
A Great-Grandfather and A President
I’ve had the pleasure and gift of knowing and growing up with my great grandmothers and grandparents around me. The memories I have of my time with them are imprinted in my brain with indelible ink, and so when I read Delhi Thaatha — A Great Grand Story by Chitra Viraraghavan, all those images and conversations came rushing right back. Published by Seagull Books, Delhi Thaatha, is written for young readers, and is a biography of the first vice-president, and later the President of India, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.
The book is a delightful testament to the special relationship grandparents and grandchildren share. A keepsake, for your home library.
The world knows what a loved teacher and an outstanding philosopher he was, but this book doesn’t aggrandise him. Instead, we see him as an affectionate great-grandfather — a Thaatha — to a little girl. A lens through which we have not known him until now. The author, who is Dr. Radhakrishnan’s great-granddaughter, takes the reader through his early life, his much-loved personality, his mind, which was both playful and profound, and the warmth of his heart, through a series of charming anecdotes she recalls through her seven year-old self. The book is a delightful testament to the special relationship grandparents and grandchildren share. A keepsake, for your home or school library.
As a girl who grew up in Madras, to me Dr. Radhakrishnan’s house is something of a pilgrim centre in the heart of the city. Though I have never been inside, each time I drive past I slow down the car to catch a glimpse of the two-storey off-white house, with its columned driveway and high palm trees swaying in all their splendour. The last time I was in the city, I showed the house to my son and told him a little bit about the person who once lived there — a small-town boy, who went on to occupy the highest office in the country. He listened but didn’t seem too interested in the story and quite understandably so. The hero of the story wasn’t in his immediate context. The storyteller in me silently noted that I should find a more interesting way to tell him the story again. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long. When I spotted Delhi Thaatha at the small Seagull Books counter set up as part of the Idea Of Culture Conference in Calcutta, I knew I had to buy it for him.
When we first sat down to read the book, my seven year-old found the title most interesting. “An English book with a Tamil word!” he said excitedly. He was hooked. “Oh, you showed me this house!” he squealed as he looked at the first page. Sitting far away from Madras in Chandigarh, this book helped him reconnect with his Southern roots long after the yearly vacation to the city. The fact that the narrator was also a seven year-old made it more real for him.
“Did you enjoy the story?” I asked.
“Yes. A lot.”
“And what did you like about it?” “Everything. It’s about an important person. I also liked the pictures a lot and…I have a great-grandmother too. I think I should call her Madras Paati,” he declared.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Chitra’s lucid style of expression is a clear case of the apple not falling far from the tree.
The book opens with a colour photograph of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s house overlaid with graphic artist Sunandini Banerjee’s colourful and quirky digital illustrations. As one turns the pages, it is hard to ignore that every page is a work of art. There’s a seamless blend of vintage, black-and-white and sepia photographs surrounded by hand-drawn sketches (by P. Subramanian), contemporary flourishes, borders and backgrounds, that give it a scrapbook like feel.

Chitra’s accompanying text is beautifully simple, yet deeply insightful, mirroring Dr. Radhakrishnan’s rare ability to break down complex ideas for a child — the very quality that made him a great thinker and a distinguished teacher. It is not an exaggeration to say that Chitra’s lucid style of expression is a clear case of the apple not falling far from the tree.
Now, here’s the truth. This is not a book exclusively for young readers, for we all know there’s really no such thing as a children’s book. Especially if you’re a teacher reading this piece, you’re probably going to enjoy the book the most. Last week, when the 4th grade students I work with were reading an excerpt from Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s autobiography in their English Literature Reader, I thought it would be wonderful to have the teachers introduce this book as an extension or a parallel reading. Perhaps, do a Venn-diagram based comparison of the two teacher-Presidents, as a follow-up. They immediately agreed and began reading the book. Also, Teachers’ Day was just round the corner so that made it topical too. “I didn’t know all this about Dr. Radhakrishnan until now,” a teacher said to me before her session. “It made me think,” said another.
He was not just another President of India. He was a bit like their own ‘Daadas’ and ‘Naanas’ who wiggled their toes like rabbits and told them stories about the world.
We showed this book to the students — thanks to our ‘smart’ classrooms we could project the wonderful pages of the book on to the big screen — and read aloud the story. The word ‘Thaatha’ was new to the Punjabi/Hindi speaking children. They had fun saying it a few times, without the hard ‘th’ sound, of course. As the story unfolded, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was not an old, inaccessible, irrelevant man in the History textbook anymore. He was not just another President of India whose birthday is celebrated as Teachers’ Day. He was a bit like their own ‘Daadas’ and ‘Naanas’ (and Daadis and Naanis) who wiggle their toes like rabbits and talk to them about the world.

When the story ended, the children clapped cheerfully. A kind of instinctive response that I haven’t witnessed in the past. “Can we order it on Amazon?” they asked. “Of course, you can,” I said, beaming. They diligently noted down the name of the book. And, I know they’re inspired enough to be working on those Venn diagrams even as I write this.
On that note, here’s wishing you a Happy Teachers’ Day!
