24 Living the early 60s in Bombay

As we powered into the 1960s, I have many global and local events deeply etched in my memory. I was ready to go to school early one morning, when I heard over the radio that John F Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. JFK with his charisma, was the poster boy of all times and many remember clearly where they were or what they were doing at the moment when JFK was shot. The Panshet Dam disaster was another local event that I remember distinctly and recall seeing Poona being flooded and many lives lost.

Then there was the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s greats, freedom fighter and world statesman.

Around this time as my interest in cricket deepened, I would spend hours listening to the running cricket commentary broadcast over All India Radio by Bobby Taleyarkhan, Vijay Merchant and Vizzy, the Maharaja of Vizianagaram! Those were truly joyous days of classic test cricket with Anandji Dossa, the statistician pulling out cricketing numbers whenever Vijay Merchant asked him.

When I look back, I find that certain movies had a great impact on me – one of them was My Fair Lady. It was a great musical and I loved seeing Rex Harrison playing Professor Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. My love of book collecting started when I saw the well-appointed library of Professor Higgins, and beheld all those beautifully bound books stacked up to the ceiling of his study. My obsession with London too began with this movie, when I saw Covent Garden, Soho Square and Wimpole Street where Professor Higgins resided. Both these passions still remain very much with me – books and London and it all began with My Fair Lady.

My love of London was so great that I spent hours walking around the Ballard Estate area in Fort, Bombay because the gothic buildings in this area made me imagine I was in London. Similarly, I joined the JN Petit at Flora Fountain because this Library had quaint Dickensian Parsi characters who manned the library, and the Reading Room there reminded me of the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London.

Coupled with my passion for London, I was also very curious to know about foreigners and the white man. I had only read about them in books and seen them in English movies, somehow I had not met any white people in real life. Of course in the Jesuit Schools that I studied, there were some Spanish Fathers but apart from them, there was no interaction with people other than Indians. This particular passion of getting to know foreigners also deeply impacted my life and my interests in the future, as we shall see later.