There is a word in the English dictionary, enigma, which means literally “the unpredictable” or “something hard to understand or difficult to explain”. Yes, India is indeed an enigma that you will experience it firsthand only when you visit that country. It is a land of extremes. I hope that you, my grandchildren, will go as a tourists or on business to experience that subcontinent. You uncle or your dad, Vivek, will authenticate this impression.

As I write this in 2015, India is also one of the fastest growing economies here in the Space Age of instant communication and information transfer. It has provided a significant percentage of human brains and resources for the computer industry.

With its teeming population, India has the ability to accommodate what can be truly called diversity in all forms. If you stand in the busiest part of any of the hundred cities with more than a million population, you will witness a scenario like this: A maimed beggar asks for alms. A man washes his body at the fire hydrant because he is homeless. Nearby, the latest Mercedes Benz flashy convertible is parked, from which a businessman is trading stocks over the mobile phone in the Hong Kong stock exchange. Traffic on the roads is unbelievably confusing. Bullock-carts, auto-rickshaws, taxis, motorcycles, imported autos, and big heavily loaded trucks all move at different speeds and keep their own places. A family of four rides on a scooter, even though they are breaking all the known traffic rules of the West. The number of road accidents is relatively small and it seems everyone has a place in the road. Even stray dogs and cows find their place in the maddening crowd of pedestrians. You will see a group of well-dressed girls in their school uniforms, patiently waiting for their convent school bus to pick them up while half-naked children run around. Garbage floats over the untreated sewage. Life seems to be a “live and let live” proposition, with a generous amount of mutual tolerance.

Public buildings are poorly maintained and have not seen new paint for years. In contrast, you will also see modern highways from the airport to five-star luxury hotels, all Western style, serving the millions of foreign tourists and businessmen with multinational corporations. That is what you would experience in the present-day India or 2015. I hope that by the time you read this, India will have changed.

India is a country with a recorded history of civilization going back over 3000 years. Before 2500 BC there was an ancient Indus Valley civilization of Dravidians in the northern section of the Indian subcontinent as evidenced by the ruins of Mohan Jo Doro and Harappa in the province of Sind, which show that they had the finest planned cities in the world at that point in history. My mother tongue, Tamil, is one of the five surviving Dravidian languages.

Sometime around 2500 BC, the Aryans from the Middle East invaded the northern part of India through the Khyber and Bolan Passes in what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. They drove the Dravidians to the south and many escaped to the Southeast Asian regions now called Malaysia and Thailand and some even to Australia and New Zealand. The Aryans, who were lighter-skinned than the Dravidians, brought their own religious beliefs and their own language of Sanskrit when they settled in the northern part of India to establish the Vedic or Indus Valley civilization. The two classical epics of India, Ramayana and Mahabharata, like in the Iliad and Odyssey in the Greek civilization, quite clearly portray the tradition, culture, values, belief system, and lifestyle of this period, and even of a majority of the present-day Hindus. It would be futile to try to understand the Indian culture without a fairly good knowledge of the two epics. My name, Pattabi Raman, stems from that of a hero in the Ramayana. You can trace the origin of many names to these epics.

The predominant religion of India is Hinduism whose origin can be traced back to 2000 BC. The Hindus derived their core philosophy from the sacred scriptures the Vedas, traditionally classified as Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharvana Vedas, chanted in the Sanskrit language and memorized by each generation. Some of the central religious concepts that emerge from the Vedas are contained in the Upanishads, also referred to as Vedanta, and form the core values of the Hindus. Over the centuries, several cultural artifacts like the caste system and idol worship got introduced which have no basis or validity from the Vedanta point of view.

Even today the caste system is quite rigid. One’s caste is determined by birth. Marriages traditionally should be within the caste you were born into, as inter-caste marriage was forbidden. In the community I was born into, marriages were arranged by parents after a suitable match was found based on horoscopes. The boy and the girl were not allowed to meet except to see each other in a previously arranged party which the two families would attend. I will write more on this in a later chapter.

India has a long and checkered history of civilizations that have sprung and then died. After the advent of Buddhism in 500 BC, many prosperous civilizations flourished, such as the Mourya and the Gupta. Then came the Moslem rule over the entirety of India from 1000 AD to 1857 AD. The British period was from from 1750 to 1948 during which India was the richest British colony. Three universities were initially established following the British model in the three main cities of Bombay, (now Mumbai), Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) with English as the language of the curricula. Christian missionaries established many quality schools and the English language became the medium of instruction in a majority of schools. These Universities have produced some fine minds, including four Nobel Prize winners: Tagore in Poetry, C.V Raman in Physics, and Khorana in Biochemistry. The independence movement became strong in the 20th century with Gandhi as its leader, and India became independent once again in 1947. The Indian government divided the country into fourteen states on the basis of language. India at present is second only to China in population, with over a billion people. It has the fastest growing economy in the world.

My late maternal grandfather, V. Sundaresa Iyer, has been a source of great inspiration to all of us in the family. The vignette of his life, as I know it, goes like this.

He was born in a very orthodox South Indian Brahmin family in Nellicheri, Tanjore District, in the early 1870s and died at the age of fifty-seven, in 1930, a year before I was born. He refused to be recruited into the traditional life of a professional Brahmin priest. Instead he went to college in the nearest city (probably Trichinopoly,) to earn an engineering degree and become the first graduate in the family. He was quite a prominent, successful, and highly placed official in the government’s India Telegraph Morse code training institute from which he retired as its director and settled in T. Nagar, Chennai. Telegraphy using Morse code was the breakthrough communication technology in those days, as e-mail is today. He served in the early 1900s in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) and in Karachi (now in Pakistan). My mother was born in Karachi. He was ostracized temporarily from the Brahmin community by the priests for his travel over the water as he took a ship to go to Burma. He was later pardoned and readmitted into the community after performing a “Religious Water Bathing Ceremony” before his daughters could marry according to the Brahmin customs.

He later served his last employed years in Calcutta and had a residence in Bhawanipur. He was the first Indian employee in the Telegraph department who had a position of equal rank and salary to the Britishers in those colonial days. His monthly salary was about Rs. 1000 — an amount thirty times that of the monthly salary of an average native Indian government employee. My grandmother said that he used to bring his monthly salary in a leather pouch filled with gold and silver coins, as there were no checks and no organized banking system for the common public for transacting money. In my early years I have myself seen the leather pouch with a few gold coins in it, which my grandmother kept as a memoir. He lived affluently and always had a three-piece suit with a gold tie-pin as I have seen him in many of his official group photos. Instead of buying a car he bought a hand-rickshaw and employed a rickshaw puller. My uncles rode to school in that vehicle.

On his retirement, my grandfather bought ten acres of land in Mambalam which was almost a wilderness those days, as the nearest electric train station was Sidapet. My grandmother used to complain about the property’s isolation from civilization but he assured her that in future it will become a great metropolis. He developed this land into a fabulous garden property with a spacious house in the middle. There were well-spaced coconut palm, mango, and banana trees and two wells with good water. This where I spent the first eighteen years of my life and oh boy! What fun I had in climbing the mango trees.

My grandmother said that a good portion of his money went into buying books. He was a voracious reader and an ardent student of Vedanta. He was also very interested in Annie Besant’s writings and was a frequent visitor at the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Chennai as evidenced by scores of photographs. He had a sizable collection of books of all interests in his library. During my early childhood years I used to browse through his library collection, just for fun. Little did I know the treasure of knowledge it contained. He was a deeply spiritual man and I had always had a deep respect for his passion for newer knowledge and lifelong learning.

I was born on November 1st, 1931 on a Sunday night in the city of Chennai (then known as Madras) in a God-fearing Hindu Tamil Brahmin family. My mother was then sixteen and my father twenty-one. My father married his first cousin as intra-family marriage was a very much in common practice. Though they were married when they were young (my father sixteen and my mom ten), the marriage was actually consummated (i.e., they started living together after their “nuptial marriage” according to their custom) only after my father finished his college degree, which was a BA in Chemistry from the Christian College in Chidambaram. My mom told me that I was active after my birth, but a frail and skinny baby. They called me a “twiggy boy.”

Infants during the early years of development at one stage develop a sense if individuation or a personal identification as a distinct individual separated from his or her mother and the environment. This occurs somewhere between the ages of three and four. I distinctly remember this happening to me in as I woke up after an afternoon nap in a home-made infant hammock the town of Thudiyalur, which lies close to Coimbatore, a city in Tamil Nadu. It is about 12km from the Coimbatore city center in a northerly direction.

My paternal grandfather, Ramaswami Iyer, was the railway station master in this little town. I remember well the little house was surrounded with a circle of tamarind trees from which hung the baby swing I use to be rocked in, and the walks with my Thatha on the railway station platform, picking fruits which looked like boysenberries. My aunties, Saradha, Rukmani, and Pattammal gave me loving care. I do not remember much of my parents then.

By the age of four I believe I was very fond of listening to HMV Gramophone records. My favorite song was “Jagado Udaharana,” a fascinating theme which invokes “the re-builder of the Universe.” This is a germane “renewable principle” which was core later in my life.

I remember faintly our moving to Chennai. We stayed in a small dwelling near Mambalam electric train station. Then we moved to 18 PS Road, our family residence built by my maternal grandfather. (That’s where I was born). We had a joint family system and my parents moved in with my grandmother, to whom the house belonged. She had two sons, my uncles, who were in high school. That formed the whole family.

The flooring in all the rooms was fine cement and the walls were brick with calcium oxide paint. The house had a thatched roof and was big enough to accommodate three separate families. In fact we had two renters to get the extra income needed.

Mother and my grandmother did the cooking and clothes washing. We had servants to do the house cleaning, and to wash the cooking vessels, once in the early afternoon and once late at night.

The kitchen was the cleanest place the house with bright and shiny brass and copper vessels and had open shelves for storing the groceries. None of us children were allowed to enter the kitchen in the morning unless our teeth and face were washed well. Cooking was done on rustic home-made brick ovens using firewood, or often charcoal when it was affordable, which was the only source of heat.

We had two fresh-water wells on the site not too far from the kitchen and bathrooms, where the water was stored in clean and bright brass vessels and aluminum buckets. There was another well the about thirty yards from the house from which water was drawn to water the trees and the garden, which had a relatively good canal irrigation system. There were no so-called toilets, but simply holes in the ground in little houses built far away from the main section of the house.

These were the days when there was no electricity, running water, or a sewer system. There were no nail clippers, no tooth paste, no tooth brush. We used salt mixed with the wood ashes from cooking to brush our teeth. Often we made disposable tooth brushes by chewing or lightly hammering pencil-sized twigs from the neem plant to get soft bristles. We used candles, lighted oil-wicks with open flame, and kerosene lamps when guests came.

In general the South Indian middle class communities in those days were barefooted. We did not wear shoes or even sandals when we went out to do our errands or to work. Many of my teachers were barefooted. As a rule, when anyone enters or re-enters the house, they are to wash their feet as the roads are filthy and dirty. I was barefooted until I went to college.

For furniture, we had two king-sized all solid wood beds with cotton-filled mattresses, bought by my grandfather during his Calcutta days; two wooden bookshelves containing my grandfather’s library; one writing table with a stool; and two mirrored cupboards. Two wooden and one granite-topped bench, each 6x4x2½ feet, served us to sit and read during the day time and to sleep at night. We children slept on the floor on bamboo mats and thin but comfortable straw-filled pillows. The concept of a bedroom for each member of the family was unknown. When guests came, we brought out extra mats. There was no need of heavy blankets as the weather was hot, hotter, or hottest with high humidity.

There was no dining table and chairs; we sat on the floor on a straw mat or a rectangular plank of wood about 3×2 feet to eat. There were no porcelain plates or cutlery as we ate on banana leaves or stainless steel plates, or if affordable, silver plates. We used our hands and fingers to eat as there were no forks and spoons. We did not use glassware to drink from, but copper tumblers and mugs. As a rule, the males in the house would eat first, and then the females in a second batch. The food was not displayed in front of us and my mother served each of us individually.

I lived in this house for more than seventeen years, with the exception of three years from 1942-45.