It was 1980 or early 1981. I was a year into my job as a journalist at the Times Of India group in Mumbai. All through my school life I had idolised some of my teachers who happened to be Bengali. Their excellence in teaching, their simple lifestyle, and their starched white sarees with different borders, all of it made a deep impression on my young mind. Later, my love for all things Bengali (except fish--I am a vegetarian--), and whatever I had read and heard about Shantiniketan made me want to go there and see for myself the extraordinary institution founded by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore .
I had known noted author, actor, orator Vasant Potdar--Vasant Kaka as we used to call him--since I was a child. He was a close friend of my father, and would visit our house whenever he was in Indore. Every visit of his was like a breath of fresh air, and the stories he used to tell would open windows to a new world for us. I used to be fascinated by his towering personality, his booming voice, and above all the wondrous accounts of his life that he would share with us. I was a mere schoolgirl with hardly any exposure to the outside world. It was long before the internet era, and we had very limited access to information. Vasant Kaka had been living in Kolkata (Calcutta in those days) for a long time, had mastered Bangla, and used to write for Bengali newspapers and magazines. He also performed several of his one-act plays in Bangla. He knew many writers, actors, artists, singers, musicians etc from close quarters. His rich experiences acquired from years of travelling made him a rare storehouse of amazing anecdotes that he used to narrate in his inimitable style.
He also possessed a great ability to spot a spark of talent in somebody when he saw one. He would then encourage the person to pursue it, and would help him or her in whichever way possible. I loved to pen short stories and was really an amateur. But he would always ask me if I had written anything new, would go through it, would appreciate my efforts, and would give me useful tips on how to improve on it. All this helped me build a good rapport with him.
So no wonder, when I thought of realising my dream of visiting Shantiniketan from Mumbai, Vasant Kaka's name was the first to come to my mind. He was in Kolkata, and he welcomed the idea of my visit. We planned the whole trip by exchanging letters, and one fine day, I was on my way to Kolkata in a coach of the Gitanjali Express. No phones, no messages in those days! Vasant Kaka was at the Howrah station to pick me up.
I did not have a camera, and I have no pictures from the trip. He took me to Shantiniketan as promised. He showed me around giving background information about various places. The serene campus of the Visva-Bharati, its greenery resplendent against the red soil, the beautiful art and sculpture at the Kala Bhavana and all around the campus, the simple yet elegant houses where Gurudev lived, all of it was simply out of this world. It was an exhilarating experience for me. I can recall very sketchy details of the trip. If I were to make that trip today, I would have written a series of blog posts on it, and it would have stayed fresh in my memory years later! All I remember is that Vasant Kaka took very good care of me. I owe my first trip to Shantiniketan entirely to him, and will forever be grateful to him for that. It was a brief visit focused on Shantiniketan, and so we didn't really have time for most of the usual places of interest in Kolkata.
A small tidbit of memory from the trip: Vasant Kaka was friends with Surendra Pratap Singh and M J Akbar, the stars of Ananda Bazar Patrika's Ravivar and Sunday respectively. I had tagged along with him to a party at Akbar's home, where among other people SP Singh was also present. Years later, he would sit in an editor's cabin across the hall from my desk in the office of the NavBharat Times, New Delhi!
