The year 2007 has whisked past us before we even realized,its December 15th 2007,Temperatures are dropping to 30 F here in San Jose U.S. On a cold winter morning , I sit back in my favorite spot at my apartment, my couch. My mind wondering around in my brain’s hard drive , scanning though my memories old and new. I sit staring at my laptop as my thoughts are weaving a fabric of faint images and memories. The previous night my dad had asked me to write about my Grandfather.
Last decade has been fast , eventful and exiting for me. I have changed my profession, location and direction in life many times over as any other youngster of my generation would do. Most of us are so engaged with external world in this phase of life that little do we get time to look within. To look into the spirit within that generates the energy to drive us forward.
But today i am pausing my iPod which constantly churns music into my ears as i go about coding for my next new and exiting project. Today my mind is being sucked into introspection neuron at a time. Today i am thinking about my Grand Father “Tamaash Madhav Rao”.
At age seventy he was healthy and strong, bit short tempered as a result of his high blood pressure, or may be because of crazy grandkids who used to turn the whole home up side down when we all gathered for vacation at our maama’s home where my grandparents lived, we used to call them taata and ajji affectionately. I would say those were my “wonder years”,( if you happen to watch the TV series “Wonder years” you know exactly how i feel ).
Anytime i think of my taata , the picture of him wearing white “dhoti ” ( an indian treditional dress ) and a white jubba with silver white hair combed to perfecton comes to my mind. Most of the times, he used be sit in the front office of “Repographics India” a Utility shop with photocopying machine the size of a room. It was a new business started by my maama in Mysore during late 70’s. This was before the age of mimi auto photocopying machines and personal computers took off in India. At that time this was the latest and hot technology and I was mesmerized by it.
While taata used to be sitting in the frond office entertaining the customers, my maama and aunt mala used to be busy churning out photocopies for the customers, with each copy taking nearly a minute for them to make. We used to play and create havoc mostly inside the home, which was at the back of the room where the photocopying machine was placed. we knew this was a restricted area, but once in a while we could not contain ourselves, and thats when we used to get yelling form our taata, but we always had our ajji and mala aunti at our side, so it wasn’t that bad.
My taata passed away when i was 8 years old. It still remember my mom had come to pick me up form my school. She was visibly shaken and had little grasp of things around her. I held her hand and boarded a rickshaw ( a local mode of transport in mysore) and my mother broke the news to me, while she was still crying. It was the end of an era and great loss to a family and the community. Today when i look back i feel how little i knew about my grand dad when he was alive. I started knowing my Grand dad through the stories and incidences narrated by my mom, aunts and uncle, specially from aunt choodamani who used to tell us stories about her childhood and taata with interesting details. She even took us to the place where they all lived when they were kids in Gadagh ( a small town in north Karnataka).
Madhav Rao or Maadhu as his friends and family used to call him was a very talented young boy who hated to be usual and boring. At a tender age he left his home to peruse the glitters of “cinema” . He wanted to be a Star. He struggled in the dream city Bombay ( now Mumbai) to get a break, often surviving on junk food that he could afford and sleeping in the railway station. At that time few ventured into that world of “cinema” and there were only a handful of passionate souls who wanted to live their dream. He finally realized his dream when he played the lead character or “Hero” as we love to call in India for the first ever Kannada social drama on screen in 1936. The Movie mas “Samsara Navaka” and the character was Maadhu. That was the start of a new era in Kannada Motion Pictures.
In 1942 he started a news and review magazine for Kannada film and theater. The Magazine was “Tamaash”. He ran it successfully for 9 years with an ambition of delivering “The Dream world” of Cinema and Drama to every home, to share his dream with other dreamers who were still awake. Now it sounds cliche but in 1942 there were no news magazine for Art and Entertainment. It was a revolutionary business idea with a novel intention of popularizing the art and culture among the mass. But the idea was too early for the market. The magizane was popular but looking back the concept of advertisements was in its infancy at that time. Taata had to close his dream shop due to economic pressures. Tamaash magazine was finally closed, but the name stuck with him for the rest of his life. Tamaash Madhav Rao became a household name.
Later on in his life he turned to health care industry by taking a job as a “Medical Representative” to support his family. The job took him to different places in Karnataka, but the family set camp in Gadagh/Darward and then in Raichur. He never abandoned art or acting. He found a friend and patronage in “Akki master” of Kalakshetra in Gadag, where he directed dramas and dances. He introduced all his children to the magical world of art at a tender age, and thus the seeds of dreams were sown in those young minds.
Taata wore many hats is his life, as an actor, director, journalist, entrepreneur, medical representative and a father. He was most popular as an actor, but to me he was a dreamer first. A dreamer who dared to live his dreams. A dreamer who struggled with a stereo typical world all his life.
How many of us have sacrificed prosperity for passion or compensation for creativity. From childhood we are hammered by society into a peg that fits into the stereo typical hole, conforming to the social specifications. Every child learns from an early age to sacrifice his or her dreams and passion as a price for being a peg. There are only few who dare to dream. I am proud to say my Grand father was one such Dreamer.
