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THE MANY WAYS OF BEING HUMAN!
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THE MANY WAYS OF BEING HUMAN!

July 18- July 24, 2026, MEMOIRS July 17, 2026 , by

To coincide with the conclave organised by a group of scientists headed by Ranadhir Mukhopadhyay on being human, I recall acts of great compassion that I have experienced over my life journey of six decades…

DUA or blessings are freely available. But daya or compassion is very rare. The art of practicing being human is the ability to be spontaneously compassionate. I have experienced several instances of such spontaneous compassion from extraordinary and ordinary people and would like to recount them. My first experience of spontaneous compassion was when I was 13 going on 14 years and a young woman, maybe all of 21 or 22 years old, entered the life of the Narayan Iyer family. Narayan Iyer is my father’s name.
My own avatar of Shanta Durga came in the form of an orphan, this Maharashtrian girl who had been adopted by the family of the then editor of Bangalore’s leading daily “Deccan Herald.” The family of the editor was ironically called Kripa Nidhi, or rather, his mother had adopted this young woman Shanta. When the children in the family grew up and their father died, they threw Shanta out or rather told her to go away. Shanta, who was a friend of my 21-year-old sister and a classmate in college, took refuge in our tiny one bedroom flat in Mumbai’s Andheri.
Shanta came into our lives at an extremely stressful moment. My oldest sister had started getting severe epileptic fits at the tender age of 20. These are called grand mal fits and last for hours at a stretch. My father, a lower division clerk in the defense army, as usual had got himself transferred to a distant location. There was not enough money to go around and Shanta, who worked as a clerk in the library of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bangalore, supplemented the earnings of my elder sister Vasanta who worked as a school teacher. Vasanta was diagnosed with a tumor of the brain. Shanta took care of her as she was working at NIMHANS. Shanta was the calm, stabilizing influence. With infinite compassion she looked after Vasanta.
All of us in the family in transition between Bangalore and Bombay years, including my elder brother and my younger sister, became very attached to Shanta and I remember presenting her with her a small box of peanuts wrapped with a ribbon on her birthday. Shanta went on to do a librarian’s course in Mysore (now Mysuru). There she met a physics professor and got married to him and moved out of Bangalore (now Bengaluru). I can never forget Shanta’s spontaneous compassion for her fellow people.
Then, on June 29, 1989 I got beaten up savagely just 50 meters away from the servants’ basement flat in which I was living in Dona Paula, Goa, as the editor of the “Oheraldo” over 20 years. Those days the young priest Fr Oscar Quadros had become a good friend. Fr Oscar used to drive me around in his Volkswagon Beetle.
I remember that we had passed the house of the then Speaker in the Goa Assembly, Dayanand Narvekar (who had given a “supari” to Santa Cruz goons) the day before I got beaten up. On reading of the assault on me in the “OHeraldo” newspaper the next morning Fr Oscar rushed to the GMC where I had been admitted. It was Fr Oscar who took care of me for a month till Dr Wilfred D’Souza decided I would be better off in the Jaslok hospital in Bombay (now Mumbai). Fr Oscar accompanied me as I was taken on a stretcher loaded on to a flight from Goa to Bombay. He deposited me at the Jaslok hospital where my oldest and best friend C S Mirchandani took over charge of me.
Mirchi, as Chandru Mirchandani was popularly called by his friends, was a friend of mine for many years till his eventual passing away in Goa. We had first met in shared paying guest accommodation in 1970 at the Dadar Parsi Colony in Bombay. Mirchi was an electrical engineer in his first job and I had just started working for the “Financial Express.”
We remained in touch after I moved to Goa in 1980. But when I returned to Bombay on a stretcher as a patient years later, Mirchi came to receive me at the airport and he supervised my admission to the Jaslok hospital. Every day after work he would come and spend a couple of hours and catch up on my medical treatment. Unlike in Goa, Bombay hospitals and even private hospitals, do not insist on every patient having a caretaker. The nurses and the ward boys look after patients in their care with the supervision of relatives or friends. It helped that the Jaslok was a Sindhi hospital and Mirchi’s father, who had been an IAS officer and his family, were highly respected. For over two months Mirchi looked after me and I subsequently shifted to his residence near the Breach Candy hospital where his wife Jyoti also was a friend. I returned to Goa and much later Mirchi re-located to Goa as a professor of marketing in the Goa Institute of Management and we met up again regularly.
AT one particular point around 1993 it was decided that I should seek treatment in the Mecca of neurosciences called National Hospital in London. The editors of Goa raised the money for my air-fare to London. My film producer friend Kenneth Griffith made the arrangements for me to stay in London at his house called the Michael Collins House. For some reason I could not get admission to the hospital and was treated as an outpatient. Kenneth was busy with his films and I was often alone at his huge villa, living on digestive biscuits and cups of tea.
Lui Godinho, my old photographer from the “OHeraldo” in Goa had by then moved to London with his wife Eligreen, who had been a GMC nurse. Lui lived 70 km away in a distant suburb but every day he would travel by tube to my south London sanctuary. Lui would take me out to dinner, check on my medications and generally cheer me up. Luis did this for almost two months. Luis introduced me to the Goan community in London. The Goan community very generously presented me with a blood pressure monitor as I suffered from sharp variations in my blood pressure. But for Lui I don’t think I would have survived the bleak cold London winter over two months.
I returned to Goa not very much better. The doctors in London would not take me off steroids but instead my situation worse by putting me on to “uppers” – a tablet called Temzpan which makes one feel euphoric and very hyper. I passed through a phase when I was quite violent. My eyesight had deteriorated with growing glaucoma and I had to go to the Arvind Netralaya in Madurai. While I was returning to Bangalore I had a fall at the Bangalore airport and sustained several fractures. An old friend from Bangalore Peter Colaco admitted me to the Mallya hospital where a young endocrinologist , recently returned from Sloane Kettering hospital in New York, happened to pass by my bed. Dr Shrikanta was not involved in my treatment for fracture but he saw how bloated I was and believe it or not I was even more bloated than Anant Ambani then, my weight was 200 kg plus.


Dr Shrikanta insisted one examining me and said I was suffering from Addisons, a steroids induced condition. Dr Shrikanta told me I would have to de-tox. I told him it would be very dangerous as doctors had warned that I would die within a month if I went off steroids. Shrikanta said I would not last another month if I did not de-tox and he took charge, he put together a team consisting of a neurologist and a psychiatrist. He weaned me off the steroids over four months and Dr Shrikanta became my friend, philosopher and guide through the four months I was at the Mallya hospital in Bangalore. Every night he would come and read from the Bhagvad Gita to me. He was the president of the local Ramkrishna Mission and I was gratified when very touchingly Dr Shrikanta waved his personal fees. It was Dr Shrikanta who released me from my dependence on steroids and gave me a new lease of life.
 On my return to Goa my weight was down to just about 35 kg, down from the 100 plus kg when I was admitted to the Mallya hospital. My Man Friday who was Ashraf Hassanawallah had come to Bangalore to bring me back to my basement flat at Mendes Haven at Dona Paula in Goa. Virtually, for the next two years, Ashraf nursed me back to health. I didn’t have the strength to even walk to the washroom and Ashraf would bodily lift me up to help me. Ashraf, a migrant from Karnataka from Hassan, had started his life as a canteen boy at the NIO. The then director Quasin Ali did not have any children and his wife reached out to all the children at the NIO colony and outside.
Ashraf was motivated to study in the night school at Don Bosco. When he passed his 12th standard he was appointed as a clerk in the NIO. Ashraf was an ocean of compassion. Not just for me but to everyone in the NIO. From the director to the senior scientists, he was everyone’s favorite. Unfortunately, he died young when he contacted rabies because of a dog bite and literally died in my arms at the Campal Clinic where I had taken him from the GMC.
NOW in the last phase of my life in Goa I have been witness to another example of spontaneous unlimited compassion and giving from Jimmy, who is 40 years, plus. Jimmy is by vocation an electrician. He spent some time with the pastor Dominic in Siolim. The pastor managed to ensure that Jimmy gave up drinking, the pastor also sowed the seeds of genuine Christian charity in Jimmy. Jimmy parted with the pastor but he continued his mission for caring for the elderly and the sick.
Jimmy takes senior citizens from Dona Paula, Caranzalen and elsewhere, including yours sincerely, for medical check-ups and shaving outings to the nearby hair and shave salons. Jimmy has been taking an 80 year old woman patient of dialysis twice a week to the GMC. Jimmy is drives his many dependent seniors in his faithful car, a Tata Indica, and goes even all the way to Mumbai or Bangalore on request. He loves driving. Jimmy is everybody’s Man Friday in the vicinity of Dona Paula where he lives and most everybody recognizes and smiles at him with welcome. He doesn’t expect payment for his many deeds of mercy and compassion but he does accept whatever you give him. What makes Jimmy unique is that he really cares with his heart and listens to anyone who comes his way. Right now Jimmy is still trying to help out people although he has fractured his right wrist. He is going around doing his best with his hand in a plaster and a prayer on his lips.
My autobiographical musings here are provoked or inspired by the first of its kind workshop on how to be human, organized by the Ganga Zuari Academy. The initiative for this 3-day workshop has been taken by Dr Ranadhir Mukhodpadhyay, former chief scientist of the Council for Scientific Research. Ranadir, who is a marine geologist, has collaborated with three of his other scientist friends, in the publication of his maiden book titled “Primordial” – which tells us about the exciting story of planet earth’s creation, extinction and resurrection. A scientific recounting of the cycle of creation, preservation and destruction, embodied by the Hindu trinity Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara. No less than the Christian trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Hey Ram, Ameen, Amen.

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