 They live by their beliefs
When T M Mukundan entered the portals of IIT Madras 40 years ago, no one could have foretold the course his career has run ever since. Five years after joining that much sought after institution, Mukundan took wing and flew to the United States of America like any other self-respecting IITian of the day. But those were the seventies and the idealistic sixties were not far behind, the Beatles were God and long hair, hash and ‘Make Love Not War’ very much the ‘in-thing’ still.
I don’t know if Mukundan ever graduated from MIT - I never asked him - but I know that in the West he found the East, and returned to Madras in the eighties, where for a while he taught at his alma mater and also became a Yoga teacher at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, where he had been a student earlier. This is when I caught up with him, learning Yoga from him and also finding out that he had been my brother’s classmate at IIT Madras.
Over the decades, we have been in touch though pursuing completely different paths, Mukundan choosing the high road to self-discovery, far from the rat race. He did invaluable work in non-conformist institutions like PPST (Patriotic & People Oriented Science & Technology) and the Centre for Policy Studies, where along with his colleague J K Bajaj, he did some original work in Indian science before it was dominated by western science.
He also did some painstaking research interviewing the oldest residents of Chengalpattu district to record for posterity traditional irrigation practices in the area, which were fast vanishing from our lives. Every now and then, he would disappear for months on end, to join Sunderlal Bahuguna at Tehri as an opponent of the construction of the dam there.
Marriage to P L T Girija, an ayurvedic physician, meant yet another new field of knowledge to pursue for Mukundan, who has been quietly helping his wife in her work, besides teaching Yoga to patients. All through these past few decades, Mukundan has constantly worn khadi, and in his younger days, cycled or walked everywhere.
Last year, Mukundan provided personal proof of the efficacy of the medicine practised by his wife, if proof is indeed needed. He suffered a stroke and collapsed on the road, where strangers found him and admitted him to a well-known hospital. When Girija came to know, she persuaded the hospital to let her take him out of the ICU back to her clinic, where she treated him. It was a hard road back to normalcy, but Mukundan is today active and healthy, helping Girija at the clinic as before.
V Ramnarayan
vramnarayan@gmail.com
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