing you are a South Indian, I have made idli-sambhar specially for you!”

I last met him when he was lying in hospital grimacing in pain after having broken his hip bone. Seeing me, he switched into Tamil, and although his voice was down to a hoarse whisper, he sang an iconic song from one of MGR’s films, the lines of which, loosely translated, mean, “If I were to command, and it were to happen, then the poor would no longer drown in an ocean of tears.” He then pronounced with an air of finality that MGR had built the foundation for what Tamil Nadu is today.

A few weeks later he was gone.