As his son, I had framed his life within my own needs and fears, but its canvas had proved much broader than I had realized. I could now see that I had lived too long with the possibility of my father's death, while countless others had seen only the possibilities of his life. That, in the end, allows me a kind of celebration.
STANDING TALL
My sisters and I knew him as Valiachan, which in Malayalam is literally “Big Father,” for he was our father's elder brother, indeed the eldest. “Big” might have seemed the wrong adjective to apply to him, for Valiachan was a big man in everything but the physical sense: five foot two inches in his socks, with a prematurely bald head and thick-rimmed glasses, he spoke in a soft but rasping voice with a hint of eosinophilia in his pauses. But Valiachan commanded respect, even awe, in all who met him. Height was no handicap for Napoleon, nor was it for Tharoor Parameshwar. For he was one of those people who was not merely a self-made man, but one who had made others; rarer still, he had built institutions that would survive him. In 2004, at the age of eighty-six, Valiachan passed away in Bangalore, and for those who had been touched by his extraordinary life, it was as if an age had passed with him.
Valiachan was born, in February 1918, into a good family that had fallen upon hard times. Historians tell us that at the time of Vasco da Gama, the entire area around Palghat was known as Tharoor Swarupam, but the Tharoors had, over the centuries, been reduced to farming at levels little above subsistence. The usual Kerala solution had to be found to the problem: emigration. So young Param, a brilliant student, dropped out of school after tenth grade, learned typing, and moved to Bombay, aged eighteen, to look for a job. His father had been ailing for years and soon passed away, leaving the financial responsibility for his mother, four brothers, and three sisters upon the teenager. Valiachan found a place in the Ramakrishna Mission at the Bombay suburb of Khar where, in return for cleaning the premises, he was allowed to sleep on the floor and given one free meal a day. Each day he walked twenty kilometers to work in the Fort area and back, because he could not afford the bus fare. But he sent money home. Before he became an adult, Valiachan had become the savior of his family.
At the Mission he studied the sacred Sanskrit texts, memorizing slokas that he could recite well into his eighties. But he combined his spiritual inclinations with an utterly realistic sense of his material needs and obligations. After a few temporary jobs he was hired by the largest advertising agency in British India, J. Walter Thompson, as a stenographer. His intelligence, integrity, and drive soon shone through: within a couple of years he was the media manager.
After spending most of the war years in Simla as deputy head of the government of India's propaganda department — poverty had made Valiachan apolitical — he decided to set up shop on his own in London. Advertising was a profession Valiachan instinctively understood, and he knew the Indian media better than anyone. In those days most major Indian businesses were headquartered in London and the consumers were in India, so for five years he ran a successful operation from Fleet Street selling space in Indian newspapers and magazines to British advertisers. While doing this he not only supported his family in Kerala but brought his three youngest brothers to London to study and start their working lives. It was no accident that two of them followed Valiachan into advertising: one was my own father, Chandran Tharoor.
London lost its attractions after independence, so three years in Calcutta followed as advertising manager for the Amrita Bazar Patrika— the old war propagandist, in a nice twist of irony, having been hired by the Indian nationalist paper in London. In 1955 Valiachan returned to Bombay in triumph, as the founder publisher of the Indian edition of the Reader's Digest. It was a far cry from sweeping floors at the Ramakrishna Mission, but success had to be earned: he began with an office at home, his secretary operating out of the living room. But Valiachan's tireless energy, his matchless ability to persuade advertisers that space in his pages was worth buying, transformed the Digest’s fortunes in India. From representing a nominally “Indian” edition printed in the United Kingdom, he built a national brand that soon had its own Indian editors (starting with the gifted Rahul Singh) and local content.
Param was the Digest, and the Digest, in India, was Param. But when the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1976 required the Digest to dilute its foreign shareholding to 40 percent, the parent company decided to sell out completely. Valiachan found buyers he hoped would uphold the values of the organization he had nurtured for a quarter of a century, but once he retired in 1981, the management of the Digest passed into unworthy hands.
Fortunately, the Digest was not Valiachan's only institutional legacy. He resurrected the Advertising Club of Bombay, presided over it for many years, and published its newsletter, Solus (to which my father contributed a pseudonymous column). Ironically, the club celebrated its fiftieth anniversary the very week Valiachan died, and the city's admen were reminded of how much he had done to recast their profession. He also took a keen interest in education, serving for many years on the Board of Governors of the Lawrence School, Lovedale, where he educated his three sons but — equally important — drafted a constitution, established retirement benefits for the staff, and reformed the school's management. He was an early and active member of the Lion's Club, both locally (he was the president of the Chembur club) and internationally. And after his formal retirement he brought his energies, in an honorary capacity, to professionalize the running of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for many years.
All these institutions were transformed by his involvement, but he never took credit for his role. Quiet but authoritative, it was enough for him to leave his stamp on something whose possibilities he was usually the first to spot. The advertising guru Gerson da Cunha has written of Valiachan's knack for “perceiving competence and talent usually before anybody else did, then giving that person the opportunity and encouragement to occupy the full space of his or her potential.” Secure in his own self-esteem and iron self-discipline, he was happy to encourage others, serving as example and inspiration to hundreds. Valiachan was once asked for the secret of good public relations. He replied immediately, “Make friends before you need them.”
That he did, around the country. The boy who could not afford to complete his schooling, who walked twenty kilometers to work each day, ended a long and distinguished life as the patriarch of a highly successful and prosperous family, and the revered patron of an entire profession. He was indeed, in the profoundest sense of the word, a big man.
FRIENDS WHO LEFT A VOID
An authentic Indian hero died recently at the tragically young age of fifty-nine. His passing did not merit two lines in our country's papers, because it happened far away, in Pretoria, South Africa. And yet the death of Shunmugan Nganasamantham Chetty — known universally as “Shun,” though no one ever shunned him — ended a life of which every Indian should be proud.
Shun Chetty was a courageous lawyer in apartheid-blighted South Africa who fought bravely for the rights of the victims of tyranny until he was obliged to flee for his life in 1979. He had been the solicitor for Steve Biko's widow in a remarkable case charging the white government with responsibility for the Black Consciousness leader's death in prison. (Biko, in one of the most notorious episodes in apartheid's history of repression, had been shackled naked in solitary confinement and beaten to death, but the government had arranged for a white doctor to certify that the thirty-six-year-old anti-apartheid crusader had died of “natural causes.”) Chetty's courage was also foolhardy: he had been brave enough to take on cases others shied away from, defending the heroes of the African National Congress whose convictions were a foregone conclusion; he had been humane enough to visit them in prison to look into their conditions of detention; but now he had gone too far in trying to make the government accountable for murder. One did not buck the system beyond a point, and the apartheid regime put the word out: Chetty's number was up.