An eminent mind with a silver tongue
I sat glued to his voice as Dr Anandatissa de Alwis waxed eloquent on Krishnamurthi. In the wake of visits by other notables of India, Krishamurthi came here twice. At the time of the first visit, Anandatissa was only a cub reporter of 21 callow years. Someone had to interview Krishnamurthi but, who would bell the cat?
On Anandatissa fell the honour, but onerous task. “Why me, it must have been because I was from Ananda College,” he said dropping the ‘o’ many octaves to sound like in ‘collateral’ in a mischievous imitation of the boys from the elite schools.
“Anyway, I interviewed the great man but the newspaper gave me only a few token lines. It was an era when India’s philosophy was not of import.” The second occasion when Krishnamurthi visited our country was a few decades ago and by then Anandatissa de Alwis had also grown in stature and was considered of eminent cast of mind and vision with an honorary doctorate and a Cabinet portfolio to boot.
Mr. Adhikaram was the most competent to handle the assignment but steeped as he was in the lore and philosophy of the great man, he recoiled at the very suggestion of an interview, homing in the truth that one fears and respects the waters the more only when one has learned to swim.
Once again, on Dr de Alwis fell the magnificence of having to interview the great man and those of us who were exposed to the TV interview will vouch there has never been a better searching out of the profundities of thought. But yet, Dr. de Alwis found it perplexing as to why he was chosen. That’s of course, selling himself short and is the measure of the man.
The expressions and postulations of Krishnamurthi had, obviously, a telling effect on Dr. de Alwis too as is evident from the many books on the subject he had subsequently acquired to adorn and give weight to his bookshelves.
When Dr. de Alwis spoke it was almost with the silver tongue of Krishnamurthi, mellifluous and resonant, and the listener, as it has often been my experience, is caught in the thread-bare cliche of the wood and the trees. I made a conscious effort to listen and must be excused that I forever will remember some gems.
“Krishnaji,” said Dr. de Alwis, “Never challenged the concept of God. But he did speak of the galaxy of clergy that religions spawned. It is like committees and sub-committees of a society.
“And then, again, there is the problem that our minds have been cluttered with rubbish from the time we had meaningless ‘Ba ba Black Sheep’ and ‘Goosy Goosy Gander’ thrust upon us that there is little residual space to accommodate essentials. When we react it is with the cumulative impact of all the ruinous stuff and nonsense that we have been exposed to from our plastic years.”
I remembered that Buddha Himself, was Indian and immortals [in the sense that they will never die in our minds] like Tagore and Nehru had come ashore to awaken our aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities and so I asked Dr. de Alwis with which other Indians would Krishnamurthi rub shoulders.
“That’s a difficult question to answer in the absolute,” he said, “Because India has periodically brought forth men of tremendous mind power; men like Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Sai Baba and many of that stature and spiritual grace.”
comments powered by Disqus