Prof.Prema Raghavan

The Moment of Breaking Away

Sometimes wisdom arrives from the most unexpected quarters.

The other day, as I was being driven to pick up a friend, the driver remarked quite simply: it takes years to build trust, and only a moment to break it. The observation stayed with me, not for its novelty, but for its truth.

At this point in my life, I find myself in the throes of stepping away from a belief system,something I had once questioned and then, over time, come to accept. Faith, after all, often asks of us a willing suspension of disbelief. Without that, perhaps nothing deeply human is possible. Not everything can be proven with the precision of a geometric theorem, neatly concluded with a QED,though I remember a time when we believed it could.

And yet, there comes a moment when what once sustained you no longer does. What once felt right begins to feel insufficient. From the outside, it may look like an epiphany, a sudden illumination. But in truth, it is rarely sudden. It is something that has been gathering quietly within, until a final trigger,the last straw,brings it into the light.

What follows is a kind of falling free.

In that moment, one must turn inward and ask difficult, essential questions:
Is this the path I want to walk?
Is this what I choose for the rest of my life?
Do I turn away from what no longer feels true?

Ibsen, in An Enemy of the People, suggests that truth itself is in a state of flux,that it is never fixed, never final. If that is so, then examining one’s life is not an indulgence but a necessity. To live authentically demands that we revisit, and sometimes relinquish, what we once held as certain.

This is not an act of self-righteousness. It is, rather, an act of honesty.

To believe one thing and outwardly profess another is a fracture no life can sustain indefinitely. And it is in our closest relationships that this fracture becomes most untenable. These are the spaces that require ethical clarity,where what we believe, what we revere, what we bow before, must align with what we truly hold within.

When that alignment is lost, and nothing meaningful remains to pursue, then perhaps it is time to walk away.

Cleanly. Swiftly.

I had briefly imagined a gentler exit, like the Cheshire Cat, fading slowly, leaving the smile behind as the last trace. But I have come to see that lingering at thresholds serves no one,not oneself, and not those who remain.

And so, if one must leave, one must leave fully.

I realise this may sound enigmatic. I am not inclined, especially in a public space, to speak in specifics. But perhaps I don’t need to. These reflections, I suspect, belong not just to me, but to many who find themselves, at some point, standing at similar crossroads.

Strangely, one of the forces that has compelled this inward turning has been the presence of war in our times. I cannot fully explain why. But it has impressed itself upon my imagination in a way that refuses to be ignored. It has demanded of me a response,one that I hope is marked by both feeling and a measure of dignity.

If this raises questions, I am willing to engage.

Some journeys, after all, begin in clarity. Others begin in questions.

It Is a Small World

It is a small world. It may sound like a cliché, a phrase worn thin with use, but life has a way of proving it true again and again.

I do not mean this in the sense of globalization or shrinking distances. I mean something quieter, more personal. The unexpected reappearance of connections. The way people, memories, and moments resurface, sometimes decades later, as if time had merely paused rather than passed.

Looking back, I see one such thread stretching all the way to my early years.

I was a young woman then, determined to make a life of my own, regardless of whether my parents agreed. Ironically, it was my father who, shaped by circumstances in the life of someone dear to him, wanted his daughters to be independent. He had seen what it meant for a woman to be left to rebuild her life, to study again, and to raise children on her own. That experience stayed with him.

Yet, at eighteen, I could not understand him at all.

Marriage proposals came, and I would not have minded an arranged marriage if it meant an end to examinations. I loved reading, but the pressure of studying for exams filled me with a deep, almost paralysing anxiety. Curiously, the moment I entered the examination hall, that anxiety would dissolve. Even today, certain things, like the scent of mango blossoms, which arrive around exam season, carry with them a faint echo of that old unease.

Eventually, I completed my graduation and teacher training, and all I wanted was to begin working. A position opened up at Campion School, and my father, in his quiet wisdom, found a way to say yes. The job allowed me to teach in the afternoons while continuing my studies. It solved both our concerns.

That is how I began teaching Grade Four.

Those years remain among the happiest of my life. The children were bright, curious, and wonderfully receptive. They absorbed everything and returned it with affection. I gave them my energy and received, in return, an abundance of love.

Then came another turning point.

My Master’s examinations were delayed. When I finally took them, I stood first in the university. To continue, I needed to complete a dissertation under a professor, which would require leaving my job. I did not want to.

Once again, my father intervened. He spoke to Fr. Joe Saldana, the principal of Campion School, a Jesuit priest whose compassion and wisdom left a deep impression on me.

Fr.Saldana had once gently pointed out something I had not noticed about myself, that I had favourites among my students. “Do not lose your heart to them,” he had said. At the time, it seemed almost impossible. I grew deeply attached to my students and knew I would miss them when they moved on. Only later did I understand the wisdom in his words.

When my father approached him, Fr. Saldana made me a promise. I was to take a year off, complete my Master’s, and return if I wished. My position at the school would remain open.

It was a generous, deeply humane assurance. On the strength of that promise, I left.

But life, as it often does, took an unexpected turn. I received a position at NCERT, and though I informed him that I would not be returning, I never went back to Campion School.

Yet, Fr. Saldana remained a presence in my life through memory. I spoke of him often to my children, of his kindness, his insight, and the quiet way in which he shaped my understanding of teaching and relationships.

And then, many years later, something remarkable happened.

My daughter met someone who offered her a sweet, a “bull’s eye.” Curious, she asked what it was. When she was told, she replied that her mother often spoke about bull’s eyes from Bhopal, though she had never seen one herself.

The woman smiled and said that these sweets used to be brought for her from Bhopal by her uncle, Fr. Joe Saldana, former principal of Campion School.

In that moment, a circle quietly closed.

A man I had known and admired decades ago, whose influence had stayed with me across the years, reappeared in my life through my daughter, through a simple sweet, through a casual exchange.

It is a small world.

Not because distances have shrunk, but because connections endure

A Time for Unlearning to Learn Again

The world which the young inhabit is not one I know very much about. I am not speaking of little children, but of the generations that followed ours. A decade ago I understood them better, because they sat in my classrooms.

The world of a child, however, is closer to where I stand now. Through watching my granddaughter, I feel I understand that world far better than I do the world of the generations that came after ours.

That generation looks at the world through a lens very different from the one we wore. When we looked at the world, we were seeking stability, and that desire was reflected in the choices we made. Many of those choices were shaped by a certain conditioning that began almost at the cradle.

I remember that my father very much wanted me to become a doctor. For a long time I went along with the idea. That is, until my zoology classes in high school required us to dissect frogs. I can still recall those wax trays with the frogs pinned down, their tiny hearts visibly thumping. The thought that I could do that and then calmly eat my lunch afterwards filled me with a profound sense of nausea. If I felt that way about frogs, I wondered how I would ever face cadavers in medical college.

That realization quietly but firmly closed the door on medicine for me.

Instead, I wandered into the world of literature, which turned out to be infinitely more enriching. Once I made that choice, I stayed close to it. My professional life unfolded around language and literature. I taught literature, certainly, but also language studies and worked with children who had learning disabilities. Most of what I did had something to do with words, their meanings, their music, and the many ways in which they shape thought.

For many of us in my generation, once we chose a direction we stayed with it. The young today do not always feel that same need. They often take up work that may not be directly connected with what they studied. Their choices are less tethered to the past.

The same was true of marriage in our time. Whether it was a choice we made ourselves or one in which our parents played a role, there was an underlying assumption that it was for keeps, unless fate or difficult circumstances intervened.

And then there was the idea of a home. Most people of my generation wanted to build a home and live in it for the rest of their lives. For more than thirty years we lived in the same city. We had a beautiful architecturally designed home and a garden where I had spent years growing plants from different parts of the world. It was a bird friendly garden, and watching the birds that visited it was one of my quiet joys.

And yet there came a time when we moved to another city and another home almost without pause. We were drawn by ties of love, and I do not regret that decision even for a moment.

Those circumstances followed the years of COVID, and that time made many of us learn and unlearn important lessons. One of them was the importance of being close to the people we love.

That is what brought us to this city, sometimes charmingly described as the city of djinns. It is a fascinating place, layered with history and stories, and there is so much here to explore. I have not even begun yet.

In many ways our generation grew up believing that the major decisions of life were for keeps. Careers, marriages and homes were choices made with the expectation that they would endure.

Today the anthem seems different. There is a strong sense that we have one life to live and that it must be lived in rhythm with our innermost desires and deepest sense of self.

I admire this generation for that. I admire their sincerity, their refusal to be hypocritical, and their determination not to live entirely within inherited conditioning. And yet I sometimes wonder whether the sense of stability that many of us experienced is something I would easily exchange for that kind of freedom.

What I am describing is not abstract. I see it among the children of my colleagues, my friends and my relatives. They inhabit a world very different from the one we knew, a world that asks to be understood on its own terms.

Perhaps the challenge for people of my generation is not to resist this new world but to learn how to understand it.

If I do not wish to become like a dinosaur quietly heading towards extinction, I must learn to adapt. I must unlearn what no longer serves me and remain open to what this changing world can teach.

It may be a little late to live life the way they do.

But it is not too late to keep learning how to understand their world.

The Quiet Work of Trust

When I think of trust, an image from a childhood textbook comes back to me. It showed a small child leaping from a rock into the waiting arms of his father.

Even then, the picture seemed to say something important: trust is a leap of faith.

Not blind faith, but the kind that grows slowly from being in relationship with someone.

Over the years I have come to feel that we trust a person when certain quiet assurances exist between us. When we can be our real selves in their presence. When we do not have to struggle for the right words or worry about how we will be understood . While respecting their sensibilities, we can say what we think, ask for what we need, and even admit what frightens us.

And as we grow older, the list of fears grows longer.

At such moments, what one longs for is someone who can say, quite simply, “It’s all right. It’s no big deal.”

Trust is knowing that you can share your joys and your anxieties without fearing that the other person will envy you, judge you harshly, or twist your words. It is the confidence that a moment of vulnerability will not be stored away and used against you later. When that happens, when something said in trust returns in a harsher form, the relationship itself becomes difficult to trust again.

Trust also means that when you need help, the person shows up. Their words match their actions. Sometimes they set aside their own convenience for your sake. You do not have to pretend that everything is fine when it is not, nor do you have to constantly gauge their moods in order to feel secure.

It is the freedom to be vulnerable. To speak of your insecurities and the quiet what-ifs that inhabit the mind and still feel respected and valued.

Now, having become a grandmother, old enough at least to recognise certain truths about life, I feel that trust is not confined only to the innermost circle of our lives. It can also appear in small, unexpected places.

Some time ago I took a fall in the compound of our building. The security guard helped me to my feet. That was, of course, part of his duty. But he did not stop there. With great gentleness he told me that I ought to be a little more careful and take better care of myself, even suggesting how I might do so.

He did not have to say any of this. But he spoke from a place of simple concern.

And in that moment, I trusted him.

Not because I imagine he will never disappoint me. But because when I needed help, he was there, and he spoke in a way that did not make me feel small or embarrassed about my fall.

Perhaps that too is a form of trust. Not always the great leap of the child in the textbook, but something quieter. The simple knowledge that, in a given moment, another human being will steady you when you stumble.

And sometimes, that is enough.