The Solitude of Emperors Read Online Free PDF Page B

not once did we discuss the politics of faith or any of the myriad other subjects I had studied. At the end of his questioning, Mr Sorabjee said to me, ‘Well, that’s all I have for you, young man. Do you have any questions for me?’
    I had grown tense as the interview continued to meander along without touching on anything that I hoped would clinch the job for me; now, without intending to be quite so forceful, I blurted out, ‘But sir, don’t you want to know my views on politics, on communalism…’
    ‘I already know everything I need to know,’ Mr Sorabjee said with a slow smile that folded the skin at the corners of his eyes like a concertina. ‘Let’s see, what we have here is a young, single, economics graduate, a Tamil Brahmin from K—who prefers Krishnamachari Srikkanth to Kapil Dev and Kamal Haasan to Amitabh Bachchan, who listens occasionally to M.S. Subbulakshmi and doesn’t really know too much about contemporary popular music.
    ‘And this young man wants to work for an old Bombayite with a degree in philosophy from Wilson College, a practising Parsi who is fascinated by every other religion that has taken root in this country, a widower who has had to give up red meat on account of his gout, whose cricketing geniuses stopped with Farrukh Engineer and Sunil Gavaskar, who loves to go to Western classical music concerts, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky preferably, at the NCPA auditorium, who is partial to Shakespeare especially the tragedies, whose favourite hero will always be Cary Grant, and, well, I deliberately didn’t bring up heroines, young man, we’re all entitled to some secrets…’
    ‘I might have got the order a bit wrong, but I believe I have covered pretty much everything we talked about. I can see you’re puzzled by my apparent lack of interest in your reasons for wanting to join this magazine, Vijay, but the very fact that you are here for this interview is reason enough. In the course of the next few months I will have plenty of time to explore your credentials, nothing you could have said to me in half an hour would have made a difference. I was a student myself once, and we Indians are the best in the world at soaking up information and spitting it out on demand. No, Vijay, I wanted to discover as many facets of you as I could in the time that we have, and tell you in turn as much as I could about myself, because in my long years with the magazine I have discovered that the core of the battle we’re fighting is this: the fundamentalists have always sought to pare people down to a single dimension, their religious identity, and in doing so exclude everything else about them. What we’re trying to say, in our stubborn way, is that each of us contains worlds within us; we are so multi-faceted that we will not be put into little boxes, segregated and turned against one another.’
    He paused, and then said, ‘Do you know why I named this magazine The Indian Secularist?’
    ‘Because it champions secularism, sir?’
    ‘Yes, indeed, but I had something more in mind when I was thinking about a title for it. So let me ask you this: how would you define secularism or better still the word secularist?’
    This was one of the questions I had prepared for. ‘The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as someone who is concerned with the affairs of the world, not the spiritual or the sacred.’
    ‘Quite so, which is why it was important to me to have both the words Indian and Secularist in the title because taken together they stand for something far richer and more resonant. The Western interpretation of secularism is the strict separation of Church and State, but as that would never have worked in this country, where religion permeates every aspect of daily life, our founding fathers took it to mean an even-handedness or neutrality towards all faiths. We practise secularism in the Indian sense of the word without quite realizing it—while we remain true to our faith we tolerate every other