Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
emergency, the novel followed a family that endured and survived
the inner and outer torments it suffered because it was strong, and
because it had a firm foundation of belief to keep it going. Its
generations were the generations of India, despair handing over the
baton to hope, confident even in the depths that what had once
been great would again be great because it was possessed of a
greatness hard-won and thus not so easily lost. It was a fine family,
indeed, and a really fine novel. In every line I heard the quiet strength
of the man I'd spoken to all evening:
There was little hope from the rulers who were in power. So one
had to rely on oneself. It required courage to reach out to the
poor and defenceless. But that was where hope lay. Hope lay in
the private individual, who was liberal and educated, reaching
out to the silent and the suffering, and showing through his
example how the liberal institutions could work. 'Each one, teach
one,' Mahatma Gandhi had said and he had reached out and
identified with the weak with all his being: wearing their clothes,
eating their food, living their life. We can't all be like Mahatma,
thought Arjun. But each of us in his small world could reach
out and help just a little bit to root the institutions in the people,
so that they were just a little bit less like dream castles built out
of middle class aspirations. Arjun had no use for the spiritual till
human dignity was established through an unsentimental
concern for others.
The following day, gazing out at a tormented sea and the looming
edifice of the newly spruced-up Gateway of India, I wasn't certain
whether or not my concern for others could be termed
'unsentimental,' but I knew for sure that my feelings about the
grand old Taj Mahal Hotel were
definitely
sentimental. I'd stayed
there so many times by now that it felt like a second home. But, I
realised, I knew very little about the place that had played a unique
role in Bombay's history for nearly a century.
Putting off the next stage of my journey, the stage I feared the
most, I got permission to go through the hotel's archives, finding
