Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, blind from childhood meningitis, known for memoirs about India and blindness.
On the island
Eight records
Omzi must nana supuhade la yena jana
this particular song I used to sing, and there was hardly a time when I sang when I and everybody around me didn't start crying.
I grew up in what my father would call ... the noon of the British Raj. ... I remember as a child going with him to a British type club and listening to these waltzes and listening to people dancing and longing for being able to do what the people in the club were doing.
this particular song I heard first in Arkansas, and it touched me very much because it's basically Negroes wishing for their death. I mean, they were so miserable in America that they preferred death to life.
I first heard these in California, where I went to a college, and they meant a great deal to me.
I've chosen this from my Oxford period, and it has to do with learning to drink wine and enjoying it. When I arrived at Oxford, I'd never tasted any alcoholic drink, and at Oxford I developed a terrific taste for wine and became something of a connoisseur.
it was when I came to New York to write. that I first discovered serious jazz music ... and Ella was my great favorite at the time.
I came to marriage very late, after having lived a little bit the life of a playboy, and this aria is is from my favorite opera, which is Don Giovanni.
String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131Favourite
these particular pieces were written when he was in terrific anguish, full of rage and pain and trouble. But the music has kind of ethereal quality that I don't think we meet with many composers and these pieces, these last quartets, are really among my favorite in the whole corpus of Eastern and Western music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:33Is music important in your life?
Yes, actually after I lost my sight at that time I was four ... It was thought the only thing I was fit to do in life was to become a musician. Most blind people in India at that time were beggars or stayed with their relations like wounded animals. And so my musical education was taken in hand when I was very small.
Presenter asks
4:13What was that illness [that cost you your sight]?
It was meningitis. It was misdiagnosed. And I was born in 1934 and I got it in 1938. It was just before antibiotics had reached India. ... today I think meningitis, if it's diagnosed properly, is no threat to anyone. But the time the disease struck me, you usually either died of meningitis or At the very least, your brain was damaged, and if you were extremely lucky, You only lost your hearing or your eyesight. In my case, it was the eyesight.
Presenter asks
5:22Which school [for the blind] were you sent to?
Well, I was actually sent to a school which was thirteen hundred miles away from my home in Lahore. It was in Bombay and called the Dadar School. It was located in an industrial slum area of Bombay. ... anyway, he did leave me at the school and I was there off and on for three years. ... Five. Actually a couple of months short of five.
The keepsakes
The book
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
I think it's the only book ever published which sums up all the knowledge of the time. I mean, after that Britannica was published, I think we lost our faith in ever being able to convey the entire human knowledge in few volumes or in one book. ... And I think if I had that around me, I would feel I was in touch with civilized life.
The luxury
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
16:47How did you get to Arkansas?
at Saint Dunstan's, where I spent six months, I learned typing, and you can't imagine what a sense of freedom it gave me ... I used to receive all kinds of Braille magazines ... And these magazines would have addresses of schools ... So I every day I would sit down at my typewriter and send my biography and my aspirations to schools in Britain, United States, indeed even France ...
Presenter asks
23:02In India there'd been all the violence of partition. What had happened to your family?
Oh, my family had become refugees. We were Hindus living in what was soon designated as Pakistan. And during the troubles over partition ... a million people died and 11 million people were made homeless within a space of few months in the Punjab. And we were one of those families who were made homeless. So we had to start again.
“Most blind people in India at that time were beggars or stayed with their relations like wounded animals.”
“Blindness was a disease that usually was not associated with well to do people. It struck the children of the poor. And all these schools therefore were really little better than asylums.”
“Most of my life i has been spent in solitude because writing is a very solitary activity. It's an internal activity. And it's a lifetime apprenticeship. You can never say that now I know how to write.”