This column stays away from mentioning my family, but I must now make an exception. This is because my mother died last week, 12 years after my father. Never remotely famous, they were both exemplary parents. And there may be some other things to remember them by.

My parents belonged to a generation when one expressed one’s patriotism through quiet service rather than crude boastfulness. In what I write about them here, readers will recognise affinities with people they themselves knew, whether as parents, uncles, aunts, teachers or doctors, who likewise embodied the sort of decency and moral rectitude that run so thinly on the ground today.

My father, Subramaniam Rama Das Guha, was born in 1924, in a hill town once known as Ootacamund. Twenty-three years later, visiting the place of his birth, he met and fell in love with a young lady named Vishalakshi Narayanamurti. He was then finishing a PhD at the Indian Institute of Science, in the same student cohort as the great physicist, GN Ramachandran.

A postdoctoral scholarship at a university overseas was his for the asking, but affairs of the heart mandated that he instead take a job at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun, where Vishalakshi’s father worked. My father joined the FRI in 1948 and married my mother three years later. He stayed in the same job till retirement.

My father belonged to a family of public servants. A brother was in the air force, a sister in the army nursing service. An uncle and a brother-in-law were, like him, scientists orienting their research to public ends. My father himself used the words “Government of India” in tones that denoted real and total respect. He believed that state property must never, ever, be used for private purposes. He scorned the use of an official car, choosing to cycle to his laboratory and back every day.

Along with this commitment to public service, my father also had a disregard for social prejudice. Like other such Indian institutions at the time, the FRI’s scientific cadre was dominated by Brahmins. Their sons spoke proudly of their lineage, of how their fathers and they themselves changed their........

© Scroll.in