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247 pages

English

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This deeply felt memoir, translated from the acclaimed original in Malayalam, chronicles the endeavours of four generations of the Kandathil Varughese Mappillai family that set up the Malayala Manorama, the Travancore National and Quilon Bank and other enterprises. With great candour, K.M. Mathew describes how their fortunes changed when their support to the nationalist State Congress brought upon them the wrath of the Travancore dewan, leading to the bank''s collapse; and how through sheer persistence and diligence they could rebuild the paper and go on to establish huge companies. Mathew also shows that throughout the paper upheld the values of liberalism, credibility and democracy, which it continues to do until today. Featuring some of Kerala''s tallest figures over almost a century, The Eighth Ring is a rich portrait of a remarkable man, his family-clan and their stirring times.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
Date de parution	25 octobre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789352140442
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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K.M. MATHEW

THE EIGHTH RING
An Autobiography
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
The Ring and the Man
Preface
1. A Water Festival
2. Untouchable
3. Angels to the Rescue
4. A Cow, a Haystack and Pappi Chettan
5. Onward to Madras
6. Before the Fall
7. The Heights
8. Where the Abstention Movement Was Born
9. The Man with the Invisible Sceptre
10. The Travancore National and Quilon Bank
11. The Evening at Tambaram Station
12. Why Have You Forsaken Us, God?
13. The Prisoners
14. Two Deaths
15. Interlude
16. The Night the Earth Trembled
17. The Deadly Blow
18. The Insignificance of What Was Gained
19. A Return
20. Remembering You, Baby
21. Can Darkness Hide the Rays of the Sun?
22. The Door Opens
23. Months of Futility and Nights of Misery
24. Debts that Could Never Be Repaid
25. The Sound of the Printing Press
26. A Sorrowful New Year
27. Oonnoonnichayan s Gifts
28. From Bombay to Cochin
29. The Alleged and the Real
30. Those Who Helped Us
31. Faces I Can Never Forget
32. With Gratitude
Malayala Manorama: Pages of Life
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To Ammachi
The Ring and the Man
K.M. Mathew began to work on his autobiography in 2002. He grew passionate about it as memories flowed smoothly and condensed into words on paper. The work came to a halt when Mrs K.M. Mathew s health deteriorated. After the demise of his beloved wife in 2003, it took a while for him to resume writing. Yielding to the persuasion of the people around him, he returned to it with determination and completed the autobiography in 2007.
After the death of his mother in 1952, his father, K.C. Mammen Mappillai, had used her jewels to make a ring each for their nine children. K.M. Mathew was the eighth child. So, he named his autobiography Ettamathe Mothiram , meaning The Eighth Ring .
A hands-on editor, K.M. Mathew played a pivotal role in Malayala Manorama for fifty-four years. A few weeks after his demise in 2010, the family discovered some jottings. In one he stressed the importance of hard work, integrity and love. Commenting on the Malayalam autobiography, he noted: My book has received unstinted appreciation from many. It makes me more humble. I am least qualified to write this. God gave me the gift of remembering. It s a wonder. My father and my dear mother will see it in heaven. I am yet to see or hear of a couple like them, and tears come down as I note this.
K.M. Mathew was able to pen the highs and lows of his father s eventful life which affected him. Some of the events he witnessed in the nine decades of his own life were historic. His ability to observe and record them was remarkable. He suffered a lot of hardship, and perhaps destiny rewarded him. To many people, he was a father figure and his passing away was the end of an era.
In another note left behind for his children, he wrote, I was looked after with such care by all of you. I am not sure if I deserved it; maybe, you were repaying the unconditional love and affection your dear mother gave you all. By the time you read this I would be gone to the other world and will be praying for all of you with your loving mother. Do remember us in your prayers. Goodbye.
A few months before his demise, he met a renowned translator who agreed to render the book into English. The Eighth Ring respects the translator s desire for anonymity while sharing with you K.M. Mathew s undying memories.
Preface
Nashtajathakam
(A Horoscope Cast without Details of Dates and Stars)
Let me first state that I have never presumed that K.M. Mathew, who lives in Kerala, a place tinier than the speck of sand on this earth, has any significance in the context of infinity. And my ninetieth year whispers in my ear that it is sheer nonsense to claim that I have achieved much. Take even the story of the Malayala Manorama . It owes its success solely to the innumerable people who, over many generations, nurtured it with their love and dedication. It is these people, who make others excel in their work, who are really significant. How insignificant are people who perform when compared to those who make them do so? You can call the force by any name you please: God, time or destiny. The truth is that I am now beginning to be more and more aware of this insignificance as I grow older.
Haven t you heard the tricky question: how deep can you go into a dense forest ? The answer, half of it , is something even a child would know. Once you reach the middle of the forest, it becomes a journey outwards. I have nearly reached the end of that outward journey. Your state of mind when you have almost reached the end of the forest is not the same as when you entered it. Although you have treasured in your heart the sights you saw, the sounds you heard, the scents you breathed, the amazing thing is that none of these experiences can now impose happiness or sorrow on you. Nor can you say that an unheard song is sweeter than a heard one, for you have finished listening to all the songs.
At ninety, does the wealth of experience have any value? Or rather, does one have to wait until this age to realize the wealth of experience? Not necessarily, I can say firmly. The reason being that I had tasted all the sweetness as well as all the bitterness of life by the time I was twenty-five. Never again did I encounter such a calamitous transition from one stage of life to the next.
I graduated from the reputed Madras Christian College. It was while enjoying life as a student there, savouring the greatest comforts that a young man could wish for, that my family became the target of the fury of C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, the then dewan of Travancore. We lost all that we had-our wealth, our reputation and everything else. We had never thought that we would be pushed into circumstances so unfortunate. But that was what destiny had decided for us. When the college reopened after the midsummer holidays in 1938, I had become a young man who had forfeited all the comforts of good living. Appachen, my father, K.C. Mammen Mappillai, and many close relatives were in jail, and our family s onward journey faced an impasse of darkness.
C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar s police force and the law took over the Malayala Manorama that Kandathil Varughese Mappillai and my father had nurtured with their lives. The police locked and sealed the offices. It took nine long years for the Manorama to breathe the fresh air of freedom again. By that time, my father and his companions had been freed from jail. The Malayala Manorama and our family had begun to take our first tottering steps into a new life. The responsibility of being the head of the family and of the Malayala Manorama fell on the shoulders of my eldest brother, Oonnoonnichayan (K.M. Cherian). Little by little, by the grace of God, we recovered all that we had lost.
The members of our family who lived through those times experienced the two extremes of life; so did the Malayala Manorama. That is how my life as well as that of the Malayala Manorama acquired the beauty of serendipity. In other words, we lived more than one life in the span of a single one. Perhaps God, the great writer, could have written our story differently, half a century ago, without giving it a happy ending. It is our good fortune that He did not think of doing so.
Long ago, there was a soothsayer in England. He wrote predictions for the whole year in the leading newspapers of the country. People believed his predictions implicitly. A well-known lampoonist of that period in England could not stand the popularity this soothsayer enjoyed. One day, the lampoonist shocked the country by making a prediction in the best-known daily. It said the great soothsayer would die on a certain day the next year. One person kept that date in mind, our soothsayer. The fateful day passed, and there was a note in the next day s paper, under the heading I am not dead , making fun of the lampoonist. The next day, there was a box story in the same paper. The lampoonist s retort to the soothsayer s reaction was that the soothsayer had died on the day he had predicted, and that the person who had written the note was someone else with the same name.
Let me move to my own story. One of the members of the editorial team of the Malayala Manorama, Koduppunna Govinda Ganakan, was a Malayalam pundit and a well-known astrologer as well. We usually addressed all doubts concerning language to him.
I was in Bombay in the days before he joined the Malayala Manorama. During a visit to Kerala, when Koduppunna came over to our office, I asked a question that was not connected with language:
Will you write my horoscope?
It is easy enough to write a horoscope if one knows the star under which one was born and the time of one s birth, but, in my case, I only knew my date of birth and the approximate time. It is this kind of horoscope, one drawn up late in life and with the limited information available, that is termed a nashtajathakam . Although I had asked him in a light-hearted way, Koduppunna took up the matter seriously and prepared the horoscope for me in a few days. While he was explaining the details to me, I asked him when I would die. He said, It s there in the horoscope.
Many years later, that fateful day arrived and passed. By that time I was in the Malayala Manorama .
I wrote a note to Koduppunna and gave it to him with my horoscope. K.M. Mathew died on the day you had indicated. The person who writes this is another K.M. Mathew.
Though I wrote the note in a lighter vein, I learnt later that it had upset Koduppunna very much. I forgot about the matter. After Koduppunna s death, someone discovered a small notebook on his office table. It was my horoscope. I guess he had been looking after it carefully all that time, as a reminder of a prediction that had gone wrong.
It was the year in which he had foretold my death that I had my first heart attack. I still do not believe in horoscop