Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Lessons

 


I was about to select the title Life Lessons but, on an impulse, I omitted the modifier and settled for the simple one word which is so comprehensive it subsumes not only the nanosecond but eternity also. Life lessons, for lack of an equally imprecise variant, are dispensed at reduced rates in the media and the market.

It was Luiza's quiddity not to adhere to a preconceived syllabus. Her syllabus was you---the individual before her---regardless of age or antecedents. Her approach to the topic under discussion was interdisciplinary, anecdotal and wherever possible, empirical. She would show you the difference between a stalk and a stem, between a petal and a sepal, on location. The in-house garden became an extension of the class.

Once, while I was quizzing her about the brittle dynamics of a go-getting personality, she recited from memory a sonnet of Shakespeare. On first hearing I found the sonnet rather opaque. She recited it again at a slow pace inflecting the key words in her dulcet voice.

She asked me to recite it as slowly as I could without interruptions. Once, twice, thrice, four times.... over and over till I was able to recite it smoothly without flubbing any word or phrase. The motif of the sonnet began to unpack itself slowly without any hints from her.

"You can glean any number of life lessons from Shakespeare," she said, patting me on the back. "This is Sonnet 94 from among the 154 sonnets that he wrote a few years before his death at 52." 

No, it is not about a strong personality or a persona wearing an imperious mask. It is about character---the intangible armature that accounts for its ethical solidity. It is about leadership which like charity begins at home and can subsume infinite stretches of an empire thereunder.

Sashaying down the memory lane across a quarter of a century, I salute Luiza's chutzpah. She shared with me nuggets of philosophy, psychology, biography, anthropology, and what have you, via a detour of exotic trails. Here are a few lines from the sonnet:

 

They that have power to hurt and will do none

That do not do the things they most do show...

...For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds...

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

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