By Rajan Narayan

I WAS born in Pune in the Ordnance Factory factory of the Department of Defence Production in Pune. My father was working as a lower-division clerk in the factory. My father PV Narayan Iyer was from Trivandrum although he was born in Payyanur district of Karnataka. He was a very devout Brahmin. Indeed, on July 4, 1947 when I was born he was 47. The BJP has a very strong presence in Pune.
I remember that my mother was very religious. Pune city also had a large Tamil population. My mother was so devout she used to attend all the bhajan mandli sessions taking place. I study up to the 4th standard in Pune. My father was transferred to Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. Here we stayed again in a housing colony and here in Jabalpur there was a very strong Hindu ethos.
We continued to move from transfer to transfer of posting and from army living quarters to army living quarters which were decent or bad. All this until I arrived in the city of Bombay which was not yet Mumbai. Here I joined the University of Mumbai to acquire a post-graduate degree in Maths. The first death I experienced in my family was my 21-year-sister Vasanti. She had somehow started getting attacks of fits and was admitted to the neuro-surgery department at the National Institute of Medicine in Bangalore then. She was operated on but did not survive it; for some time she continued to live with these epileptic fits which came almost 80% of the time. Neck downwards she was affected by a stroke which left her paralyzed.
I had the very bad and sad experience of watching my elder sister whom I loved die in my arms. I had to light the chita and I remember putting a Cadbury’s chocolate in her hand before setting her body on fire. After that it became very difficult to believe in any religion.
But if you notice every religious trust in Goa is honored beginning with the Mahalaxmi temple and my friend the industrialist Anil Counte often heads the trust committee of several religious committees.
WHEN I was very sick I was admitted to many hospitals because I was severely dependent on steroids. My intake of steroids was often as high at 200%. When the side-effects of obesity and being moon faced came the then Chief Minister Dr Willy advised me to get treated at the Jaslok hospital in Bombay.
The steroids prescription came as a result of my five-year-long struggle after a savage beating up I got during the Dayanand Narvekar agitation. Mass was offered for me by the late AC Fernandes at the Bom Jesus Basilica. When Pope John Paul II Francis visited India and Goa in 1999 he offered me a blessed “gold” medal to thank me for organizing a massive function.
I and my wife are totally faithful to the idea of respecting all religions be it Hinduism or Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or whatever else. My wife was born in village Gujarat but as a young girl of four years she migrated with her mother to Penang in Malaysia where her father had migrated for earning a living. She schooled and grew up in Penang for 16 years in the 1950s-60s.
When a young Gujarati girl in Penang eloped with a Malay boy in the late 1960s several parents decided to send off their marriageable daughters to India in search of an Indian boy to marry. My wife Tara, then Pankajbala R Patel, was one of the daughters packed off to India. However, it was time for her to grow up in a hurry in Bombay and she kept on evading marriage and instead as a personal assistant and as a secretary in an advertising agency for a few years.
Then she did a diploma course in journalism at the KC College in Bombay and took to a journalistic career variously as reporter, sub-editor, assistant editor. I had published his first short story when I was the editor of Outlook magazine in Bombay.
Let us say she never forgot the man who published her short story about different ways to commit suicide. Much later she re-acquainted herself to me when I was editing the OHeraldo and every time she visited Goa on holiday she would come and ask me for a job. But the salaries at the OHeraldo in those days were very miserable.
Later, she said she loved Goa and was desperate to live here and I suggested we get married, the second time for me, the first time for her. We had a good group of friends then and were a group of friends then all friends and I can tell you that Tara has been my life partner in good times and bad times.
We are both religion friendly, she more than me perhaps. And I have never been biased against any religious group – religion is not on my list of priorities in personal or professional life. I have always recruited staff from all religious communities and I have Heena who joined me some years ago, she is my secretary, a B Com graduate. She has been working for me for many years and still continues to work for me.
At the Goan Observer we practice secularism from A to Z with respect for all religious denominations. Religious identity just does not matter when it comes to anyone as long as they do their job with sincerity and professionalism. It is a tragedy that today we are being divided along religious lines in Goa. However, we believe that Goa is far too integrated and cosmopolitan to be bigoted and chauvinist when it comes to religious identity and in this respect we hope and wish the state of Goa never becomes a Hindu state with vengeance on its mind for the follies of long bygone history!