What it takes to live a consequential life: Do good, love truly and keep trying

My father’s father, my Dada, was born in Sarangarh and lived out his life there. Sarangarh was one of the least consequential of over 550 ‘princely states’ when the British left in 1947, and yet it was one of those that wanted to be independent. To negotiate with Sardar Patel the terms of equal coexistence with India, a three-member delegation was sent by the King of Sarangarh to Delhi that year.

My Dada was one of the three. He would narrate this story frequently, with amusement about the delegation’s own delusions of grandeur. The three of them waited in Delhi for 14 days.

Forget the Sardar, even his secretary did not give them an audience. In those epochal days, these tiny states were simply sucked into India in the wake of conflicts and bargains with bigger states like Travancore, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Kashmir. In the 1980s, when I first heard the story, it was obvious to me that the idea of an independent Sarangarh was ridiculous and its union with India was inevitable.

How could a territory about 35km in width and 40km in length in the middle of India imagine independence? That would make my Dada laugh. It was only after I lost him in 2005 that it occurred to me that they could have done nothing else. When tectonic plates collide and shift in an earthquake, what else is there to do but try and protect your own? Fated to fail, he still tried.

But then he could see himself as a speck in the storm of history and laugh at the speck’s audacity to try changing its course. He was equally amused by the memory of smoking 60 bidis each of those 14 days as he waited with other members of the delegation for an audience with Independent India’s first home minister. My Dada was amused by most things.