The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : A living testament to simple living and high thinking

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Monday, Aug 18, 2008
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A living testament to simple living and high thinking

Staff Reporter

E. Kalyanam reminisces his days with Mahatma Gandhi

CHENNAI: The dateline is August 15, 1947. The headline reads – ‘Two dominions born: political freedom for one-fifth of humanity.’ Such yellowed parchments printed with the first draft of history have been carefully preserved by a man who witnessed these events first-hand. But his claim to a place in the annals of history is not his age, but his association with the Father of the Nation. E. Kalyanam worked as a secretary to Mahatma Gandhi from 1944 till his demise in 1948.

“I thought he was going for his bath,” says Mr. Kalyanam, describing his first meeting with Gandhi. “He was dressed in a loin-cloth. I thought I should have gone after two hours.” That meeting happened after Mr. Kalyanam joined Sewagram; not because he was a freedom fighter, but because, “I liked gardening and other physical work.” He narrates, “I was working as a civil officer in the Army. But I hated secretarial work.” When Devadas Gandhi, whose parentage Mr. Kalyanam was unaware of, offered him a place in the Ashram, he readily accepted.

“I entered a mud-house in the Ashram. There was a poisonous centipede on the floor, which I crushed with my foot. Someone said, what are you doing? This is Gandhiji’s Ashram. We practise non-violence. That was my first lesson,” the first of many he learnt over the years. Gandhiji was in the Aga Khan prison during that time.

Freedom fighter

This was also the time when Mr. Kalyanam became a freedom fighter, unknowingly.

“I was asked to slide pamphlets under the doors of Indian households. I was asked to do it without anyone seeing me. But, a policeman caught me. He asked me what was written. I said I had not read it. He read it and said it was treason!”

Mr. Kalyanam was jailed for eight months in the Lahore jail. “For the first time I tasted pulav. I played ping-pong, badminton. I was treated very nicely,” he recounts.

Due to ill-health, Gandhiji was released unconditionally. When he was recuperating in the erstwhile Bombay, Mr. Kalyanam visited him with other Ashram-members. “Do you know typing?” Gandhiji asked him. And that was how a man who joined the Ashram for the love of physical exertion, sat next to Gandhiji every morning after that to type letters.

Till date he gets up at 3:30 a.m. to sweep the street where he lives. “Today is not too late to start a second freedom struggle,” says this living testament of what simple living and high thinking can achieve. Mr. Kalyanam was speaking at a Rotary Club of Madras Chennai Patna meeting held here on Thursday.

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