My Father by Arvind Panagariya

Author:Arvind Panagariya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

New Horizons: An Author and a Historian

ASSISTED BY THE THRIFTINESS of my mother that matched his own, Father had been able to plan his finances well. Until he retired, the family was dependent exclusively on his salary, which was not very much in those days. High salaries, which today attract even qualified engineers and PhD holders towards Class IV government jobs, came many years after his retirement. I would dare speculate that his pension at the time of his passing away in 2006 exceeded, in real terms, the last salary he drew in active service by a significant margin. It is testimony to the sound management of finances by him and Mother that at the time of retirement he had no liabilities whatsoever left to discharge. Instead, they had enough assets to carry them for the remainder of their lives, with all their children able to support themselves.

Father deposited the gratuity, provident fund and insurance money received upon retirement in a bank account. The pension and interest income from these funds were more than enough for his and Mother’s simple living. Indeed, they could have chosen to treat themselves to a few luxuries since Father now had another source of income from a job with a business house that he had accepted a week before he retired. But the only luxury he allowed himself was a post-retirement job that would use up no more than a day’s time per week, leaving him free to pursue other interests.

Back in 1946, Karpoor Chandra Kulish, editor of Rajasthan Patrika, had worked with my father as a proofreader at Lokvani. Later, in 1956, he had launched the Patrika, which in due course displaced its competitor Rashtradoot as the top daily in the state. Though Dainik Bhaskar, launched in Rajasthan in the mid 1990s, challenged its supremacy, Patrika remained popular, not just in Rajasthan but also in much of the Hindi heartland of India. In July 2017, it had the formidable circulation of 3.5 million and it had editions in multiple cities in seven states as well as in Delhi. Upon learning that my father had just retired, Kulish approached him and extended him an invitation to write for Patrika. For my father, the invitation could not have come at a more opportune time.

During his last four years with the government, Father had worked in the Department of Finance and had acquired intimate knowledge of the state’s economy and finances. He was disappointed, however, that hardly anyone wrote on this subject in the media. Therefore, his first thought was to contribute articles on economy and finance. But upon reflection, he came to the conclusion that the readership for these subjects would be small, even in a city like Jaipur, and it would be difficult to keep it engaged beyond eight to ten articles per year. He wanted a subject that would have wider appeal and could keep readers engaged on a regular basis for at least a few years. Keeping these considerations and his own expertise in view, he eventually settled on the history of Rajasthan as the subject of his articles.

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