Thread by @seshanm

#APrivilegedMusician
I would really love to meet privileged Brahmins.

The Brahmins who settled down in Matunga, where I grew up, were as poor as church-mice.

The Pallakadans among them, dispossessed of their lands by the Communists in Kerala thecommunemag.com/mr-tm-krishna-…

dispersed all over India with significant numbers in Mumbai, Kolkota & Delhi.

I lived for the first 44 years of my life in a 1 Room Kitchen flat in Matunga, with my parents, a brother and 2 sisters.

Unbelievably we often accommodated several more, who might have

come from the village looking for jobs. Some of them would stay on for months, till they could afford to rent a room.

We never thought of ourselves as poor. We were, I guess, middle-class by Indian standards

We consumed only two things..food & books.

We played every game which did not require money.

The one privilege we had was a fanatical belief in the power of education (which had yet to prove itself at that be time).

Parents would stint and cut corners in everything, except the education of their children.

Education would really start to pay only from the 80' s onwards, from employment in multinationals to hard-won scholarships abroad.

The one thing no one was permitted to even think or do, was to drown in either self-pity or become arrogant.

Study/Duty to family/hard-work/thrift/obedience were the words most often heard.

All those countless sacrifices, all that stinting & scraping, all those matter-of-factly made decisions, to educate the kids to the maximum.

possible, including the girls, would begin to really pay off from the turn of the century.

I only just learnt that T.M.Krishna comes from a family with business & political connections....
maybe that's where this self-flagellation comes from!