THE MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE inaugurated its business school, MCC Boyd Tandon School of Business, last July. The Tandon half of it is Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon. An article on Chandrika winning the Grammy is the opener for @leisure this week.
Christmas carols at Bishop Heber Chapel, Madras Christian College
She was Chandrika Krishnamurthy when she studied at MCC. Her sister, Indra Nooyi, too, is an alumna and a benefactor of the college, where I spent a year before running off to Delhi to join my elder brother at St Stephen’s. My younger brother, Jacob Mathew, graduated from “the woods”―as MCCians call the lush, 365-acre campus―so did my cousin K.M. ‘Vinoo’ Mammen and some others in the family. I have heard many stories about the Boyd half from my father, and we will come to that.
Chandrika K. Tandon
Time presents the biggest challenge to a newsman. And it magnifies when you are in a newsweekly. The Delhi Assembly election results were too big to be ignored, yet taking stock would be futile as every possible angle had already been covered. Hence, this week’s cover story on how this win fits into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for the ‘city-state’ specifically and his legacy at large.
BJP vice-president Jay Panda, our columnist and the party’s point man for the polls, shares the blueprint for Delhi’s future with Senior Assistant Editor Pratul Sharma. Journalist Ashutosh, former spokesperson for the AAP, writes a powerful piece on where the party floundered and why it would be unwise to write off Arvind Kejriwal. Author-commentator Rasheed Kidwai trains his guns on Team Rahul, and the cover story is completed by analyses from Senior Correspondent Shubhangi Shah and Correspondent Badar Bashir.
Dr Alexander John Boyd
Some writers can turn even an obit into a gripping read. Ambassador Puneet R. Kundal has done that with the obituary of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, hereditary imam of the Ismaili Muslims. The Indian ambassador to Portugal throws in a nugget about the prince’s prize stallion, which was once the most valuable racehorse in the world. Shergar was kidnapped in February 1983. No one knows who did it. No one knows what happened to it.
In @leisure, Correspondent Niladry Sarkar writes about Upamanyu Chatterjee and his “loosely biographical” book, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. Then there is the Tandon article by Lavina Melwani from New York.
A path through “the woods”, as MCCians call their lush, 365-acre campus
Now, about Boyd. The Rev Dr A.J. Boyd was my father’s principal at MCC and one of the longest-serving ones―18 years, from 1938 to 1956. He famously knew the full names of all his students. Many of his boys grew into titans, such as former Chief of the Indian Army General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan aka Sundarji and the former czar of India’s nuclear programme Raja Ramanna. I just learned that Boyd visited the Sacred Heart College, Kochi, in 1950. The college is a stone’s throw from my front door.
Around 15 years after graduating, my father ran into Boyd at an alumni meet in Bombay. When he saw Boyd looking at him pensively, my father jogged his memory: “My name is Mathew.” Boyd shook his head and said: “I know your name all right. I was thinking, so the Chikmagalur man has reached Bombay!” In his autobiography, my father records his awe thus: “I felt myself burning in the bright heat of his memory. It was true, I had written to Boyd while I was on the estate (in Chikmagalur, Karnataka) requesting him for a character certificate.”
Is it any wonder that such a teacher finds mention also in Sundarji’s autobiography, Of Some Consequence: A Soldier Remembers.