Manjula Padmanabhan
Remembering Anvar
Manjula Padmanabhan is an Indian playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author.
Anyone meeting Anvar for the first time would be struck by two things: one, how interesting he was to talk to; two, how much he knew. He was always replete with anecdotes about famous people, made connections between historical events, was able to supply precise coordinates of place and time while telling even the most mundane story.
He claimed that he had no special skills and that his memory was only slightly above average. However, he did possess one very unusual gift: the determination to push past what he thought of as his limitations in order to become the person he wanted to be. He was like a sculptor who used himself as the clay that he molded into the brilliant raconteur, writer and interviewer whose absence we mourn.
According to him, he was extremely shy and reserved as a teenager. He believed he was destined to be a social failure, but he made up his mind to change his fate. How? By teaching himself to tell jokes.
He read a book that promised to make the diligent reader into a polished and professional social-entertainer. Then he applied those techniques rigorously. This included learning jokes by heart and working with a mirror to ensure that he was word-perfect in his delivery, complete with expressions and pauses. He rehearsed which jokes he would tell on any particular evening. Most importantly, he taught himself to anticipate his audience, so that he always had the right jokes for a particular occasion.
I cannot remember the name of the book, but Anvar, if he were here, would have its name, author and perhaps even the most relevant page numbers at his fingertips! Because that’s the other skill he says he trained himself to acquire: a phenomenal memory. According to him, he just followed the techniques outlined in one of the many self-help manuals that were popular in the second half of the last century.
“Anyone can do it,” he used to say, with self-deprecating modesty, “it’s only a question of practicing all the exercises. Of course you’ve got to put in that initial effort - for instance, creating the mnemonics for visualizing numbers as cartoon characters or colour combinations or whatever. We all learnt the multiplication tables when we were children, didn’t we? This is similar but more fun. Because you’re doing it as an adult and at your own pace.”
The thing he never acknowledged was that even though millions of people pick up self-help manuals every year, only the tiniest percentage of those readers complete the meticulously described courses. Anvar was the exception. He followed through. He became what he wanted to be: charming, funny, clever, laser-focused.
At the time I met him, he had already trained himself to deliver jokes with professional flair and could reel off dates and references like a talking encyclopedia. So I can’t know how accurately he reported his own transformation. However, during the time we were friends, in the mid-seventies, he decided to take up Transcendental Meditation or TM as it was known.
It was all the rage in that post-hippy era. The Beatles had come and gone, the HareKrishna Ashram in Bombay was newly established in Juhu and for a while TM was regarded as the new Ikebana craze. It didn’t last long, however. Because there’s nothing much to TM. You can buy the books, read the instructions and even go sit at the feet of a guru. In the end, though, the only essential thing is to sit still and … meditate.
Every day. At a fixed time and for a fixed period of time.
Clear your mind of the jibber-jabber, the white noise, the clutter.
Concentrate on the void.
It was something that I and the rest of my small group of friends all knew about, but Anvar was the only person I knew who actually did it. We used to tease him and not really believe him. Yet, over the months, he really did change. He really did become calmer, smoother and more deliberate in all that he did.
If everyone has a super power, then Anvar’s was the humility to recognize what he wanted to change in himself, then setting out to do it. It didn’t seem remarkable at the time but looking back? It was awesome.
