It's all child's play!

Does childhood offer glimpses into what the future holds for us? We take a peek into the childhood of some great people to see how it determined their later lives

November 13, 2011 04:25 pm | Updated 04:25 pm IST

Has the future stepped in already? Making quiet inroads

Has the future stepped in already? Making quiet inroads

“Beleyuva pairu molakeyalle”, they say in Kannada. You can tell a plant from its seedling, is what it means. Is it a universal truth? Do we get glimpses of the “greatness” or the “ordinariness” of our lives in our childhood itself? Or is childhood simply the most special period of one's life, uniformly? We can rest our differences, nonetheless, it's a period from which we constantly draw – the unending reserve which surfaces and echoes in all the later phases of one's life.

It's hard to find a child who has not heard the stories of Gandhi ji in his growing up years; it's even harder to find a child who has not heard the stories of baby Krishna. So, while the “kettle” and “Kalinga” episodes are unmistakably a part of our collective unconscious, they also set the tone for their future personalities.

But writer Mahashweta Devi, who, with her acerbic pen, wounded the powers that be and wrote gut wrenching fiction, speaking of her childhood and family in an interview said, “...life was beautiful. But that life did not prepare me for my later life.” As a tribute to her wonderful childhood — that seemed so distant from what she did later — filled with maternal and paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, eight siblings, relatives, friends, and her fantastic parents, Mahashweta Devi wrote “Our Non-Veg Cow and other Stories”. Her mother's pet cow “going up their staircase to have its daily fill of freshly fried hilsa fish”, her father who went down to “see off a friend in his lungi and bedroom slippers, carried on chatting all the way to Howrah station, boarded a train and arrived at my eldest aunt's place in Gaya” and grandmother who would herd together the illiterate girls of the area and run free classes at home from primary to standard eight – life was never short of exciting moments. However, with all the fun and happiness of her childhood, she traces her association with the tribals back to her childhood. “When we were in Midnapur, I had close contact with the Santal tribals. When my parents went to Calcutta, all of us kids played with the tribals...,” she recalls.

For the phenomenal musician Annapurna Devi, her life was determined by one chance moment in her childhood. Her father, the legendary Baba Allauddin Khan saab, was teaching music to her brother Ustad Ali Akbar Khan saab. It so happened that one day, when Baba had gone out and Ali Akbar Khan saab was struggling to get a phrase right, the untutored Annapurna Devi who had learnt by listening, was helping him achieve it. Baba stepped in at that moment and was stunned by Annapurna's talent. “I want to teach you all that I know. You have no greed, but an infinite desire to learn,” he had said. Annapurna Devi went on to become one of the finest musicians of this country, but remained a recluse. In her introduction to a biography on her father “Baba Allauddin Khan” she recalls from her childhood, “Baba used to say that every note should touch one's soul. It is a process of total surrender, of submerging one's ego” and to this day, Annapurna Devi's music shines with the power of selfless meditation.

Much of Isaac Balshevik Singer's personality and writing impulses were shaped during his childhood in Warsaw in his father's court. He presents a brilliant account of his learned Rabbi father, pious and resilient mother in his autobiographical work, “In My Father's Court”. When you read Singer's narrative that brilliantly balances the contradictory elements of human predicament without being judgemental, you know how the rabbinical court influenced him. As he puts it: “I have not attempted to idealise the Beth Din or to endow it with conditions and moods that were not part of my direct experience.”

Did you know that as a child Roald Dahl loved chocolate, never ate sphagetti and hated cats? He was lousy with spellings and his sister Alfhild drank champagne out of her shoe! His Norwegian nanny who looked after him and his sisters always called him ‘Boy'! And when he wrote letters to his mother, he signed of as Boy. Now you know where books “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Boy” came from!

Despite his father's dire threats and severe punishments the renowned composer Naushad could never wean himself from music; in his moving memoirs “Out of Place”, thinker and writer Edward Said says that right from his childhood he felt out of place with most things including his name and continued to feel so all through his life. In his concluding lines, he says, “I have learned that I actually prefer being not quite right and out of place.”

As Graham Greene puts it, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” Perhaps.

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