The story of a father

An Ordinary Life: Portrait of a Generation

Author:  Ashok Lavasa

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 300

Price: Rs 499

How much do we really know our parents? Of course, they invoke awe, respect, love and sometimes exasperation. But how much do we really know about the people involved in what is arguably the most complex relationship on earth?

Ashok Lavasa is lucky. His father, Uday Singh Lavasa, or “Bauji” as his children knew him, kept extensive diaries about his life and times. Based on those, his conversations with his parents, the collective growing-up memories of his brothers and sisters, and research in contemporary history, Lavasa has written a biography of his father that is both absorbing and moving.

What runs like a shining thread of gold through the book is the ethic of the generation, evolving from the circumstances in which they lived. Bill Bryson, the gifted and perceptive humour and travel writer, says in Notes From a Small Island that privation and denial during World War II defined the British (“Ooh, I shouldn’t really” is just so British and it is almost the reflex reaction of a Briton of a certain age, when faced with gratification and excess). Bauji belonged to a generation for which enough was more; and deprivation and making-do, the only way to get through life. Every family in India has one or other relative, widowed or orphaned early in life, looked after by the family (or not, as was the case with Bauji). Bauji, like them, adapted himself to power structures, hierarchies and politics, both in the family and at work, understanding human foibles but never bowing to them.

Lavasa was just nine when he got admission to a military school in Belgaum. His father was to take him to Belgaum from Mumbai but Lavasa’s sister happened to fall ill and was hospitalised. His father needed to be by his daughter’s bedside. But then who would take the son to school for his admission? At the station was a complete stranger. Udai Singh Lavasa entrusted his child to this person (he turned out to be a doctor), asking him to make sure young Ashok caught the right trains (three train changes were needed). This was a man whom his father had never met before and whose name and address he did not know. The train reached Belgaum at 2:30 am and the school was three km from the station. Ashok had no money. Fortunately, the stranger took Ashok home, gave him a bed for the night, breakfast the next morning and took him to school.

The book describes in detail what it was like to be a businessman in the 1960s and 1970s, how the principles of his father did not permit him to compromise on issues of “chai-paani” and what this cost him, though at the same time, earning the respect of his peers and superiors.

The same rigid code governed the upbringing of his children. Udai Singh Lavasa was a father who never differentiated between his daughters and his sons when it came to education, and veritably doted on his grandchildren. Most of all, Bauji taught his children independence and straightforwardness in dealings. “His habit of speaking the plain truth, unconcerned about the feelings of the listener would hurt; it often crossed the norms of normal social behaviour. He was a loving father who never doted on his children. He was a caring husband but never indulgent. He was a trustworthy friend but never promised more than what he was capable of. He was a loyal employee but held in awe by his bosses,” Lavasa says about his father.

Bauji’s hero was Lal Bahadur Shastri: And when India was in the throes of a food shortage, Shastri told his countrymen to give up one meal a week so that everyone could eat. Both Uday Singh Lavasa and his wife gave up one meal on Mondays (because one tends to overeat on Sundays) and followed this practice throughout their lives.

If you are looking for Lavasa’s story here — the man who began life as an English lecturer, realised that if he had to retain his love for English literature, he had to stop teaching it, went on to become a probationary officer in a bank, then an IAS officer, finance secretary in the Union government and election commissioner — you’re looking in the wrong place. Only obliquely does he refer to the trials and tribulations of his own career. He says some incidents in his father’s life illuminated instances in his own career “when I was put under pressure by my bosses and I refused to do their bidding, reasoned with them and upon introspection, not only did they realise their unreasonableness, but also they thanked me for taking a stand that prevented them from doing wrong, knowingly or unknowingly”. He does not, in the book refer at all to whether as election commissioner he felt Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches in the 2019 elections breached the Model Code of Conduct and possibly even the Representation of People Act; whether Modi should be reprimanded and punished; and if the government opened up tax cases concerning him, his wife and other family members as revenge. Lavasa resigned as election commissioner in 2020 to become vice-president of the Asian Development Bank.

Bauji’s story is told in plain, spare English. Just like the man himself.