India Abroad June 19, 2015 M35
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INDIA ABROAD PERSON OF THE YEAR 2014 3M34 Vijay Seshadri have all these other resources that come from the computer and the Internet: Games, video games. In those days, no one watched TV much. Reading was the great sort of repository of excessive mental energy. I loved it.” Seshadri’s parents (his father was a chemistry professor at Ohio State) expected him to study science, but he slowly discovered his love for poetry and his interest in fiction. On graduating from college, the first thing he tried to do was write a novel. It proved to be unsuccessful, not necessarily because he couldn’t write a novel but because his ‘life was so crazy in those days.’ And crazy it was! Talking about his journey into poetry, he told India Abroad after winning the Pulitzer that after college in Oberlin, Ohio, he worked as a truck driver, as a floor refinisher, as a bicycle messenger, and did various jobs in the Bay area. He and his friends were all artists, surviving in any way they could in order to pursue art. It was a time that was very exciting, also emotionally dramatic. In retrospect, he felt that if he had been a little more stable, he Vijay Seshadri is considered a brilliant teacher and a mesmerizing lecturer. might have continued to write fiction. It was COURTESY: THE SESHADRIS only when he was about 25, that he rediscovon, he would give advice on literature and explain books to characters in the play. ered poetry. her and so we grew up in an intellectual household. The couple moved to their present apartment in the fall At one point, Seshadri even thought of staying in the fishThey were reading Victorian literature in India at that of 1986 when he was doing his PhD at Columbia. They diding industry where he had worked and had been very time. He was telling her to read Thomas Hardy, and talking n’t have much money and he is still amazed how they surhappy, but the love for poetry beckoned harder. about George Meredith and they went to a lot of plays in vived at that time. He then moved to the ‘spectacularly beautiful’ Oregon Kannada, in Tamil (in India). But he was recommending Their son Nicholas was born in 1992 and was named coast and was ‘steeped in the beauty of the landscape, the her to read English and American authors. To read John after Susan’s father. Seshadri conceded that since his son weather and the incredible power of the ocean’. It was an Dos Passos’s trilogy, for example. was going to have an Indian last name, he thought his first experience that somehow felt divine but overwhelmed as he Those were the kind of books he was telling her to read, name should come from his wife’s tradition. was by the love of literature, he decided to apply to college and also contemporary writers. The milieu I grew up in was In February 2015, part of the family’s tradition was lost on the East Coast, he continued in his conversation with an intellectual one and it was pretty influential. Of course, when his 90 plus young father Kalkunte Srinivasa Seshadri India Abroad last year. the influences of a father are so deep and profound. died in Pittsburgh. He then undertook another journey — boarding a bus In his case, it was very much an ocean of the purity of When news of the Pulitzer had arrived, the first call that that took him from Newport on the central Oregon coast to wealth of the mind as opposed to any other values having to Vijay Seshadri made was to his parents. He would have Portland, where he transferred to another Greyhound bus, do with being rich or famous or anything like that. been filled with regret and, it wouldn’t nearly have been as spending three days across the country and arriving at the My father was very much a part of the history of the sweet if his father had not lived to see that day. ‘Daddy, you Port Authority (bus station) in New York City on a swelterIndian Republic in some ways. The same as the history of and I did this,’ he told Professor K S Seshadri on the phone. ing day. his life because he was born right around the time of the He wrote about his father in The Long Meadow and feels He went to some friends’ place in Brooklyn, showered Independence and Quit India movement. Of course, you he now has to write about his mother and tell her story. and went to Columbia the following day to register. can take the actual birth of the Indian Republic rather than At 85, his mother, who was once hailed as the best Indian New York came as an incredible shock, he reminisced to its political birth in 1947 to the years of the early 1920s. cook in America, is wheelchair bound and doesn’t really India Abroad last year. This was the New York when trains He was a part of that Independence generation which cook any more. were covered with graffiti and Bryant Park was Needle really made modern India, especially in the But she taught her son how to cook; and on the days he’s Park. He thought it was a really vital and interesting city, commitment to science and technology. All visiting — which he does a lot since she is sick — the but also a dangerous one. those values were very, very, significant in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cooks for her. “They hadn’t cleaned it up in the way that they did,” life. Your father Professor Kalkunte Srinivasa Seshadri died in Seshadri told India Abroad last year, “And to suddenly wind When he died, I arranged the funeral in February 2015 after a long illness. Let’s talk about the influup in this milieu! It was quite a shock but wonderful! I’m Pittsburgh and we used a church in the neighence your father had on you and your thoughts on his death. glad that I came because New York is really a place for the borhood for his funeral. There were a lot of My father was a real intellectual of that generation of young.” Americans because they had many American Indian intellectuals. He was a scientist, but he was also “It is a city of intellectuals,” he continued. “Even the peofriends and there were a lot of Indians because very interested in literature. And he was an avid play-goer. ple in finance here tend to be more intellectual. The New they had a large number of Indian friends. I was looking at some of the letters he wrote to my mothYork intellectual is a kind of fabled creature.” It was an open casket. We cremated him the er when he came here to get his PhD in the 1950s. They are In the fall of 1984, Vijay Seshadri met his wife Suzanne. next day and I started the service by playing filled with advice to her to read this book or that For their first date they watched the Samuel Beckett play 4M38 the Indian national anthem. Everybody stood book. They are very, very, touching and he would comment Endgame and later, named their cats ‘Nagg’ and ‘Nell’ after