From the memoir: When Gurcharan Das’s mother told him to stop reading Albert Camus’s ‘rubbish’

On my first day at Harvard, a new spirit of moksha was in the air. At the master’s reception for incoming freshmen, everyone seemed to be into a fashionable phrase: “existential freedom”. It was a strange, exciting world, where the individual was paramount, not the nation, nor religion; where a person was free, determining their own future. People were speaking about being “authentic”, condemning the inauthentic middle-class life and its fake world view. It reminded me of the charming deceptions of my mother’s middle-class friends in Kaka Nagar.

At Harvard, the heroes of the day were Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It was heady stuff. The next day, I rushed to Lamont, the undergraduate library, and borrowed Camus’s novel The Stranger. It moved me so deeply that I could not sleep for two nights. It even aroused an incipient, bashful literary ambition, and must have had something to do with my majoring in philosophy at Harvard. But my mother got worried. Every Friday evening, I used to write her a 10-cent blue aerogramme about my doings of the week. It was a promise I had made when she was leaving me in America. In my excitement with new ideas, I went on and on, quite thoughtlessly, about how life was absurd. There was no point looking for any meaning in it because a meaning did not exist. It was false to believe that bad things did not happen to good people. What happened could just happen to anyone. The answer was to learn to live without meaning.

I mentioned Camus’s line about suicide being the only true philosophical problem. This frightened my mother. She replied instantly, demanding that I stop reading such rubbish. She asked, ‘Did I make a mistake leaving you alone in America at a young age?” She advised me to learn a useful trade, like engineering, so I could get a job when I came back. “Remember, you have to make a living!” My father had the opposite reaction. He was delighted that I was discovering new ideas, even though he did not believe in them. He felt the purpose of a university education was to “make a life”. He advised me, however, not to write such letters – my mother was a worrier, best not to upset her.

From that day I began to keep a diary in order to write what I couldn’t in my letters. Ironically, diary keeping was a habit I had inherited from my mother. I have found that a diary is a way to observe events and distort them to suit your temper, your inclinations. It is the distortion that is interesting, because it reveals something about you. Some people learn by taking copious notes. I have found that I learn by writing things down in my diary. Diary writing, besides, is good exercise, a bit like tillana steps, which are a good warm-up for a Bharatnatyam dancer.

Anyhow, my mother kept my letters dutifully all her life and gave them to me before she died. Although I am embarrassed to read my letters and diaries now, they have helped me to understand who I am – a useful thing for any human being. My diary records that I was drawn to the existentialist “authentic life” because it built upon what I had learnt from my cousin Jeet, Miss Allen, Joe Leeming and my own moksha-seeking nature. My father believed in “finding” himself (through meditation), but the existentialists said there was nothing to find. I’d have to “create” myself – give myself values to live by. This freedom is scary, even to someone who’d always yearned to act freely, not mimic others.

I was torn between my mother’s advice to “make a living” and my father’s to “make a life”. I tried diligently to become an engineer, like my father, but the project got derailed. My tutor mentioned casually one day that I might be at the wrong school – there was another one down the river called MIT, and it did a better job of making engineers. My roommate added to my doubts. I envied him. He read Anna Karenina in his Russian Lit. class, while I was cramming Bernoulli’s equation in fluid mechanics. Over dinner one evening, he suggested that if one were to have an affair with a married woman, it ought to be with someone like Anna.

And what was I doing? While he dreamt of sleeping with Anna Karenina, I was calculating pipe friction at the wrong university. James Watson, the molecular biologist, came to speak in our common room one evening. He was a hero at the time, having recently discovered “the secret of life” by cracking the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule. Someone asked him about his own secret of success. “Avoid boring people!” he said. Boring people got in the way of the search for truth. Was he speaking of engineers? Watson would go on to win the Nobel Prize, but that evening he inspired me so much that I promptly switched my major to molecular biology.

My love affair with biology, however, lasted only briefly. I went home that summer and discovered, for the first time, India’s grinding poverty. One must be away from India to “see” its poverty. It was a moment of political awakening – my second one after Partition. I was tormented for nights and wanted quick answers. So I switched to economics. John Kenneth Galbraith taught Economics 1 with Paul Samuelson, who taught as a guest professor from MIT. Both were famous names, although Galbraith sometimes used to fall asleep on his notes. I wanted to know how to make a poor country rich, but economists tied me up in mathematical equations. It was only after I discovered that economics was common sense that I figured out the answers for myself, and I began to enjoy economics. Most economists believed that it needed state intervention to bring prosperity quickly to a poor country. Socialism was the answer, they said, and it reinforced my faith in Nehru’s socialism.

Meanwhile, I was being enticed by the romance of the humanities. I enrolled in an elementary course in philosophy. The humanities constitute the core of a university, teaching you that every sentence you utter is not a statement but a question. It was unbelievably exciting to debate with Socrates about the good life; interrogate Kant about what is moral and right; argue with Marx about equality; cross-examine Freud about desire. I began to ask myself: Who am I? What is a flourishing life and how should one live it? I was following unconsciously my father’s dictum of “making a life”. The liberal arts, I realised, is not about mastering content but about learning how to reason and judge for yourself, as befits a free human being.

Excerpted with permission from Another Sort of Freedom: A Memoir, Gurcharan Das, Penguin India.