Geronimo, Jawaharlal and a very young reader

My son was a little over four when I picked up a new copy of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History from a bookstore in Chennai. The store was a funny place, I remember. It had kept Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22 (which I bought) under the Wild Life section and Khalil Gibran’s The Wanderer (which I didn’t buy) under Self Help.

Sangeeth looked at me with some suspicion as his little fingers browsed through Nehru’s book. It seemed he had sensed I’d force him to read the tome one day and, more into videos, he wasn’t particularly interested in enjoying a book then. But the weight of the volume got his attention.

What’s this heavy book about, he asked me as we drove back home. I replied that it had letters a man once wrote to his little daughter. How little? She was 13 when he wrote the book, I said, and I will read this to you when you are 13. Only when I am 13, Okay? Word, I said.

That night I started reading Hitch-22 just after I put Sangeeth to bed. A few pages into it, I read: “...nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.” I looked away from the book, at my boy’s face. He was frantically sucking his left thumb, a habit he developed when he was a few months old. Old habits die hard.

As I looked at him, I thought of Nehru, the father. What would have Jawaharlal thought about himself and his daughter, Indira Priyadarshini, in the early 1930s when he wrote the letters? Did he know he was making history? Or was he just a father who wanted his child to have the best of himself and tried to share with her whatever he thought would make her a better human being? I didn’t know. And I did not go back to Glimpses of World History for the next three years.

The pages opened up some weeks ago. Sangeeth, now seven, has been reading books on his own and has been devouring the stories of Geronimo Stilton, a cheeky mouse who runs a newspaper. The narrative of the series is structured in such a way that it takes many digressions to discuss science, history and arts without diluting the racy pace of the mouse’s adventures.

Sangeeth was reading Following the Trail of Marco Polo, one of the popular books in the graphic novel series, and had many questions on travellers and explorers. Should I Google, he asked. Let’s ask Nehru, I said. Nehru? Who’s Nehru, and why?

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of our country, I replied. And he wrote books, and, like Geronimo, he published and edited a newspaper. One of his books is called Glimpses of World History , which runs into around 1,200 pages and is a collection of his letters to his daughter Indira, who also went on to become a Prime Minister, I said. I pulled the book out of the shelf. Let’s see what Nehru says about Marco Polo.

“A famous traveller from Venice, Marco Polo, about whom I shall have something more to say later, visited Kayal, the port twice, in 1288 and in 1293,” he writes. Marco Polo also tells us that the finest muslins, which “look like tissue of spider’s web”, were made on the east coast of India. India? Sangeeth was curious. That’s us! Indeed, I agreed and read the next line in the book: “Marco mentions that a lady — Rudramani Devi — was the queen in the Telugu country — that is the east coast of Madras.”

“Ah, Madras! How did he know about Chennai?” Nehru knew a lot about everything, places, people, things and ideas, I replied. He must have used a lot of Google, then, look at the size of the book, he exclaimed. I said I should disappoint him there as when Nehru wrote, there was no such technology available. No computer? No. WiFi? No. Television? No. Then what did he have? “Books and pen,” I said. Was he living inside a library? Not when he was writing this book. He was in prisons in Naini, Bareilly and Dehradun. Nehru wrote a big part of the book when he was aboard a ship, SS Cracovia.

Wow! So he remembered all these things? Yes, he did, I said. And later when a publisher bundled the letters into a book many people checked the facts and they didn’t have to change much. Sangeeth was impressed. He picked Page No. 1,005. That’s almost near the end of the book. Chapter 182, ‘Science Goes Ahead’. Written on July 13, 1933.

I started reading: “I have written to you at great length about political happenings, and a little about the economic changes that took place all over the world during the post-war years…In this letter I want to write about other matters, and especially about science and its effects. But before I go on to science, I would remind you again of the very great change in woman’s position since the World War.” I continued reading. “This so-called ‘emancipation’ of women from legal, social and customary bonds began in the 19th century with the coming of big industries which employed women workers.”

Sangeeth looked puzzled. When big companies started giving jobs to women, it made a difference to their lives, I explained. Work makes a lot of difference to people’s life, especially for women. Nehru writes that when the war happened, most men went to war, and more women got opportunities to work and that made the process of their emancipation faster.

He didn’t quite get it, but looked curious. This is good, but can we go to science, Acha ?

“And now let us go to science,” writes Nehru. “In dealing with the Five Year Plan in Soviet Russia, I told you that it was the application of the spirit of science to social affairs. To some extent, though only partly, this spirit has been at the back of Western civilization for the past 150 years or so. As its influence has grown, the ideas based on unreason and magic and superstition have been pushed aside, and methods and processes alien to those of science have been opposed…”

But people still believe in bad things, father. People do, my dear. But people change. People evolve as they learn more, as they open themselves up. Are you saying reading more books and knowing more things will make us better? I am not sure. But that’s one way. Nehru says more information doesn’t actually mean more wisdom. What?

I read: “There was great increase in knowledge, but do not imagine that this necessarily means an increase in wisdom. Men began to control and exploit the forces of Nature without having any clear ideas of what their aim in life was or should be. A powerful automobile is a useful and desirable thing, but one must know where to go in it.” That’s funny. What’s funny? Getting into the car and not knowing where to go, he laughed. But that’s what a lot of people do these days. They have a lot of things with them, phones, gadgets and the like, but they don’t know what they are supposed to do with them.

Nehru tells his daughter: “Most of us use the products of science — railways, aeroplanes, electricity, wireless, and thousands of others — without thinking of how they came into existence. We take them for granted, as if we were entitled to them as of right. And we are very proud of the fact that we live in an advanced age and are ourselves so very ‘advanced’...”

My eyes and mind were already on the next lines and I was amazed at the prophecy dormant in them. “We read so many books nowadays, most of them, I am afraid, rather silly books. In the old days people read few books, but they were good books, and they knew them well. One of the greatest of European philosophers, a man full of learning and wisdom, was Spinoza. He lived in the seventeenth century in Amsterdam. It is said that his library consisted of less than sixty volumes.”

I was getting ready to tell Sangeeth about Spinoza but he didn’t ask me about the philosopher. Instead, he said: “But there are a lot of things on Facebook and friends tell me they know about stuff from there, not books.” I wasn’t surprised as I knew, like most parents, how children consumed social media for almost everything.

I turned back to Glimpses of World History again. It is well, therefore, for us to realise that the great increase in knowledge in the world does not necessarily make us better or wiser. We must know how to use that knowledge before we can fully profit by it.

Remember what we read earlier, Sangeeth? Nehru says we must know where to go before we rush ahead in our powerful car. A clever monkey may learn to drive a car, but he is hardly a safe chauffeur. I heard him giggle as he slowly slouched in the bed.

It was late in the night and we had been reading Nehru for quite some time now. For a few minutes more we read the book and spoke about science (physics, Einstein, Eugenics, yes he discussed all that in July 1933, things Sangeeth said he’d know when he was bigger). And in the paragraphs, I found a father yearning to make his daughter and many millions like her understand the world better with a greater scientific temper. “...but still science does answer more and more questions, and helps us to understand life, and thus enables us, if we will but take advantage of it, to live a better life, directed to a purpose worth having... It illumines the dark corners of life and makes us face reality, instead of the vague confusion of unreason.” I stopped reading. Sangeeth was already asleep. He was still sucking his thumb. I went back to Nehru. Old habits die hard.

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