Woodstock School Alumni Magazine Vol CIV, 2011

Commencement address
Jalabala Vaidya
Quadrangle - 19
Dear Principal Laurenson, Members of the
Board, Distinguished Guests, Mr. Ben Lall,
all the members of the faculty and staff:
thank you for asking me to be here today to
share this important step in the lives of the
graduating class of 2011. I speak to you all,
you lucky students of Woodstock School who
have chosen to make Woodstock their Alma
Mater, their ‘generous mother’ to guide them
in their learning and the formation of their
characters and personalities, and specially,
the class of 2011 for whom I am here today to
wish Godspeed in your lives, and to say with
Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, and in the
words of T.S. Eliot, ‘fare forward travelers’.
As many of you must know I am an actor, an
artist, an entertainer, a person who makes you
laugh and cry, to make you, the audience, aware
of the meaning and the value of your existence.
I am an artist who follows the path of Indian
classicism, an outlook not conditioned or
restrained by religion or any other sectarian
consideration, but by a sense of the beauty
of totality, that which is both manifest—creation,
and that which is formless—unknowable,
not perceivable by our five senses
(or their extensions, like microscopes and
telescopes), but nonetheless there, and also
present in each one of us. Which does not
mean that God, and we, do not laugh. ‘For
God’s sake, God, are you God or aren’t you
God?’ a character in one of my husband,
Gopal Sharman’s films, asks.
We both began our grown up lives as journalists
in Delhi, though Gopal had trained to
be a classical singer and I had enjoyed and
excelled at theatre in school and University.
We met as journalists. A couple of years later
(we were married by then) a fairy tale took
over our lives!
Gopal was editing Sunday edition of the
Indian Express newspaper, the Sunday Standard,.
Every week end he wrote a piece for
the paper under the pseudonym Nachiketas,
a character from the Upanishads. It was
either a story or a poem and I thought they
were very beautiful. I was in love of course,
which you might say could have influenced
my judgment. One day a search was instituted
for Gopal by the renownend scholar and
intellectual and President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan.
He had recently had a cataract
operation which had made him miss several
Nachiketas pieces and he wanted the poet to
come to Rashtrapati Bhavan and read them
aloud to him. Gopal asked me to read his
pieces aloud because he said I was a better
reader. The President and his distinguished
guests listened with rapt attention. Every
now and then the President would stop me
to explain to his guests how beautifully Gopal
had used a difficult philosophical idea
expressed in this or that Upanishad. They
loved it all. Dr. Radhakrishnan said to me,
you can’t just do this for us. The writing is
so beautiful and modern and young, and yet
based in our traditional thought! Many, many
people should hear this. I have to tell you that
the President was amazed to find that Gopal
was young, North Indian, wore slacks and a
turtle-necked tee and moved around the city
on a bicycle, with a little Hermes typewriter.
A few days later, the President arranged for us
to perform at the Azad Bhavan auditorium in
Delhi on Friday the 13th of January.
We called our show ‘Full Circle’, Gopal’s
poems and stories recited by me, and songs
sung by Gopal. And here is the Fairy Tale bit.
To the performance came not only the critics
who wrote fulsome praise in their reviews
the next day, but also several Ambassadors
and we were invited to bring ‘Full Circle’
to Rome, Belgrade, Zagreb and Lubljiana!
So we set forth to conquer the world or at
least Europe with our stories and poems and
songs. And so we did! Rome, Belgrade, Zagreb,
Lubljiana led to the Vatican, Munich,
Frankfurt, Brussels, London! Rave reviews,
front page pictures, full houses, proper theatres
and television programmes too!
The Fairy Tale happened for two unknown
young Indians. We earned enough money to
buy ourselves a shiny black VW Beetle and
travelled through Europe soaking in the delights:
Florence, the Alps, a Wagnerian opera
in Munich, La Boheme in Zagreb, a musical
in Lubljiana, Brecht play in Frankfurt, performing
at the Theater Poeme in Brussels.
The Writers Club in Belgrade, Spumanti
wine, Rhine wine, dancing and drinking all
night while men at nearby tables toasted me
by smashing their glasses on the floor and
calling out ‘La Bella Indiene’. Most wonderful
of all: performing, performing, people
listening to Gopal’s words. Communicating
a sense of beauty, willy nilly a sense of India
and Gopal’s beautiful voice making me cry
real tears as he sang the Kabuliwala’s Ae
Mere Pyare Watan song and as we ended
with Iqbal’s Sare Jahan se Accha, Hindustan
Hamara.
And this brings me to something I have been
told about, that in the Class of 2011, there
are quite a few of you who are thinking
seriously about taking up one of the arts as
a profession.
The arts, whether painting, sculpting; film,
television, photography; acting, directing;
dancing, choreography; music, classical,
instrumental or vocal, Indian or Western; or
rock and metal, pottery, laser shows, installation
art whatever—the arts all have several
most important things in common.
To practice an art you have to learn the craft
of it. The craft often means a great deal of
drudgery, like learning lines, for instance, or
practicing scales. Hours and hours of work.
No cheering audience, just hard, lonely
work. If you don’t have the craft you do
not have the means to communicate what
burns inside you to be told. If you don’t
have a passion that burns inside you to communicate
something most dear, most true to
you, forget it.
Most people are happiest with the security
of a regular job, the assured income, the
well worn path upwards, the well earned
retirement, the annual increment, the annual
vacation. Yes, there is stress here too, fierce
competition, office or business politics, family
entanglements. But it is the better path for
most of us, and not to be derided. Then too,
each life has its opportunity for a moment of
bravery, of true sacrifice, of true love, of the
elation of having made the right, the dharmic
choice.