Disclaimer: This post isn't about the stories my son recorded. Those narratives belong to the people who related them and now to the 1947 Partition Archive too. To hear those very interesting stories you have to visit www.1947partitionarchive.org where they will be put up very soon.
This is about the whole process of a teen age boy taking up a challenge, some of the interesting situations we encountered, the difficulties, our emotions and the joy of successfully reaching a goal that seemed elusive once too often during the whole process!
April- May 2018, Nairobi, Kenya. It was around the end of April 2018 that I saw the advertisement during my self allotted ten minutes on FaceBook, from the 1947 Partition Archive, asking for applications from college students for a six week paid summer internship, which involved interviewing twenty four people who remembered the partition of India. I messaged one of my oldest friends who is the founder and brain behind the Archive, asking her if students just entering High School could apply too. "Yes", she said, "they could apply with parental permission".
Next I asked my son if he was interested. The process, I explained, was very long. He had to attend a webinar, answer the questions that followed, then fill in the internship application, then there would be a couple of interviews to test his suitability for this rather massive task and last, but not least, he would have to work for six out of the eight weeks of his summer vacation. He loves India, adores History, ( a true chip off the old block!) and has been collecting comics of Indian Freedom Fighters and other historical figures since the time he was very young, pouring over them time and again, when he has run out of books to read...His first true test, I warned him, would be waking up at 5:00 am Kenya time to attend the webinar at 5:30 am, that too on a day when he had to go to another school for a tennis tournament. Wake up he did, even shooing me away once the webinar began, telling me to go back to sleep. After two intense hours and successfully answering the required number of questions, he rushed to catch the bus to go for the tournament. Phase one was done and then he decided he wanted to apply for the internship, as completing the webinar had been a prerequisite. Conducting one interview was essential, as it was a part of the application process. Thus began a massive hunt for someone who had migrated during 1947 and was currently living in Kenya! Time was short, the school year was coming to an end, he was very busy already and I was travelling to Mombassa with my sister in law just on the day he had to wrap up the interview....! But old neighbours from Tanzania days, who have been very good friends, often rise up to various occasions and a dear Sindhi friend came through for me. She told me to go off to Mombassa without a care and she would take my son for interviewing an old Sindhi lady she knew who had been displaced in 1947. And so the first interview was canned and submitted just before the deadline ended. (But not before a little adventure with the tripod that broke when my son was laying out his equipment, ready for the interview the next day. Father and son made it to the nearest mall just before it closed and came home with a new tripod!) We were taking 'cutting it close' to newer heights!
In the meantime, my son, during his desperate hunt for a suitable person to interview, had also contacted the archive to see if they knew anyone in Kenya who had expressed a desire to be interviewed. The archive sent us a name and number of a lady who had waited for FIVE years to be interviewed and it turned out that two of my friends knew the lady's son very well and I had met him too! ( By this time, since my son had successfully finished the webinar and submitted an interview which met all the requirements of the Archive, and he had become a Citizen Historian and could officially conduct interviews, though he hadn't become an intern yet). And so we fixed a day and time as per their convenience. But the day suitable for them turned out to be the day before we were to leave for India! So instead of packing and winding up, we were rushing across town so he could conduct the interview. Little did we know then that this would become the story of our entire summer...
June-July 2018, Pune, Maharashtra, India. The next two rounds consisted of telephonic interviews with people who work for the archive and dates and times were set for my son's interviews. I was listening to him confidently answer questions that were asked and I realized that he is a natural when it comes to talking to people. It was nice to discover this as I believe this is a very basic skill and something that technology can never replace...One answer struck me deeply. He was on speakerphone and was asked why he wanted to do the internship. He said he loved History, liked talking to people and wanted to know more about the partition of India. Then he added that my mother was very interested in this but we were small, so she could not leave us to go and interview people, so now I want to do it...He knew that I had loved the idea of the archive when my friend had first told me about her brain wave when she visited us in Pune in 2010. He had been just six years old then and my daughter had been twelve. He had surmised so correctly the reason I could never be involved with the archive, despite being a historian and archaeologist, before I switched to a different field. It left me stunned. Children perceive so much more than we realize.
He finally got a mail that he had been selected for the internship and was told on the phone that, at the age of fourteen, he had become the Archive's youngest paid intern in the world! Sending documents, signing contracts, sending his bank details, attending a summary writing workshop on line, suddenly everything became very official...
And then began the rush to scout for people who had memories of 1947. This essentially meant he had to look for people who were more than eighty years old in 2018. They need not necessarily have migrated but should have been old enough in 1947 to speak about it. Now this is much harder than it sounds. Some old people we knew had dementia so had to be struck off the list, others could not hear at all, some were not physically well enough to talk for an hour or more, some did not live in Pune and we had no time to travel and others refused to give the interview for reasons best known to them!
Here, WhatsApp groups came to our rescue and friends shared messages rapidly across various groups, asking for folks in the required age bracket. People who were complete strangers to us responded on behalf of their old parents and in laws and set up dates and times for us to visit. Relatives and friends truly came to our aid, as did neighbours and parents of my students who happily welcomed my son into their homes.
My son lost nearly a week of his precious six weeks as I was appearing for twelve exams and finished only by the third week of June. He was relying on me to drive him around and when we finally started visiting people, we scheduled so many in the first couple of weeks itself, that my right knee seized up, as I was driving up to fifty kilometres a day in choc a bloc Pune traffic, unable to proceed beyond the second gear! After too much of switching between accelerator and clutch (my car in India is not an automatic one) and also standing for long hours teaching students in my classroom, my knee got itself a fancy name 'chondromalacia patella' or, in layman's terms, runners knee (though how driving can cause it, is beyond me!), and swelled to thrice its usually bony size, leaving me hobbling in sheer agony. Again, a student's mom came to my aid and dropped off poultices of herbs to heat and apply, along with some medicinal oil. This brought me much relief and the interviews were then able to proceed, though I began using cabs and autos to take him around town and, much to my dismay, had to stop driving for a while. My mother too helped out by taking him for a couple of interviews.
As part of his pre internship briefing, my son had been told that old people tend to offer food to the interviewer and declining it would be considered disrespectful. And that turned out to be exactly the case. Relatives and neighbours, of course, fed us delicious snacks, (which was a blessing because the whole process from leaving home to wrapping up the interview usually took around three hours and my son would be starving at the end of that period) but even complete strangers used to keep food ready for us! In some homes, old ladies would be rushing around making coffee for us and it brought tears to my eyes. Time had dulled their senses, gnarled their fingers, knocked off a few teeth, but they had not forgotten the basic lessons of hospitality learnt at their mothers' knees, at least seven decades ago! In other homes, busy men and women took time to chat with us after he had finished interviewing their mother or father or in laws. Even the old age home administrator, where he conducted three interviews, offered us lunch. People were so kind to us that we did not feel awkward or out of place at all. Trust me, it is not an easy task to walk into a stranger's home and start firing off questions and recording the whole process, but I am so glad my son did it and did it rather well. Sometimes he forgot to get the forms signed, once he forgot to click photos of the interviewee but everyone was really gracious in accommodating him and ensuring he got everything he needed.
The Internet! Once my son had uploaded the day's interview or interviews on to the computer, it was time to upload them on to the archive website. And this is where all his struggles and woes (and mine by default) began...Each file was at least nine gigabytes and it was a task to find super fast unlimited internet in India. After trying two providers, buying new modems and just struggling every night and falling behind in the uploads, I finally discovered a provider who was able to give us the speed and the bytes we desperately needed! Then it was smooth sailing and quick transferring but not before the main cable broke on the very day we got our connection! Again we met some amazing people at their office and they allowed my son and me to take turns to sit in their office and transfer files while they worked at repairing the fault.
The highlights of this time for my son were meeting at least three people who had interacted with Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse, and many others who had met or seen Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak and other freedom fighters. Equally impressive was meeting the daughter of an Indian judge who heard Bhagat Singh's and his fellow patriots' case in a Lahore High Court. Did he pass judgement against them for killing a Britisher? Watch the interview to find out!
For me, the highlight was meeting a lady doctor who belonged to my Alma Mater, St.Helena's High School. For a woman to become a doctor in the 1940s in India was a rarity in itself and the fact that she was from my school made it all the more special. We bonded fondly over school memories and history, though she had finished high school nearly fifty years before I had...She also answered all my son's interview questions in fluent English and I did not need to interpret anything at all. But then, I expected nothing less from an alumnus of my beloved school...
An old lady at the old age home who refused to sign the release form after her interview was over, touched my heart. She wanted to share so much more about her life and she knew we would leave once she signed it. My son decided then and there that he would be back the following year and teach the old people to become more tech savvy (they all had smart phones!) so they would feel less lonely. He even helped an old man, who had migrated from Karachi, to search for his old school's pictures on Google and he actually found them for him!
It was also a revelation to know what the staple diet in most homes was in those times and it was heart wrenching to hear how Brahmin homes in Pune and many other cities were burnt down after Gandhi's assassination all because Nathuram Godse was a Brahmin. Even more gut wrenching were the tales told by the handful of people my son interviewed who had actually migrated from what is modern day Pakistan. It just made me even more thankful for all that we are blessed with today...
We are so, so grateful to all the staff at the 1947 Partition Archives, both in the United States and in New Delhi and Pune. They were so patient with my son and the errors he made in the beginning, sometimes while uploading files or naming them and at times while interviewing folks. It was only when they were talking about their youngest intern and happened to say his name out loud during a meeting, that my friend discovered that he had been selected. She was so happy and proud of him!
This past summer has taught my son what it actually means to earn a living. To have to get out of bed each day and do the tasks that have to be done. To meet deadlines and to work on a schedule that may not necessarily be to your liking.
Actually, history and 1947 taught him about life!
At What Cost?
This is about the whole process of a teen age boy taking up a challenge, some of the interesting situations we encountered, the difficulties, our emotions and the joy of successfully reaching a goal that seemed elusive once too often during the whole process!
April- May 2018, Nairobi, Kenya. It was around the end of April 2018 that I saw the advertisement during my self allotted ten minutes on FaceBook, from the 1947 Partition Archive, asking for applications from college students for a six week paid summer internship, which involved interviewing twenty four people who remembered the partition of India. I messaged one of my oldest friends who is the founder and brain behind the Archive, asking her if students just entering High School could apply too. "Yes", she said, "they could apply with parental permission".
Next I asked my son if he was interested. The process, I explained, was very long. He had to attend a webinar, answer the questions that followed, then fill in the internship application, then there would be a couple of interviews to test his suitability for this rather massive task and last, but not least, he would have to work for six out of the eight weeks of his summer vacation. He loves India, adores History, ( a true chip off the old block!) and has been collecting comics of Indian Freedom Fighters and other historical figures since the time he was very young, pouring over them time and again, when he has run out of books to read...His first true test, I warned him, would be waking up at 5:00 am Kenya time to attend the webinar at 5:30 am, that too on a day when he had to go to another school for a tennis tournament. Wake up he did, even shooing me away once the webinar began, telling me to go back to sleep. After two intense hours and successfully answering the required number of questions, he rushed to catch the bus to go for the tournament. Phase one was done and then he decided he wanted to apply for the internship, as completing the webinar had been a prerequisite. Conducting one interview was essential, as it was a part of the application process. Thus began a massive hunt for someone who had migrated during 1947 and was currently living in Kenya! Time was short, the school year was coming to an end, he was very busy already and I was travelling to Mombassa with my sister in law just on the day he had to wrap up the interview....! But old neighbours from Tanzania days, who have been very good friends, often rise up to various occasions and a dear Sindhi friend came through for me. She told me to go off to Mombassa without a care and she would take my son for interviewing an old Sindhi lady she knew who had been displaced in 1947. And so the first interview was canned and submitted just before the deadline ended. (But not before a little adventure with the tripod that broke when my son was laying out his equipment, ready for the interview the next day. Father and son made it to the nearest mall just before it closed and came home with a new tripod!) We were taking 'cutting it close' to newer heights!
In the meantime, my son, during his desperate hunt for a suitable person to interview, had also contacted the archive to see if they knew anyone in Kenya who had expressed a desire to be interviewed. The archive sent us a name and number of a lady who had waited for FIVE years to be interviewed and it turned out that two of my friends knew the lady's son very well and I had met him too! ( By this time, since my son had successfully finished the webinar and submitted an interview which met all the requirements of the Archive, and he had become a Citizen Historian and could officially conduct interviews, though he hadn't become an intern yet). And so we fixed a day and time as per their convenience. But the day suitable for them turned out to be the day before we were to leave for India! So instead of packing and winding up, we were rushing across town so he could conduct the interview. Little did we know then that this would become the story of our entire summer...
June-July 2018, Pune, Maharashtra, India. The next two rounds consisted of telephonic interviews with people who work for the archive and dates and times were set for my son's interviews. I was listening to him confidently answer questions that were asked and I realized that he is a natural when it comes to talking to people. It was nice to discover this as I believe this is a very basic skill and something that technology can never replace...One answer struck me deeply. He was on speakerphone and was asked why he wanted to do the internship. He said he loved History, liked talking to people and wanted to know more about the partition of India. Then he added that my mother was very interested in this but we were small, so she could not leave us to go and interview people, so now I want to do it...He knew that I had loved the idea of the archive when my friend had first told me about her brain wave when she visited us in Pune in 2010. He had been just six years old then and my daughter had been twelve. He had surmised so correctly the reason I could never be involved with the archive, despite being a historian and archaeologist, before I switched to a different field. It left me stunned. Children perceive so much more than we realize.
He finally got a mail that he had been selected for the internship and was told on the phone that, at the age of fourteen, he had become the Archive's youngest paid intern in the world! Sending documents, signing contracts, sending his bank details, attending a summary writing workshop on line, suddenly everything became very official...
And then began the rush to scout for people who had memories of 1947. This essentially meant he had to look for people who were more than eighty years old in 2018. They need not necessarily have migrated but should have been old enough in 1947 to speak about it. Now this is much harder than it sounds. Some old people we knew had dementia so had to be struck off the list, others could not hear at all, some were not physically well enough to talk for an hour or more, some did not live in Pune and we had no time to travel and others refused to give the interview for reasons best known to them!
Here, WhatsApp groups came to our rescue and friends shared messages rapidly across various groups, asking for folks in the required age bracket. People who were complete strangers to us responded on behalf of their old parents and in laws and set up dates and times for us to visit. Relatives and friends truly came to our aid, as did neighbours and parents of my students who happily welcomed my son into their homes.
My son lost nearly a week of his precious six weeks as I was appearing for twelve exams and finished only by the third week of June. He was relying on me to drive him around and when we finally started visiting people, we scheduled so many in the first couple of weeks itself, that my right knee seized up, as I was driving up to fifty kilometres a day in choc a bloc Pune traffic, unable to proceed beyond the second gear! After too much of switching between accelerator and clutch (my car in India is not an automatic one) and also standing for long hours teaching students in my classroom, my knee got itself a fancy name 'chondromalacia patella' or, in layman's terms, runners knee (though how driving can cause it, is beyond me!), and swelled to thrice its usually bony size, leaving me hobbling in sheer agony. Again, a student's mom came to my aid and dropped off poultices of herbs to heat and apply, along with some medicinal oil. This brought me much relief and the interviews were then able to proceed, though I began using cabs and autos to take him around town and, much to my dismay, had to stop driving for a while. My mother too helped out by taking him for a couple of interviews.
As part of his pre internship briefing, my son had been told that old people tend to offer food to the interviewer and declining it would be considered disrespectful. And that turned out to be exactly the case. Relatives and neighbours, of course, fed us delicious snacks, (which was a blessing because the whole process from leaving home to wrapping up the interview usually took around three hours and my son would be starving at the end of that period) but even complete strangers used to keep food ready for us! In some homes, old ladies would be rushing around making coffee for us and it brought tears to my eyes. Time had dulled their senses, gnarled their fingers, knocked off a few teeth, but they had not forgotten the basic lessons of hospitality learnt at their mothers' knees, at least seven decades ago! In other homes, busy men and women took time to chat with us after he had finished interviewing their mother or father or in laws. Even the old age home administrator, where he conducted three interviews, offered us lunch. People were so kind to us that we did not feel awkward or out of place at all. Trust me, it is not an easy task to walk into a stranger's home and start firing off questions and recording the whole process, but I am so glad my son did it and did it rather well. Sometimes he forgot to get the forms signed, once he forgot to click photos of the interviewee but everyone was really gracious in accommodating him and ensuring he got everything he needed.
The Internet! Once my son had uploaded the day's interview or interviews on to the computer, it was time to upload them on to the archive website. And this is where all his struggles and woes (and mine by default) began...Each file was at least nine gigabytes and it was a task to find super fast unlimited internet in India. After trying two providers, buying new modems and just struggling every night and falling behind in the uploads, I finally discovered a provider who was able to give us the speed and the bytes we desperately needed! Then it was smooth sailing and quick transferring but not before the main cable broke on the very day we got our connection! Again we met some amazing people at their office and they allowed my son and me to take turns to sit in their office and transfer files while they worked at repairing the fault.
The highlights of this time for my son were meeting at least three people who had interacted with Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse, and many others who had met or seen Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak and other freedom fighters. Equally impressive was meeting the daughter of an Indian judge who heard Bhagat Singh's and his fellow patriots' case in a Lahore High Court. Did he pass judgement against them for killing a Britisher? Watch the interview to find out!
For me, the highlight was meeting a lady doctor who belonged to my Alma Mater, St.Helena's High School. For a woman to become a doctor in the 1940s in India was a rarity in itself and the fact that she was from my school made it all the more special. We bonded fondly over school memories and history, though she had finished high school nearly fifty years before I had...She also answered all my son's interview questions in fluent English and I did not need to interpret anything at all. But then, I expected nothing less from an alumnus of my beloved school...
An old lady at the old age home who refused to sign the release form after her interview was over, touched my heart. She wanted to share so much more about her life and she knew we would leave once she signed it. My son decided then and there that he would be back the following year and teach the old people to become more tech savvy (they all had smart phones!) so they would feel less lonely. He even helped an old man, who had migrated from Karachi, to search for his old school's pictures on Google and he actually found them for him!
It was also a revelation to know what the staple diet in most homes was in those times and it was heart wrenching to hear how Brahmin homes in Pune and many other cities were burnt down after Gandhi's assassination all because Nathuram Godse was a Brahmin. Even more gut wrenching were the tales told by the handful of people my son interviewed who had actually migrated from what is modern day Pakistan. It just made me even more thankful for all that we are blessed with today...
We are so, so grateful to all the staff at the 1947 Partition Archives, both in the United States and in New Delhi and Pune. They were so patient with my son and the errors he made in the beginning, sometimes while uploading files or naming them and at times while interviewing folks. It was only when they were talking about their youngest intern and happened to say his name out loud during a meeting, that my friend discovered that he had been selected. She was so happy and proud of him!
This past summer has taught my son what it actually means to earn a living. To have to get out of bed each day and do the tasks that have to be done. To meet deadlines and to work on a schedule that may not necessarily be to your liking.
Actually, history and 1947 taught him about life!
At What Cost?
