22 Thaker Seedhayo!

Dear Readers,
             In remembrance of Thakur Shri Vijay Karan As Karan Arha, Thikana Panchetiya, R.H.J.S.(retd.), Former Legal Secretary to Legislative Assembly of Rajasthan.

                    To loose a dear one is one of the most bitter experiences this ruthless life teaches you. Such a grave personal loss is often indescribable. Leave alone a coherent expression of words, one cannot even put together his/her thoughts in a cogent form. I lost my revered and beloved grandfather yesterday. I could muster up the courage to write a few words about this loss only because of having already gone through the trauma of facing two untimely deaths in my family recently. 

                     I do not wish to write about how much I loved my grandfather. The currency of the word "love" is grossly undervalued in my economy. I would like to tell you how he inspired me to be a great man like all grandfathers do viz. a viz. their grandchildren. My grandfather was a Hakim in the service of the state of Marwar before Independence and later on became a judge in the state of Rajasthan. When in his finest mood, he would narrate stories from his legal career regarding curious cases. 

                     A fabian Socialist and a Gandhivadi, he was a man of principles and a practitioner of upright honesty like many of his generation who had suffered a few blows of British Raj lathis in their student days before witnessing the epic scene of the tiranga being unfurled from over the Red fort in Delhi. He was one of the few scholars from the state of Marwar to have obtained a prestigious legal education from Agra College. Back in my village, Panchetiya, I became his die-hard fan when he would ask dalits and non-Thakurs to have a seat on a chair and not sit on the floor as was the custom. He used to say, " The worst of  democracies is better than the best of monarchies".

                      I owe my passion for history to him. I had dedicated my M.Phil dissertation to him and he had tears rolling down his eyes when I showed it to him. He made me aware about the glorious past of my family  along with its pitfalls and tragedies. He introduced me to Dickens, Keats, Shelly, Tagore, Marx, Gandhi, Durso, Carl Popper, Russell, Hegel and then his greatest gift to me ever, two volumes of short stories by Chekhov. Data, as I call him, you will remain with me till my dying day as I will lie in my death bed remembering the vision of your nimble fingers turning another page of the text called life.....   .