APRIL 2024
AL
SPECI R’S
CTO
COLLE ION
EDIT

FROM 1977

Agatha
Christie:
Queen of
Mystery
PAGE 48

`100

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FROM 1985

The Magic of
Marilyn Monroe
PAGE 32

FROM 2006

Discovering
Ambedkar
PAGE 74

FROM 1959

The Unbelievable
Bob Ripley
PAGE 84

(L to R) Marilyn Monroe,
Charlie Chaplin and
Sophia Loren

Reader ’s Digest

Contents
Features

ffrom
rom jjune
une 22014
0144

from
from march 1990
19990

The Commando
with the Tattoo

The Many Roles
of Sunil Dutt

Ganesh Dhangde was
six years old when he
got lost. 20 years later,
his mother had a visitor.

Through many personal
tragedies, this matinee
idol finds strength and
solace in helping others.

by deven kanal

by v. gangadhar

ffrom
rom jjune
un
ne 11977
977

ffrom
rom m
ay 2009
may

Lion in the
Living Room

Marilyn: Her
Magic Lingers On
The real Marilyn Monroe
was nobody you’d look
at twice—unless she
wanted to you to.

Agatha Christie:
Murder by the Book
More widely read
than any other English
writer, she baffled the
world with masterly
tales of murder
and mystery.

by maurice zolotow

by virginia kelly

by heidi krause

from de
december
ecem
mber
r 11971
971

The Day We Made
Flying History
In 1913, the author
set three world
records in a homemade flying machine.
by adolph g. sutro

on the cover and this page: photos: A L A M Y

from
mn
november
ovemb
ber 1985
19885

cover design: Angshuman De

Five decades after
two men brought a
playful cub into their
London home, the tale
has touched a whole
new generation.

readersdigest.in
r e a d e r s d i g e s t. i n 33

Reader ’s Digest

Features

Humour
from across
the decades

from december 2006

17
Humour in Uniform

Discovering
Babasaheb

38
All in a Day’s Work

Four momentous
incidents from B. R.
Ambedkar’s amazing life.

62
Life’s Like That

by ashok mahadevan
and sushan shetty

Departments
from june 1959

The Unbelievable
Mr Ripley
The creator of Believe It
or Nott had an insatiable
curiosity about strange
and astonishing facts.
by douglas f. storer

8
82
97
110
113
116

Over to You
Picturesque Speech
Viewpoints
Notes from All Over
Word Power
Quotable Quotes

10 Crawling in the
Paddy Fields

JUMDE

(top) shutterstock. (bottom) S I D D H A N T

4

department of wit

He Opened Up the Arctic
The story of famed
polar explorer
Knud Rasmussen.

14 I Think, Therefore,
I Spam ...

by allen rankin

18 A Lesson in
Criticism

by mohan sivanand

the best advice
i ever had

by richard wolkomir
from february 2005

The Good Badshah
In conversation with
Bollywood’s top gun.
by monisha pratap shah

april 2024

109
College Rags
112
Cartoon Quips
115
Virtual Hilarity

words of
lasting interest

by yu yuh-chao
from january 1972

98
Laughter, The
Best Medicine

personal glimpses

22 Sophia Loren,
Charlie Chaplin,
Smriti Irani
and More

A NOTE TO
OUR READERS
From time to time, you will
see pages titled ‘An Impact
Feature’ or ‘Focus’ in
Reader’s Digest. This is no
different from an advertisement and the magazine’s
editorial staff is not involved
in its creation in any way.

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Published at F-26, First Floor, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001. Editor: Kai Jabir Friese (responsible for selection of news).

6

april 2024

OVER TO
YOU
Notes on the
February issue

Dear Readers ...
I grew up in sleepy, coastal Malabar where I had little
opportunity to read RD. I encountered this ‘little magazine’ when I accompanied my father to Calicut, to
meet a lawyer. The RD was lying on a table in the
lawyer’s room. I picked it up—my brain racing with
the thought that I may not be able to finish reading in
time. I remember my disappointment at seeing that it
cost `10—an astronomical amount for me then. However, I shared my experience with my classmate—an
equally voracious reader like me, and affluent. He arranged for the Digest using concessional subscription
cards. Our arrangement: He would read it first, then
pass it to me. After I was done, we would give it to
the Panchayat library. The practice was discontinued
once I moved to Kakinada. But luckily, the sailors
coming in from foreign shores brought me RD copies.
My daughter too continues to indulge my love for the
Digest—whenever I visit her in the US, she arranges
for all the issues till the month of my visit. Needless
to say, I have been an avid reader of RD!
PM Gopalan, Mumbai
PM Gopalan gets this month’s ‘Write & Win’ prize of ₹1,000.—EDs

Stories shared by the five editors, including the present one, took me down memory lane when we, as
school students, would quiz each other on the
names of the editors of major publications. And
most of us knew their names by heart, and of their

8 april 2024

im
mmediate predecesso
ors too! I still retain
my passion for reading;
m
I subscribe to three
newspapers and a few
n
magazines, but I admit
m
I have no knowledge
ab
bout their editors.
The commemorative
T
article thus served the
purpose of highlighting
the importance of editors and their significant contribution.
Arvind Arya, Mumbai
The write-ups by the
editors of yesteryears
and by the gentleman
presently at the helm,
taken together, encapsulates all that a loyal
reader may like to know
about RD India. Some
years ago, it was mentioned by the then editor in his note that the
word ‘prepone’ did
not exist in the English
language; it was an
Indian creation to indicate the opposite
of the word ‘postpone’.
And the word ‘advance’ should be used
instead. However, recently I found that according to the Oxford
Dictionary, the word

Reader ’s Digest
‘prepone,’ originated in
the 1970s—years before
the said editorial note
was published.
Dev Dutta Roy,
Greater Noida

Love is Winter

Selma’s story transported
me back to my own
newly-wed days. I had an
arranged marriage. In
India, it is true that we
marry not only our spouses, but the entire famOver the Rainbow
The profile did a splen- ily. Tensions cropped up
as I learnt to share him
did job of shedding
light on the various In- with his six siblings, their
children and dozens of
dian queer history
relatives. I learnt, to my
milestones ranging
from Shakuntala Devi’s consternation, that I occupied only a small porWorld of Homosexuals
tion of his heart. Over
to Dhall’s own work.
the years I realized I had
It was astonishing to
learn about the history to let go of my narrow
mindset. I learnt to
of the work that individuals and collectives recognize his love in
his actions and deeds.
have undertaken for
the betterment of queer There came about moments when we undercommunity in India.
stood each other without
In the context of LGwords. Thirty years
BTQIA+ history month
hence, we still have our
in February, I am
proud to report that we differences, maybe we
only have differences.
have started a Queer
But, I now know that we
Collective in my colrespect and love each
lege, with the aim to
other. Now as my son is
create a safe space
waiting to find his partfor questioning and
ner, I hope I have raised
queer individuals.
him right, and that he
I hope this too
will give his spouse the
can be a small step
intimacy, and security
in celebrating all
that Selma writes of.
kinds of diversity.
Shiny Gihon,
Arya Nirmal J,
Ernakulam, Kerala
Thiruvananthapuram

The story took me back
to the time I asked my
college value education
teacher, what made a
perfect marriage. Well
26 years down my own
marriage, finding joy
in giving and not expecting anything in return
would be my answer. I
had a happy childhood
and owe it to my parents
for being role models I
could look up to. The
thoughtfulness and love
they displayed for each
other during their marriage, helped lay a foundation for my own. In a
marriage, it’s the little
things that matter. Times
have changed but it is
not impossible to make
a marriage work—it only
takes a heart willing to
give, and a mind that
thinks ‘come what may I
am here for you’—irrespective of the change
of seasons in life.
Preeti Aranha,
Mangalore

Write in at editor.india@
rd.com. The best letters
discuss RD articles, offer
criticism, share ideas.
Do include your phone
number and postal address.

readersdigest.in

9

Reader ’s Digest

10 april 2024

WORDS OF LASTING INTEREST

ILLUS TR ATION: GE T T Y IMAGES

F R O M M AY 1985

BY Yu Yuh-Chao

readersdigest.in

11

Reader ’s Digest

have ploughed, planted, cut harvests, pickled
tea leaves and chopped wood in the isolated
but beautiful countryside of Kuanhsi in
Taiwan. But of all the chores that are a
farmer’s lot here, crawling in a paddy field
to rid it of weeds is, in my experience, the task
that trains one best to develop a Spartan spirit.
Nowadays, of course, the farmer need
only use chemicals to kill weeds. It was
not so when I was a boy some three
decades ago. From the age of eight or so,
I had to contribute my share of labour
along with my father and two elder
brothers, Yuh-hsien and Yuh-tang.
Our family was too poor to afford paid
labourers. Kneeling in a paddy field with
a hat, a shirt and a pair of shorts my only
protection, I was up to my thighs in
mud. It splashed all over me, wet, sticky
and dirty. When mud splashed into my
eyes and on to my lip, I’d stand up, find
the kettle of fresh water and try to wash
it away; but it was always a long struggle
before I could get it completely out of
my eyes and off my lips.
The first weeding of the year
occurred just before spring, and the
second in midsummer. Then the blistering sun beat upon my arched back,
making me feel like hot bread stuck to
the side of a pan. The evaporating
water from the paddy field steamed up
my nostrils and face.
Between 10 in the morning and four
or five in the afternoon, when the air

12
2 april 2024

hardly stirred, perspiration ran in rivulets, making streaks on my mud-covered arms and legs. It felt as if little
bugs were crawling all over me. If a
drop of sweat ran into the eyes, it would
trigger tears. To prevent the sweat from
running into my eyes, I kept my face as
low as possible.
I told myself, Be patient! What good
does it do to begrudge my lot? If
my parents and brothers could go on
taking it, so I could II. A kind of pride
took place of the hurt in me. So thinkk
ing, I slowly pulled myself together and
I crawled on.
When I pulled out rotten plants, they
had a raw stench. The mud was so
slimy that it made my flesh creep.
Standing up, ploughing or planting,
you didn’t feel it so much, but it hit you
hard when you were working with your
face close to the water.
My skin often developed rashes
and my knees bled. The bamboo stakes
and the bugs, worms and snakes in
the water cut and stung. Moreover,
the small leeches sucked blood and
caused infection.

Crawling In The Paddy Fields
On the way home every day, I’d soak
myself in the creek and then take a hot
bath at home. I could not sit down and
eat dinner until I was sure that every bit
of dirt had been removed from my
pores, and no hint of smell remained.
When I put on clean, coarse cotton
clothes, fragrant from drying in the sun,
it was pure ecstasy.
ONCE, DURING MY SUMMER holidays, Father was sick, but he worked in
the field just the same, because there
was so much to do. As I looked at his
lean figure, crawling ahead of me, I
thought of my own dim future. I was
tied to the land by job after back-breakk
ing job, unlike other boys who had freedom to pursue happiness. Why were
there people in the world who would
never know what it was like to toil, and
others, like me, who had been toiling
ever since they were small boys, season
after season, year after year? Why were
some people sitting before electric fans
or in air-conditioned rooms, while I
was panting and sweating under the
blazing sun? Why was there mud and
more mud in front of me?
Only we farmers were willing to
crawl, to assume the lowliest of
positions in order to have a better harvest. Even a buffalo or a horse, when
working for man, stands tall. I was
suddenly consumed with great pity and
great respect for the multitudes of
poor farmers, and the focus of my
attention began to extend beyond
myself and my family. This was

an important turning point in my life.
While resting beside a field one day,
my brothers and I resolved to pursue
useful knowledge and technology to
help ourselves and other farmers
improve our circumstances, and
lighten our burden of labour. This
resolve gave me strength so that when
I went to university, and later to the US
on a scholarship, my spirit rose above
personal hardships. Crawling in the
mud had taught me to take bleeding
and sweating as part of my life, and not
to be afraid in the face of difficulties
and setbacks. But what was more
important was that I had learnt the
meaning of ‘you reap what you sow’.
Mother used to say, “Judge a man
not by his face, but by his fields.” I
appreciate more and more the meaning of these words. The land is dependable, as long as you are willing to toil on
it. When the wind blew and the green
rice plants swayed like waves in a sea,
dazzlingly beautiful, a deep sense of
satisfaction swelled up in me.
I laboured hard in the simple, isolated countryside of my home, and I
am proud of this. Although later I went
into academic research, I shall always
remember what working in the paddy
fields taught me: plant your feet firmly
on the ground, work hard and you will
be rewarded.
Update: The author’s brothers also found
work away from the paddy fields. Yuhhsien became an agricultural and forr
estry official. Yuh-tang became a deputy
police superintendent.
readersdigest.in

13

DEPARTMENT OF WIT
A PRIL 2012

I Think,
Therefore, I Spam ...

... has become the way forward for too many e-mail
pests. Here’s how I deal with them every single day

BY Mohan Sivanand

14
4 april 2024

You’ve got mail—with the real thing!

ticket, cash and other valuables. I am
stranded in a hotel. Please can you loan
me $2,000 so that I can settle my bills
and book the next flight home? I promise to pay you back.”
Now, that’s money I could easily part
with. Why, in November I’d won half
a million UK pounds from the ‘Office

IMAGES: MULTIVISION GR APHIC S

ought to write “Manage spam”,
“Delete forwards” next to the 9
a.m. slot for every single day in my
desk diary. But then I don’t write
“Brush teeth” next to 6 a.m. either. I
automatically start my workday by
deleting spam, or at least most of it.
Today, there’s one from young Ayeda
in Nigeria. “My name is Ayeda Musa,”
she writes, “and I am a girl … and personally became interested in being your
friend, and even more, as time goes on
we will get to know each other better.”
For me, at age 60, this was like a
blast from the past.
“Dear Ayeda,” I wrote. “Where are
you, sweetheart? Send me your picture, and I will tell you how old I am.”
And then there was V. Vasudevan.
“Please Help!!!” he emailed me
recently, “I had to rush off to Spain …
and robbers made away with my air

Reader ’s Digest
of British Telecommunication’. I’d
also won £5,00,000 from a “BBC 2012
Poverty Alleviation Program.” Another
£3,65,000 from Coca-Cola. And just
nine hours ago, I learnt as I write this,
yet another “half a million UK pounds
from Coca-Cola.”
There’s also a Mrs Regina Matthew,
who emailed me from Ivory Coast. Her
late husband Joe Matthew left her
6.5 million US dollars. Regina, childless, is herself about to die of cancer.
So she wants to give it all to me.
I worry. Just what do I do with so
much money? One reason why I
responded to Vasudevan in Spain:
Dear Vasu,
I am so sorry to hear this. In fact only
yesterday I’d met your cousin Madhavan, who told me that you were away.
Please let me know how I can call you
and send you the money. I can ask a
friend in Spain to help you. Are you in
Madrid? Meanwhile, take care.
Mohan Uncle
Vasudevan was quick to reply [copypasting, unedited]:
Thanks a lot please you can send it
via western union money transfer with
my name on this address: Casas de
Miravete 28-B, Madrid, Spain.
We corresponded for a few more
days, me with excuses for my delay in
sending the money, and he sounding
increasingly frantic. I finally forwarded

our entire correspondence to the Spanish consulate in Mumbai, asking them
to “Please send it to the Madrid police
for further action.”
Routinely deleting forwards is an
important part of my daily 9 a.m. spammanagement ritual. This way useful
emails alone show up. In the past, ‘forward’ normally meant the opposite of
‘backward’. Today ‘forward’ is a fullfledged noun: a piece of unsolicited
email you get from a former colleague,
a retired uncle, new pal or some random pest who’s got hold of your email
address. It works something like this:
Retired Uncle gets an unsolicited
email. He reads it and is so excited, he
wants to share it. He forwards it to
all his surviving nearest and dearest
not realizing that, in the process, he’s
become another pest. One dear former
colleague spams me on average thrice
a day—forcing me to erase 1,095
forwards a year, from just one sender.
Despite spam being such a global
phenomenon, few people know or
remember the origins of the word.
Before our Internet Age, spam just
meant meat, spiced ham actually,
readersdigest.in

15

Reader ’s Digest
which often came in a can. The connection with email derives from an
episode in an old British TV comedy in
which spam featured in almost every
dish in a cafe, and where the word
spam is said about 132 times.
Experts at first distinguished the two
by calling the inedible one ‘electronic
spam’, which at any rate has much
more variety. For instance, one offered
to flatten my tummy. I did not respond,
although it might have helped me. A
second one offered to unflatten
another part of my anatomy. I didn’t
need it, but I responded (notice how
spam can make you act irrationally).
“No, thanks,” I wrote. “I’m quite satisfied with the size of my breasts.”
I also replied to Regina Matthew, the
childless, terminally-ill lady who
wanted to give me her millions:
Dear Regina,
Very sweet of you to think of me.
Sorry, must be so long, I can’t really
remember when we last met.
Anyway, tell me what I must I do
to get the money?
Your adopted son,
Mohan
A religious soul, Regina replied.
“Faced with life’s uncertainty,” she
wanted me to send her my “direct contact information—full name, home
address, phone, fax and bank details—
to enable me to obtain an authorization letter that will officially and legally
approve you as the next of kin …”

16
6 april 2024

The kind lady ended with, “Please
remember to put me in your daily
prayers for God’s healing in my life.”
I have not prayed for Regina so far—
because if she survives the cancer, I
might lose $6.5 million.
By evening I also heard from the
beautiful Ayeda Musa in Nigeria. She’d
attached her photo, as per my request.
Recall how, in her first email, she was
personally interested in me, but all
that charm had evaporated in a matter
of hours. All she wanted to do now
was share her dear departed daddy’s
$10.5 million with me. How insensitive!
And Vasudevan? After I blew the
whistle on him, having forwarded our
correspondence to the Spanish consulate, I’d hoped that the policía in Madrid
would act fast. I’d imagined those cops
walking him out of apartment 28-B, all
handcuffed and humiliated, into a van
waiting outside Casas de Miravete.
They’d then hold a proper Spanish
inquisition, charge Vasu under what
would be their equivalent of our Section 420, maybe even deport the crook
back to India. He’d be all over the
papers, on TV and Twitter for having
finally been apprehended by the ingenious efforts of a Mumbai journalist
who went out of his way to forward …
Did I say forward? Maybe that’s
why you didn’t see all those things
happening to Vasudevan—or to me.
Somebody at the Spanish consulate
must have thought, Uno más plaga!
[One more pest!] Just before deleting
one more forward.

Reader ’s Digest

Humour in Uniform
1950s
BESIDE THE swimming pool at
Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, I
noticed a shapely young lady who
was attracting more than her share
of attention. The focus of the attention was her white bathing suit,
which sported a patch of blue on
the back. I inched my way nearer for
a closer look. Beside the zipper on
the back of the suit was a military
stamp which read: “To Be Operated
by Authorized Personnel Only.”
—A/2C L. WINKELMAN, NOVEMBER 1958

1960s
DURING DRILL, a soldier who
spoke broken English was having a
hard time with his rifle and couldn’t
seem to follow the sergeant’s instructions. Noticing his confusion,
the sergeant yelled, “No, no! Bring
the butt forward!” His face lighting
up, the soldier promptly turned
around and backed up four steps.
—MARTHA L. DAHLINGHAUS, SEPTEMBER 1960

1970s
POLICE RADIOS in an Ohio
town cackled with glee one recent
weekend, at the expense of one of
their own. An officer in a patrol car

radioed to an unmarked police cruiser
that he was in hot pursuit of a speeding vehicle. The radio conversation
outlined the chase for some time before the first officer reported, “I am
stopping pursuit.” “Why?” came the
immediate question from the other
officer. “Because,” confessed the first,
“I think I’m chasing you.”
—FREMONT, OHIO, NEWSMESSENGER, JULY 1978

1980s
IN MY INTERPERSONAL communications course, I called on a Marine
drill sergeant in the class. “Let’s see
if you’re successful in leaving the job
behind when you greet your family,”
I said. “What are your first words to
your wife when you get home?” Without hesitation , he replied, “At ease!”
—MARLENE CAROSELLI, APRIL 1989

2000s
my desk assignment in
the Army, I noticed that my coworker,
Rick, never answered his phone. One
day I asked him why. “If you had to
pick up the telephone and say, ‘Statistical section, Specialist Strasewski
speaking,’” Rick replied, “You wouldn’t
want to answer it either!”
—KAYE GORDON, JUNE 2001

readersdigest.in

17

ILLUSTRATION: SHUTTER STO CK

Reader ’s Digest

18 april 2024

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER HAD
F R O M J U LY 1 9 8 6

A LESSON IN

Criticism
I was brimming over with self congratulations
when I met the theatre manager. His words simple
as they were, hit me like a harpoon

A

by Richard Wolkomir

fter my sophomore year in
college, I worked for the
summer as a cub reporter
at my hometown newspaper. I saw it as a step toward becoming a ‘literary’
person. I was cloudy about what literary
meant, but I was sure it involved being
a ‘sophisticate.’
I was as vague about the meaning of
sophisticate as I was about literary, except that I was sure it had a lot to do
with being like our newspaper’s editor.
He was a genuine literary person, a poet

with longish hair, a doleful moustache
and sharp blue eyes. His verse appeared in esteemed magazines, and he
always had wry, witty comments to
make. I wished that I, too, might develop a sharp, superior eye for others’
foibles and failings.
That summer’s big event was the
arrival of an acting troupe, whose
young members enthusiastically began
transforming a sagging store in a
nearby resort hamlet in the Catskill
Mountains into a theatre. The manager
visited our newspaper and explained
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Reader ’s Digest
build the theatre at the same time. I
that the actors were learning four diff
ferent plays, which they would present waved to our newspaper’s official critic.
alternately. “It’s a lot for these kids to She was a tall, kindly widow who I was
sure would write a cheery review. I
get ready,” he said worriedly.
Sometimes the editor and I drove would fill my review with wry observaover to watch rehearsals. As we tions and mordantly turned phrases.
Most of the actors were only a bit
slouched in the rear row, he would
whisper amusing comments, for the older than my own 19 years. I sensed that
performers were still floundering and the pretty, dark-haired female lead had
flubbing. To me, it all seemed delight- the jitters about tonight’s performance.
It was painful for me as she flubbed her
fully urbane.
Then we would leave the magic of the first line. I thought the editor would find
theatre, and I would go back to my real it amusing, however, so I made a note. I
also jotted down when
work. It consisted of writthe male lead entered
ing stories on the order of
AS A
the stage from the wrong
“New Pumper for VolunBL
LOSSOMING
G
place. He deftly ad-libbed
teer Fire Company”. As a
LI TE
ER A RY
a few lines that eased the
blossoming literary perother actors out of their
son, I yearned to try more
PE R S O N , I
confusion. But I made
colourful material. I
Y E ARN
N ED TO
no note of that, as it
wanted to write something
T RY MOR E
would not lend itself to
that would win my editor’s
C O L OU R F U L
trenchant prose.
applause. But our village
M
A
T
E
R
I
A
L
.
On my way out after
had no chic set whose glitthe play was over and
tery doings I could report
the standing ovation
on; only people working
hard to pay their rent and buy groceries. had died away, I met the regular reviewer. “Isn’t it wonderful, a theatre like
Yet, we did have the new theatre.
A regular reporter would be review- this, right here? “ she said. “And the acing the play. I decided to attend open- tors are so enthusiastic.” I agreed abing night even so, and write a review sentmindedly, preoccupied with the
just for the editor to see. Possibly, if my ironic, barbed sentences I was going
article had sufficient verve and bite, he to write.
I worked late that night, polishing my
would run it. But his simple approval
article. The next day, the regular critic’s
would be reward enough.
On opening night the theatre was review came out. As I had expected, it
almost full. The people sitting next to was enthusiastic, and she found someme commented on how plucky it was thing to praise in each actor’s perforfor the troupe to learn four plays and mance. Finally I handed in what I’d

20 april 2024

A Lesson in Criticism
Standing there on Main Street, I
written. From my desk, I watched the
felt a little sick. I braced myself for
editor glancing over my manuscript.
He grinned, leaned back in his chair, his anger. Instead, he spoke softly.
put his feet up on the desk and gave it “You write so well. But you know, all
his undivided attention. He laughed work is difficult, and life is too,” he said.
out loud and then laughed again, more “Instead of using whatever abilities
heartily. I felt flushed wit h excitement, we have to tear down, just so we’ll
look clever or sophisticated, shouldn’t
almost giddy .
“This is funny—it has a sharp edge,” we be trying to help one another
the editor told me. “I’m going to run be excellent?”
That was nearly 25 years ago, but I
this review too.”
When it appeared the next after- still see that theatre manager whenever
noon, I read it through five times and I have the urge to criticize somebody
else’s efforts, whether it is
felt myself filling with
work in an office or the
the helium of success. I
TO WIN THE
arrangements for a meetsaw a brilliant career
PRA
A ISE FOR
ing or the decoration of a
ahead of me as a critic,
W H IC H I
house. And I think of the
my favour courted, my
H U NGER ED, I
review by the newspaper’s
printed words avidly
H A D BLIN
N DED regular reporter, which
read. In that intoxicated
MY
YSEL
LF TO
gently suggested where
state I met the theatre
the actors might improve,
manager in front of the
HOW T HOSE
while focussing on what
five-and-dime.
AC TORS
S
“Well,” I said, brimWOU LD FEEL . they did well, and urging
them on to excellence.
ming over with self-conPerhaps that kindly widow
gratulation. “How did
you like my review?” I’m not sure what was the true sophisticate.
Not long ago, a man stopped me
I expected him to say. I was young , unsure of myself, and—just now—drunk on the street. “I read your writings
on praise. Surely, he also would be from time to time, and I enjoy your
amused by my carefully crafted phrases. positive outlook—you never seem to
The theatre manager’s words, simple as knock anyone,” he said. Smiling, he
they were, hit me like a harpoon. He added, “I bet that’s the best criticism
you’ve ever received.” I thought again
said, “You hurt a lot of people.”
The balloon of my self-satisfaction of the theatre manager. To the man
burst. To win the praise for which I who had just complimented me, I
hungered, I had blinded myself to how said, “You don’t know how much I
my waspish criticisms would make appreciate that. But no, actually, it’s
the second-best.”
those actors feel.
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Personal Glimpses
BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF THE LIVES OF THE FAMOUS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SIDDHANT JUMDE

WEDDING WOES
When it came to the subject of
marriage Charles Darwin attacked
the problem in his usual scientific
manner—deliberately, carefully marshaling all the facts. “This is the question,” he wrote, and then, under
separate headings (‘Marry’ and ‘Not
marry’), listed the pros and cons.
Eventually the pros (children, home,
charms of female chitchat) outweighed the cons (terrible loss of time,
cannot read in the evenings, if many
children, forced to earn one’s bread)
and he summed up: “Never mind,
boy. There is many a happy slave.”
—Newsweek,
k DECEMBER 1958

SHARP WIT
There was a writer
r who not only
appropriated a lot of Bertrand Russell’s ideas for a book he was writing,
but had the nerve to ask Russell to
contribute an introduction when the
work was completed.
Lord Russell’s reply consisted
of two words: “Modesty forbids.”
—B.C., NOVEMBER 1959

WHAT’S IN A NAME
AFTER publishing an article on
Ian Fleming, the creator of James
Bond, Lifee received this letter from

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Mrs James Bond of Philadelphia:“In
1961, after learning how Mr Fleming
had appropriated my husband’s
name from his book Birds of the West
Indies, I wrote him a letter to apprise
him amiably of JB authenticus, winding up: “I tell my JB he could sue you
for defamation of character, but he regards the whole thing as a joke.”
Mr Fleming replied that the name
had struck him as brief, masculine,
and just what he needed—and so
James Bond II was born. He added:
“In return, I can only offer your James
Bond unlimited use of the name Ian
Fleming. Perhaps one day he will discover some particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to
christen in an insulting fashion.”
—DECEMBER 1967

ROLE PLAY
When Charlie Chaplin met Albert
Einstein, he asked the scientist to discuss his theory of relativity. Einstein
suggested that it would not be proper
to try to explain it just then. “It would
be,” he said, “as if I were to ask you to
do some acting for me right now.
You probably couldn’t do it.”
For the next hour, however, Chaplin expounded in mystical terms on

Reader ’s Digest

HEAVY METTLE

IN MARCH, nurse Carol Balta was the
victim of an elaborate hoax performed
by a con man who claimed to know
guitarist Eddie Van Halen. The man
took Balta’s car, promising to bring the
rock star to visit the quadriplegic
children and adults she cares for at New
Start Homes in Chatsworth, California
When he failed to return, Balta lost her
car—and her patients lost faith in her.
Van Halen learnt how his name
had been used, however, and decided
to do something about it. Quietly, without
media attention, he paid a surprise visit
to New Start Homes.
“He talked to each patient, signed
autographs, passed out CDs, posters and
videos,” Balta says. “He was warm and
mathematical theories until the confused Einstein was exhausted. The
next morning, a messenger brought
Einstein a photo of Chaplin, inscribed:
“To a great mathematician. I hope you
liked my acting.”
—LEONARD LYONS, SEPTEMBER 1972

SUPPORTING ROLE
When actress Sophia Loren sobbed
to Italian movie director Vittorio De
Sica over the theft of her jewellery, he
lectured her: “Listen to me, Sophia. I
am much older than you and if there
is one great truth I have learnt about
life, it is this—never cry over anything
that can’t cry over you.”
—E. HOTCHNER, Srjphta: Living and Loving
(MORROW), NOVEMBER 1979

caring, and took time with each person.”
“You should have seen the smiles on
their faces as we wheeled them back to
their rooms,” Balta continues. “Eddie’s
become more than a rock star to them.
He’s become a friend.”
— DENNIS MCCARTHY, Los Angeles Daily News,
October 1994

SWEET ESCAPE
ON ONE of his European tours, the
master magician and locksmith Harry
Houdini found himself locked in by
his own thinking. After he had been
searched and manacled in a Scottish
town jail, the old turnkey shut him
in a cell and walked away. Houdini
quickly freed himself from his shackk
les and then tackled the cell lock.
But despite all his efforts, the lock
wouldn’t open. Finally, ever more
desperate but completely exhausted,
he leaned against the door—and it
swung open so unexpectedly that he
nearly fell headlong into the corridor.
The turnkey had not locked it.
—HAROLD KELLOCK, Houdinii (Harcourt), April 1982

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Reader ’s Digest
SECOND OPINION
PAUL NEWMAN recalls the worst
role he ever accepted: Once I played
a newspaper guy who was something
of a ladies’ man. My wife, Joanne
Woodward, read the script first and
said, “Hey, this would be fun to
do together.”
I read it and said, “Joanne, this is
just a bunch of one liners.”
Then she said, “You blankety
blank, I’ve been carting your children
around, taking care of them, you, and
your house at the expense of my career.” And I said, “It’s a terrific script. I
can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
—QUOTED BY DAVID RAGAN, Cosmopolitan,
MAY 1995

MR BRIGHTSIDE
THE COMIC Martin Short has found
success as a film and stage actor. As a

young man, he suffered a series of
tragedies, with the loss of both parents and a beloved older brother. But
he realized his parents gave him gifts
no one could take away. “I was the
child of a very funny family,” he recalls. “There was lots of humour in
our house. I truly believe that when
you’re funny, you’re blessed.”
“When I saw my mother fight to
survive, it gave me an early view of
bravery and what life was about,”
Short says. “Your mother dies and
you’re 18, and you face a choice. Are
you going to take drugs or are you
going to become more spiritual?
Why not go with the thing that
seems more positive?”
—DOTSON RADER, Parade, January 2001

PEACEMAKER BAHU
“THE PAST 18 months have been

NOBLE CAUSE

FROM THE MOMENT her parents’ car
slammed into a logging truck in 1987,
Shania Twain never had the chance to
fully mourn their deaths. Just 21, Twain
took on a great deal of responsibility for
her family. Her singing paid the
mortgage on the house she and her
three younger siblings lived in. Twain,
one of country music’s hottest newcomers, won a Grammy Award this
year. But back then, she sang for her
family’s survival . “Taking care of my
family was a blessing in disguise,” she
says . “It was a total distraction from my

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grief. If you focus instead on people
who need you, you may do yourself
the biggest favour.”

—JEFFREY ZASLOW in USA Weekend,
September 1996

Personal Glimpses

PLAYING IT COOL

ACTOR and martial
arts expert, Chuck
Norris knows
might doesn’t
always make right.
He explains: Not
long ago, after a
day of filming my
TV series, I went alone to a small Texas
bar for a cold beer. As I sat in a corner
booth, savouring my drink, a large
man towered over me and said with
an edge to his voice that I was sitting
in his booth. I didn’t like his tone or his
implicit threat, but I said nothing and
moved to another booth. A few minutes later, though, the big fellow
headed back in my direction. Here it
comes, I thought, a local tough out to
make a name for himself by taking on
Chuck Norris in a fight. When he
arrived at my new booth, he looked
directly at me. “You’re Chuck Norris,”
he said. I nodded.
“You could have whipped my butt
back there a few minutes ago,” he
said.“Why didn’t’ you?”
“What would it have proved?”
I asked.
He thought that over for a moment
and then offered me his hand. “No
hard feelings?” he said.
“None,” I said, and shook his hand.
I had avoided a confrontation and
made a friend. I won by losing.
—CHUCK NORRIS, The Secret Power Within
(Little, Brown), March 1996

fantastic for me,” says Smriti Malhotra
Irani, leading lady of Star TV’s Kyunki
Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, where she
plays Tulsi, the Virani family’s older
daughter-in-law and resident peacemaker. Last year Smriti got married to
her long-time friend Zubin and gave
birth to a son, Zohr. And she’s just
started playing Sita in B.R. Chopra’s
new TV serial, Ramayan.
“Most people don’t realize it but,
like Tulsi, women can be traditional
yet strong and influential,” says the
young actress. “I’m like that in real
life too. The key is understanding relationships, and knowing when to
give in and when not to. Your strength
comes from that.”
At times when she’s felt that Kyunki’ss script wasn’t realistic, or that it
made her look too weak, she has discussed it with either the writer or the
director. “I tell them, I’m not convinced by this bit. Either you change
it or explain your point of view. One
important scene she managed to get
changed was her reaction when her
screen husband Mihir Virani dies
in the serial.
“I was given some lines to say over
his body. But they didn’t seem right.
So I told the director ‘Why don’t you
let me do it my way?’ I then imagined
that Zubin had died. I didn’t say a
word—I simply cried.”
How’s she looking forward to playing her new role as Ramayan’s Sita?
“T’ll try to make Sita look strong.”
—MOHAN SIVANAND, March 2002

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Reader ’s Digest

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DECEMBER 1971

THE DAY WE MADE

On a sunny September day in 1913, the author set three
world records in a homemade flying machine

IM AGE: ALAM Y

by Adolph G. Sutro

REALLY believed in that hydroaeroplane I’d patched together, and
I decided it was time to prove its
merits by setting a world’s record or
two. Nothing like circling the moon,
of course—or even the earth.
The year was 1913, and all I wanted
to do was to circumnavigate San Francisco Bay. And with the help of two intrepid friends, and the experience I’d
acquired working with a couple of
brothers named Orville and Wilbur

Wright, I succeeded in writing a bizarre
footnote in the history of flight.
It all started with the addiction to
aviation that gripped so many young
Americans after the Wrights’ first flight,
at Kitty Hawk. Now at the very peak of
their fame, they were being showered
with adulation, often by the same people who, a few years before, had ridiculed their claim that they could fly.
Young, fresh out of school, I called in
1910 at the Wright home in Dayton,
reade
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Ohio, and told Orville I had come from
California to work in their flying machine factory. Within few weeks, I was
settled in the wing covering department. Eventually, after learning to fly
myself, and after a nearly disastrous
crash, I decided to design and build a
plane of my own—a safe one. For there
was no question about it: those early
flying machines were dangerous.
With no closed-in fuselage, they
consisted of a morass of wooden
struts and spars and harp-like wires
supporting muslin- or
linen-covered wings. A
small seat, often just a flat
board, was mounted
toward the front, and the
engine was installed in
the open framework.
Being of a conservative
ive
nature, I determined first
fi
to find out all I co
could
about plane design.
gn So,
after learning from
m them
what I could, I bade
a the
Wrights farewell
e and
headed back to myy home
in California, where
ere I enrolled in an
evening engineeringg co
course in stress
analysis at what is now the University
U
of San Francisco.
After months of work and study, my
design was completed. A biplane, with
two eight-foot, six-inch propellers, it
had a spread of 64 feet on the upper
wing, and 40 feet on the lower, with a
six-foot wing width. Overall length of
the craft was 36 feet. The propellers

28 april 2024

were driven by a 60 horsepower Hall
Scott motor. Profanely known as a
Scalding Hot, it had a habit of leaking
water from its multiple joints, and had
a voracious appetite for oil. All the engineers to whom I showed the drawings
laughed. For the only time in my experience, the experts were in agreement:
My flying contraption would never
leave the ground.
Undaunted, I managed to scrounge
some lumber and soon erected a small
shed in our backyard. Here I worked
day and night, using
crude equipment that a
modern mechanic
would laugh at, until my
plane was completed. It
boasted an extra safety
device: I cut an old trouser belt in half and riveted each end to the
board seat. For all I
know, this was the
world’s first seat belt.
And the machine flew!
So pleased was I with
it that, after some encouraging trial flights, I decided the
time had come to prove the new plane’s
merits to the aviation world.
I’d read that a Frenchman, Henri
Fabre, had pioneered water take-offs
and landings in 1910, and that Glenn
Curtiss had built a seaplane the next
year. So why not,
t I thought, substitute a
pontoon for my wheels and thus gain an
unlimited takeoff runway?? Improved
landing fields were non-existent in 1913.

The Day We Made Flying History

Adolph Sutro’s
1913 hydroplane

As I was completing my conversion, I
heard that a new type of licence was going to be issued exclusively for seaplane
fliers. On 9 February 1913, I took my
licence tests and was awarded Hydro
Aeroplane Pilot Licence No.1, the first in
America and perhaps in the world.
Then, bright and early on 28 September—after a spring and summer of
painstaking preparation—I felt myself
ready to make aviation history. Two
officials of the Aero Club of America,
an affiliate of the prestigious Federation
Aeronautique Internationale, calibrated and sealed the barographs
for checking altitude, and my two passengers were weighed in. (The FAII
weight rule stated, if passengers were
carried in a record-breaking attempt,
they must each weigh a minimum of

65.7 kilos. My two didn’t, so we had to
add one kilo of ballast.)
Willing and reliable passengers for
an airplane flight were not easy to find
in 1913, and I had picked mine carefully. Stuart Dodge, a salesman, was the
ebullient type—and a staunch friend in
an hour of need, as subsequent events
would prove. Arthur Knapp, a San
Francisco Chronicle reporter, was quiet
and studious. He had almost fanatical
interest in flying and an unswerving
belief in its future.
At 10 a.m., the three of us climbed into
the plane. My sole navigation device was
a tiny shoelace, tied at one end to a
crosswire in front of me. This served as
an astro and bank indicator; also, as long
as it stayed straight back in flight, I
would know that the plane was not
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side-slipping or stalling. Finally, I took
aboard my secret weapon—a gallon
demijohn of water—as a precaution
against the leaky radiator of the HallScott engine. A float gauge in the radiator would give a warning of a leak, and
a piece of garden hose that ran from
radiator to cockpit, ending in a tin
funnel, would enable me to replenish
from the jug any water that escaped.
The flight started at 10:19 a.m. Conditions were ideal: summer fogs had
largely disappeared, and clouds were
light, although a few
film-like banks were rolling in from the ocean. A
square-rigger, reminiscent of an earlier era,
was coming through the
Golden Gate. I gunned
ed
the engine, and we lifted
fte
off about 50 feet above
b
the water. I did no
not intend to try for altitude
al
until some of the gas
g and
oil had been expended,
p
making the plane lighter.
l
The monotonous
o
rounds of the
markers commenced.
ce The western
turning point was a buoy
oy m
marking Anita
Rock. Official observer Guyy T. Sl
Slaughter, president of the Pacific Aero Club,
had been rowed across to the rock
by friends. Our eastern marker was the
No. 2 shoal buoy just off Alcatraz. The
other observer, Jack Irvine, watched
from a launch.
Near Alcatraz, a small fog bank developed, unfortunately right between the

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official markers. I had to steer a slightly
devious course, but we always managed to come out in the general vicinity
of the turning points.
On one of the circuits, the fog around
us seemed even denser than usual—
and suddenly a ferry boat loomed dead
ahead. I couldn’t climb over her in the
short distance remaining, so I threw the
plane into a steep bank and made the
fastest turn I had ever made, either
before or since. The plane’s tail missed
the smokestack by inches; our backs
were washed with the
hat of passengers.
From then on, low
flying lost its appeal.
We started to climb for
the altitude record. We
were about 200 feet
above the fog in bright
sunshine. I wiped the
perspiration from my
face and began to
breathe more easily. The
engine was running
beautifully. The blue
water of the bay sparkled below. Flying
was never more enjoyable.
After a bit, though, I felt some warm
drops of something on my face. It was
oil! I looked closely at the engine to see
if the trouble was visible. Indeed, it was.
The
he lleak, a big one, was in plain sight.
Even w
with the six-gallon reserve oil I
had along
on for just such an emergency,
our remaining
m
minutes in the air were
numbered.
er
I thought record-breaking
was for others; I was a failure.

The Day We Made Flying History
At that moment, Stuart Dodge, sitting
in the rear seat, leaned over and tapped
me on the shoulder. “What can I do to
help?” he asked. “Nothing. We’re
licked,” I called back to him. “Unless
you want to climb out from and hold
your finger over the leak.” Stuart looked
at the water of the bay some 700 feet
below, at the engine mounted in the
wide open cockpit space in front. He
gulped once or twice, then made himself heard over the roar of the motor.
“I’m your boy,” he shouted. “I’ll try it.”
Carefully, he crawled over my seat
and past me. Arching to avoid the rudder control bar, he squirmed alongside
the engine and placed a finger over the
largest part of the leak, reducing the
flow considerably.
With the propeller roaring dangerously close on one side, his position
was cramped and fiendishly uncomfortable; he was exposed to a full
blast of the wind, oil, and exhaust
fumes over his face and shoulders.
But he stuck it out.
Now Stuart undoubtedly had the
most dangerous job on the flight, but I
wasn’t exactly idle. Between flying the
plane, watching the barographs, using
the secret weapon, and fiddling constantly with the emergency oil feed, I
had no time to be bored. Nor did Arthur
Knapp, crouching behind me to offer
the least possible wind resistance.
Finally, we could stand no more.
All of us were drenched with oil;
Stuart was blue with cold; the secret
weapon was empty; there were only a

few pints left in the reserve oil tank. I
landed and taxied across the bay to
beach the hydro.
The officials were all smiles. To our
amazement, they informed us that we
had broken not one, but three records.
On that September day, I became
the proud possessor, for pilot and two
passengers, of the official American
hydro-aeroplane duration record of
one hour, 15 minutes, and 35 seconds,
the altitude record of 75,000 feet, and
the distance record of 53.9 kms.
Passengers, pilot, ballast, fuel, oil,
and float weight added up to a total of
397 kilos. Today, 58 years later, despite
all the improvements in the art, I know
of no one who has flown with a greater
weight with only 60 horsepower.
And as I read about our historic
moon rockets and the giant thrusts that
send them on their 3,82,500-km journey to the moon, I like to think that our
flight over San Francisco Bay was one
small, hesitating step toward man’s
conquest of space.
Note: Adolph Sutro left aviation shortly
after his record-breaking flight, and had
a successful career in the real estate
business in California. At the time this
story—which won the Reader’s Digest
First Person Award for outstanding and
unusual true story and personal experience—was first published, Sutro had
retired and lived on the Portuguese
island of Madeira with two dogs, five
cats, one crippled duck and a pet spider
named Pilota II.
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NOVEMBER 1985

MARILYN:
The real Marilyn Monroe was nobody you’d
look at twice—unless she wanted you to

E

VERY DAY, tourists swarm
over the forecourt of Mann’s
Chinese Theatre (formerly
Grauman’s) in Los Angeles,
looking in awe at the handprints, footprints and signatures of
the movie stars of the past. In the centre, on a golden coloured block, are
the imprints Marilyn Monroe made on
26 June 1953. You never have to wonder
where her square is, because that’s the
one with the crowds.
Many of those peering at Marilyn’s
footprints, or trying to fit their fingers
into the concavities of hers, are adolescent girls. What’s eerie is that some
resemble, in posture, clothes and even

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voice, Marilyn herself. It’s a look inspired
by pop singer Madonna, whose recent
video hit Material Girll was modelled on
Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Marilyn haunts us in a way few performers ever have. She appeared in
only 28 films and starred in 16—several of them classics: The Seven Year Itch,
Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot,
t The Misfits.
Director John Huston always spoke of her
as if she were some mysterious force of
nature—“like a fog bank that starts building up at dusk with the turn of the tide.”
I first met Marilyn Monroe in 1953 at
a dinner honouring Walter Winchell. He
was flanked on the dais by 20th Century
Fox production boss Darryl Zanuck and

photo: alamy

by Maurice Zolotow

Reader ’s Digest

Marilyn Monroe arriving at the
Ciro’s Nighclub, for an event
celebrating screenwriter
Louella Parsons.
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33

Born Norma Jeane Baker, Monroe lived her
early years in foster homes and orphanages.

an expressionless mannequin costumed
in a skin-tight, emerald-green-sequinned
gown, thick makeup and false eyelashes.
Here was another studio manufactured puppet,
t I thought. But then I was
introduced to her. In her eyes was a
look of vulnerability, of innocence, of
sheer terror. The contradiction between
what she looked like and who she was
inside gripped my imagination. As a
writer, I would follow her rising star
for six long years, trying to unravel her
many mysteries.
I once asked director George Cukor
what he thought was the source of
Marilyn Monroe’s power, and he said :
“It certainly wasn’t her body, because
there were many women just as beautiful. It came from her eyes and from the
way she looked at you.” Another of her

34
4 april 2024

directors, Billy Wilde, disagreed. “No, it
was her ear for dialogue,” he explained.
By the time Wilder directed her in The
Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe had the
best comedy delivery of any actress he
had ever worked with.
She could impart a unique tone of
sweet naiveté to the most suggestive
lines and make them sound amusing,
droll and tender all at once. But it was
poet Delmore Schwartz who expressed
better than any other observer the purity of Marilyn’s art. “She can be understood,” he wrote, “only from one point
of view, that of beauty which is its own
excuse for being. Her poise and carriage
have a true innocence.” She was never
vulgar, never obscene.
In The Seven Year Itch, she starred
with veteran actor Tom Ewell. Ewell
played a New York publishing executive
whose family has gone to the country for
the summer. Marilyn has subleased an
apartment in the same brownstone.
It’s a very hot summer, but Ewell has
air conditioning. He invites her in to
cool off. In one scene, Ewell and Marilyn
pick out a clumsy duet on the piano.
Ewell has been fantasizing about playing love scenes with Marilyn, and suddenly he gets carried away and plants an
awkward kiss on her lips. They lose their
balance and fall on the floor together.
Ewell is ashamed, contrite. “Nothing
like this ever happened to me before,” he
says. “Oh,” Marilyn replies airily, “happens to me all the time.”
She could be very witty. After she
sang for 10,000 Marines at Camp

photo: alamy

Reader ’s Digest

Marilyn: Her Magic Lingers On
Pendleton, California, a voice called out,
“Hey, Marilyn, what do you think of the
sweater girls?”
“I don’t know why you guys are so
excited about sweater girls,” she replied
with breathy inflection and perfect timing. “Take away their sweaters and what
have they got?”
The Leathernecks screamed, they
whistled, they stomped—they wouldn’t
let Marilyn off the stage.
Many people believed that gag writers
invented Marilyn’s jokes for her, but she
said these things spontaneously. Some
of her clever lines in films were partly
hers and partly the screenwriters’, but
she always made them her own.
She had such a wonderful smile, such
a grin, such a joyous peal of laughter. She
seemed at times to be bursting with joie
de vivre. And she had a love affair with
the camera like nobody before or since.
Earl Theisen, a Look magazine photographer, told me that in his viewfinder he could almost see her blossom, like
the petals of a flower opening in timelapse photography. But the power of her
beauty was a consciously willed act.
The real Marilyn was nobody you’d
look at twice—unless she wanted you
to. In private life, she liked going around
without any makeup—not even lipstick—and wearing jeans and loafers.
Once, we were together in Manhattan,
and I started to flag a taxi.
“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “Let’s walk.”
“Marilyn, the fans will pester you to
death,” I said.
Grinning like a mischievous tomboy,

she clasped my hand as if we were a
couple of teenagers. She was wearing
sandals, a man’s white shirt with the
tail out, tennis shorts, and a scarf covering her head. No dark glasses. “When I
don’t make believe I’m a star, they don’t
see me. They never know me unless I
want them to.”
We passed Sardi’s—with its usual
cluster of paparazzi and autograph
seekers. Nobody spotted her. At a
Chock Full O’ Nuts , she snacked unnoticed on a cream cheese and raisinbread sandwich. We sauntered past
Sixth, Fifth, Madison Park, and finally
went to her suite at the Waldorf Towers.
The most publicized face and body in
the world. Unrecognized.
One aspect of Marilyn’s genius was
that she always looked more powerful
on the screen than she did while playing the scene on the set. Dame Sybil
Thorndike, the dowager queen in The
Prince and the Showgirl, told me that
she’d see Marilyn doing a scene that
seemed terribly flat on the set, and then
she’d see the daily rushes and, suddenly, there was power radiating from
the screen. She studied prints of all
Marilyn’s films and tried to figure out
her secret techniques. She never did discover them. Nor has anybody else.
Then how explain the immortality of
this woman who was so often ridiculed by
critics and peers, a star who had to struggle for the right to play serious parts and
work with sensitive directors? She succeeded against all odds, I’m convinced,
because she came from a background of
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35

Reader ’s Digest
deprivation and sorrow, and
she had nobody but herself.
Born on 1 June 1926, Norma
Jeane Baker, an illegitimate
child, lived in foster homes
and an orphanage most of her
early years and had to work
long and hard to become
Marilyn Monroe.
On the set, the time she
needed to bloom drove her
co-stars and directors crazy.
Movie actors are trained to
get into a scene—often shot
out of sequence with a previous scene—when they hear
the word “Action”. Marilyn couldn’t. Billy
Wilder told me that she got better as she
did more and more takes—while others
playing in her scenes became wearier. It
was how her machinery worked.
She sometimes seemed to take forever to perform even the simplest acts
of everyday life. Bawled out by the studio head for her chronic lateness (each
day of cancelled shooting cost the studio about $18,000 at that time), Marilyn
pouted and replied seriously, “Why, Mr.
Zanuck, it’s not me that’s late—it’s the
others who are early.” Zanuck almost
swallowed his cigar.
When I was around Marilyn for any
length of time, her mysterious charm
conquered me, and I would unconsciously move into her realm of timelessness. At such moments, she could be
simultaneously a homeless waif and a
femme fatale. I remember this side of her
on a hot July afternoon in Manhattan. I

36
6 april 2024

Monroe and fellow Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes actor Jane Russell set their
handprints in the forecourt of Grauman’s
Chinese Theatre on Hollwood Boulevard.

arrived at her apartment for an interview
at precisely 3:30 p.m. I buzzed. I stood
outside and waited—and sweated. Two
hours later, the elevator door opened and
out stepped Marilyn. She fumbled for her
keys and then opened the door.
Inside, she sat on the living room hassock painting her toenails, while I made
notes. “It’s awful hot,” she remarked.
“Why don’t we talk in the bedroom? It’s
air-conditioned.”
I began to feel like Ewell in The Seven
Year Itch. Marilyn sprawled across the
bed. I sat on a chair. She had turned the
air conditioner on too high, but as we
talked, the room seemed to grow hotter, and my mind wandered. Above the
bed hung a large portrait of Abraham
Lincoln. The Great Emancipator was

Marilyn: Her Magic Lingers On

Monroe embodied the American Dream:
Anyone could make it, if they worked hard.

photo: alamy x 2

Marilyn’s hero. The photograph showed
a young, intense, spiritual Lincoln, with
large, serious eyes. He seemed to be glaring at me. I got my wandering mind back
on the interview!
The look I had seen in Marilyn’s eyes
when we first met in 1953 was still there
when I saw her for the last time, a few
weeks before her death from an overdose
of sleeping pills in 1962.
What struck me most was how thin
she was. There had been a lot of sadness
in her life. Two marriages had failed—
to baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio
and Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright

Arthur Miller. And,
despite corrective surgery, she had been unable to bear children.
Yet, when we chatted, she became her
old bubbling self. She
told me she was decorating a guest room
in her new house, and
her first guest would be
Carl Sandburg, Abraham
Lincoln’s biographer.
We kissed goodbye—a
kiss Lincoln would have
approved. I felt no foreshadowing of doom.
Sometime between Saturday night
and Sunday morning, 6 August 1962,
we lost her. For a time, she had embodied the American dream that any man
or woman—from whatever rank in society,with whatever handicaps of poverty
and social dislocation—can rise to the
heights if willing to work hard.
Perhaps it is this to which the starryeyed girls outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre
are paying tribute. She belongs to those
young girls of 1985 just as she belongs to
all of us who, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, responded to her luminous presence.
As long as her films can still be seen,
Marilyn lives.

Do the Math
One woman to another: “We aren’t going out much anymore.
All our friends are either multiplying or dividing.”
SUE MCBEE IN AMERICAN, RD AUGUST 1963

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37

Reader ’s Digest
ALL IN

A Day’s Work
1950s
A DOCTOR, PICKING UP his car
at a garage, was highly indignant at
the size of the repair bill. “All this for
a few hours’ work!” he yelped. “Why,
you charge more for your work than
we of the medical profession do!”
“Well, now,” drawled the mechanic, “the way I look at it, we got it
coming to us. You guys been working
on the same old model since time
began, but we gotta learn a brand
new model every year.”
—IRENE GIBBERD, APRIL 1950

A BUSINESSMAN WAS concluding
an interview with a glamorous-lookk
ing young lady whom he’d just hired
as his secretary. “I’m sure you can
handle the work very capably,” he
said. “But there is one other thing:
Have you got an old passport photo
I could show my wife?”
—THE CALIFORNIA PLASTERER, FEBRUARY 1951

1960s
I WAS TYPING LETTERS informing
customers who were delinquent in
making their mortgage payments that,
unless the overdue payments were received within a week, their property

38 april 2024

would be foreclosed. I’m so glad
I proofread my work. At the end
of one letter I had closed with:
“Very truly ours.”
—MARCIA L. KELLER, APRIL 1966

1970s
Caught in Passing (AUGUST 1971)
Secretary to secretary: “We call
him the office locomotive. All he
does is run back and forth, smoke
and whistle.”
—MARK BELTAIRC IN DETROIT FREE PRESS

Office receptionist: “He’s busy right
now. Could you call back in a couple
of innings?”
— QUIN RYAN IN CHICAGO TRIBUNE

1980s
FOR MANY YEARS, I WAS a university theatre director. My wife was once
asked by one of her clients about
her plans for the coming weekend.
“I think I’m going to watch my husband’s play,” she replied. “Oh,” the
client said. “How many do you have?”
—ROBERT PUTNAM, FEBRUARY 1984

EARLY IN MY CAREER as a doctor,
I went to see a patient who was coming out of anaesthesia. Far off church

chimes sounded. “I must be in
heaven,” the woman murmured.
Then she saw me. “No, I can’t be,”
she said. “There’s Dr Campbell.”
—LENORE D. CAMPBELL, M.D., APRIL 1985

1990s
AS A REAL-ESTATE AGENT, I often
advise my clients how to make their
houses more marketable. Two weeks
after suggesting that one client do
some repairs, I received a call from
him. “I fixed the leaking roof, replaced
the gutters and painted inside and
out,” he told me. “Good,” I replied.
“Are you ready to sell your house?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“Now I have no reason to move.”
—JACKIE FOSTER, AUGUST 1992

that a
watermelon is ripe if you get a hollow
sound when you knock on it. Having
picked out a melon, I was thumping
away, focussing on the nature of the
sound. A salesman passed by, saying,
“Nobody home?”
— ANGIE SPITZIG, JUNE 1993

A FRIEND’S DAUGHTER works in a
large bookstore and is often amused
by the combinations of books customers choose. She found it particularly
funny when a woman approached the
checkout counter with two bestsellers.
The first was titled Conversations With
God. The second? How to Argue and
Win Every Time.
—DAVID J . SILVESTER, JANUARY 1998

2000s
THE COMPANY I USED to work for
was located in a large building with a
lot of meeting rooms; each of which
was named after a different bird.
There was Sparrow and Swallow on
the first floor, Hawk and Harrier on
the second and so on. When the company introduced its ‘no smoking’ policy, a small area was erected outside
the back door to provide a place for
employees to light up. After a few
days, an unofficial name plate appeared on its door. It read ‘Puffin’.
—JOHN HARRISON, JANUARY 2002

A JOURNALIST HAD BEEN trying
for months to get an interview with
Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto
Ltd which advertises its products with
the slogan “You just can’t beat Bajaj.”
But all his attempts for an appointment failed as Bajaj’s secretaries put
him off on one pretext or another.
Any other person would probably
have given up, but not this journalist.
He designed a greeting card and sent
it to Bajaj with the message: “You just
can’t meet a Bajaj.” The journalist got
his interview the following week.
—SURESH HARIHARAN, MAY 2003

I THOUGHT I WANTED a tattoo,
so I had a friend come with me to
the tattoo parlour. As I nervously
paused outside the door, I noticed
the ‘T’ had slipped off their sign.
Now it read “Creative ouch.”
—KAREN BLOUNT, JUNE 2003

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d ig
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Reader ’s Digest

40 april 2024

JUNE 2014

COMMANDO

TATTOO
Ganesh Dhangde was just six years old when he got lost.
Twenty years later, his mother had a visitor

PHOTO GR APH ED BY MAN GESH S. AM BRE

by Deven Kanal

JUST BEFORE NOON, as six-year-old Ganesh Dhangde
got ready for school one day—it was the early 1990s—
his mother Manda cradled her other child, one-year-old
Ramesh. Her husband, a construction worker, had died
recently and Manda’s income as a domestic help in several nearby middle-class homes in the town of Thane,
just outside of Mumbai, was the family’s sole means of
livelihood. Ganesh walked down the Mama-Bhanje hillock on which their home stood in a shantytown amid
innumerable similar dwellings. On his way, Ganesh was
joined by Kharavi, his second-standard classmate. The
kids soon ran into a teenager who Kharavi knew.
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41

Reader ’s Digest
“Where to?” the older boy asked.
Victoria Terminus.) After a while, he
“School,” Kharavi replied.
followed the crowd out onto the street.
“Come with me. Let’s do some sight- The roads and buildings were bigger
seeing,” said the teenager. “We’ll be than he had ever imagined. The din of
back by evening.”
vehicles was disorientating.
“Let’s go,” Ganesh said trustingly,
One of these roads must lead me
excited at the thought of playing truant home, he thought desperately and
for a change.
walked till his feet hurt. The sun had
They soon reached the nearby Thane begun to set when Ganesh came across
railway station and took a commuter a mandap, a temporary shrine, with
train, alighting at a station after a while. a queue in front of it, receiving prasad.
“Wait here,” the teenager told Ganesh quickly joined the line and
Ganesh, pointing to
soon got some of it
a bench. “We’ll go
to eat. He then took
Manda then went
get something to
refuge at a corner
eat.” When the two
of the mandap and
around the
didn’t return for
fell asleep.
neighbourhood,
a long time, Ganesh
asking
if
anyone
nervously searched
MEANWHILE,
had seen Ganesh.
the station. He
Manda, having
wandered outside,
returned from
Nobody had.
looked in the street
h e r l o n g d a y ’s
and returned to the
work, stared outbench. He wanted to ask for help, but side, wondering where Ganesh was.
was too scared of strangers. Just then, Kharavi and the older boy didn’t
a train arrived.
return too—so no one knew what
Maybe this will take me home, had happened. One by one, her
Ganesh thought, and climbed aboard. neighbours began to switch on their
As the crowded train sped along, lights and kerosene lamps, bathing
he stared out hoping to locate his the Thane hill in a soft yellow glow.
neighbourhood. Nothing seemed Manda then went around the neighfamiliar. Tired and hungry, Ganesh bourhood, asking if anyone had seen
drifted off to sleep.
Ganesh. Nobody had. It was too late
When he awoke, the train had halted, to check at his school.
the compartment empty. He got off
Terrified, she gathered some
and looked around the huge railway relatives and went to the local police,
terminus, which had at least a half who promised to look into it. She
a dozen crowded platforms. (Ganesh returned home to spend the first of
didn’t know this was Mumbai’s her innumerable sleep-starved nights.

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2 april 2024

The Commando with the Tattoo
She held baby Ramesh close, praying
for Ganesh to return.

WHEN GANESH awoke the next
morning, he looked around, confused. With a horrible clarity he soon
remembered what had happened the
previous day. He wandered around,
sleeping on footpaths and railway
benches and eating whatever leftovers he could get from roadside
eateries. It must have been on the
third day that, exhausted by the heat,
Ganesh was sitting under a bridge
near a beach with some huts nearby.
He began to cry.
Just then, a woman, who was with
a boy about his own age, stopped and
asked Ganesh, “What’s your name?
Where are you from?”
“From Mama-Bhanje,” he sniffled.
“My name is Ganesh.”
Not knowing where that was, the
woman took Ganesh with her. “You can
stay with us,” the little boy urged
Ganesh. “I’m Sainath.” Ganesh wanted
to refuse, but had no choice.
Ganesh followed them to their
beachside hut, where he met Sainath’s
father, a fisherman, who took him in.
As the months passed, they even began
taking him on fishing trips. Ganesh
began adjusting to the new life. When
the fishing season ended, Ganesh
was told to go with Sainath and earn
some money.
Sainath, clutching an old broom and
a rag, took Ganesh to a railway station.
The kids boarded a city train and

Sainath began cleaning compartment
floors. After that commuters dropped
some coins in his outstretched hands.
Soon Ganesh was doing the same. As
the months rolled by nothing could
ease the pain Ganesh felt when he
remembered his real family. Is my
mother still looking for me?? Ganesh
would stare at a tattoo on the inner side
of his right elbow, done when he was
a baby—not an uncommon practice in
some Maharashtrian neighbourhoods.
His tattoo read ‘Manda R. Dhangde’ in
Marathi. It was the only link he had
left with his family.
One day, Ganesh was crossing the
road near the hut when a speeding car
came out of nowhere. Then it was all
dark for him. When he awoke, he was
in a government hospital bed. Sainath’s
parents came to visit him a couple of
times, but after the doctors asked them
a few questions, Ganesh heard them
say that he was not their son. Ganesh
never saw Sainath or his parents again.
He remained in the hospital for over a
month, recuperating from his head injuries. When he recovered, hospital
authorities sent him to the Thelma
J. R. D. Tata Anand Kendra Trust orphanage in Mumbai’s Worli area. Soon
Ganesh was enrolled in the first standard again in the local Love Grove Municipal School. For the next few years,
in addition to his studies, Ganesh learnt
to weave bedcovers from yarn and did
odd jobs which even earned him some
cash, which he’d spend on snacks in the
school canteen. By the sixth standard,
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Reader ’s Digest
Ganesh began doing well in the school’s
athletic events. Soon he was in the
kho-kho team with much bigger boys.
With all his running and playing, he
grew big and strong. He loved sports
and never missed practice.

BACK AT MAMA-BHANJE, Manda
had kept up the search for her son.
It had been six years. Manda visited
the police station countless times, but
they never had anything to report.
She visited several children’s homes,
hospitals and police stations all over
the surrounding areas. She even
wondered whether her son was kidnapped, and if so, what he must now
be doing. Tens of thousands of children are lost every year in India, many
never to be found again. Eventually,
Manda’s relatives convinced her to get
remarried, hoping it would bring her
some consolation. Manda agreed.
Meanwhile, one day during kho-kho
practice, a PT teacher from another
school who was impressed with
Ganesh, told him about Krida Prabodhini, a state-level government program that housed and trained young
athletes. He soon excelled in many
sprint events and qualified. Ganesh
and his peers were sent to sports hostels at various facilities of India. Ganesh
got Thane, but had no idea how close
he now was to his mother.
Studying in standard seven at a Thane
school, he continued his promising career as an athlete. In 2006, he won the
gold medal for pole vault at the national

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4 april 2024

school games. Even though things were
now going well for Ganesh, the teenager
felt rudderless. Surendra Modi, his
coach, gave him some direction.
“Son,” he said, “how long are you just
going to be an athlete? You need to find
a job.” Surendra advised the lean, wellbuilt Ganesh to join the police. After
some thought, Ganesh agreed and
cleared the recruitment tests easily.
After his training, Ganesh was inducted
as a constable into the police force in
Thane. He spent the next couple of
years doing VIP guard duty, transferring
prisoners or quelling minor disturbances. Then, one morning early last
year, Ganesh noticed a crowd of young
men on the police grounds. They were
all aspirants to the elite Quick Response
police commando team. He spoke to
them and got interested.
Ganesh took the preliminary test,
where they needed to run five kilometres in under 25 minutes. Ganesh
finished in 22, coming third. Next, he
and other prospective candidates were
sent to an army base for two months’
training, after which Ganesh and a few
other successful candidates reported
to a new commando unit.
On Ganesh’s first day in the Quick
Response Team, his chief, Inspector
Shrikant Sonde, moved through his
new charges, who had all brought family members along. For Sonde, this was
an annual ritual—learning all about his
‘new kids’ and their backgrounds—so
that he could help them out, if necessary, and keep them as stress-free and

The Commando with the Tattoo
clue there—until Ganesh met Shamready to focus on their tough jobs.
“Young man, tell me about yourself,” suddhin Abdul Shaikh, the elderly cook
whom they called Anna. He rememSonde said to Ganesh.
bered something.
“Ganesh Dhangde, sir.”
“Long ago when you were first
“What about your family?”
“I know nothing about my family, brought here,” Anna recalled, “the docsir,” Ganesh said hesitantly, explaining tors said that right after your accident
his peculiar situation and revealed the you were repeatedly saying ‘mama-bhanje’. ”
tattoo on his arm.
Although that meant ‘uncle-nephew’
Moved by Ganesh’s story, his life at
the orphanage and his sports record, in Hindi, neither Anna nor the others
and impressed by the fact that he was had any idea what that signified.
one of the chosen few who made it to Now, even Ganesh had forgotten that
his team despite his underprivileged term. When he relayed that information
to his boss, Sonde
background, Sonde
did some reckoning.
became interested.
There are several
He couldn’t have
He examined the
been saying nephew,
tattoo. “We’ll help
spots called MamaSonde thought. A
you find your famBhanje all over
six-year-old Maraily,” he said.
India,
mostly
thi-speaking kid
Sonde instructed
dargahs, burial sites
would say mahis team to look for
ma-bhacha, not the
that family name on
of Muslim holy men.
Hindi mama-bhanje.
online social net“I think it could
works. They were at
it for almost a month, but that didn’t be the name of a place,” Sonde told
work—a surname like that is common Ganesh. There are several spots called
in Maharashtra. Ganesh enlisted the Mama-Bhanje all over India, mostly
help of fellow constable Sumit Gandh- dargahs, burial sites of Muslim holy
wale and together, they scoured miss- men. But it didn’t take long for Sonde’s
ing persons records at police stations men to find one such dargah in their
all over Mumbai and searched the in- district itself—in the Indira Nagar hillocks in Thane. That was only a 20-minternet, but their efforts were futile.
“Why don’t you go back to the ute drive away from his hostel!
On 4 October 2013, Ganesh, accomorphanage in Worli?” Sonde told
Ganesh, hoping something there panied by Sumit and two other policewould jog his memory. In September men friends, went to Indira Nagar. Sudlast year, Ganesh visited the old or- denly, everything seemed familiar to
phanage with Sumit. They found no Ganesh. The hutments, the masjid, an
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45

old black water tank. It was like some
long-forgotten dream.
I used to walk here as a child.
Even so, finding his family among the
thousands living on the vast hillside
looked daunting—if they’re still here.
They searched for a couple of hours.
But no one seemed to know any Manda
Dhangde. As they climbed the hill, they
spoke to an old man.
“Any Manda in this area?”
Ganesh persisted.
“Yes,” the old man said. “I don’t know
their houses, but there are two or three
women with that name.”
Ganesh’s spirits rose. They soon

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6 april 2024

came across a group of women and a
young girl chatting in one of the lanes.
“Does anyone know Manda
Dhangde?” Ganesh asked.
The girl nodded. She gestured for
Ganesh and his friends to follow her
and led them up to a hut. Its door was
a faded blue and covered with an assortment of stickers of cartoon characters—a sign that there were kids here.
Ganesh peeked inside. A few adults
were sitting on brown plastic chairs.
They were observing shraadh, the ceremony held in memory of family members who had departed. A few children
sat on a large bed. A woman was

P HOTO GRA PHED BY MANGESH S. AMBRE

Reunited with Manda. “I want to take care of her now,” says Ganesh.

Reader ’s Digest
moving among them, distributing food.
“Is there any Manda Dhangde here?”
Ganesh asked, his voice quivering.
“Yes,” he heard.
“We’re from the police,” Ganesh said.
“We need some information.”
Another woman emerged. She was
thin and small, with sunken cheeks.
Grey streaks running through her hair.
“I am Manda. How can I help you?”
“How many people live in your
house?” Ganesh asked.
“My two sons, two daughters and
me,” she said.
So the others present were relatives.
“Did you have another boy?”
“I did,” she confirmed sadly. “His
name was Ganesh. He was lost when
he was a little boy. It’s been 20 years.”
“How would you recognize your son?”
asked Ganesh. The question startled her.
“My full name was tattooed on his arm,”
the woman said. “Manda R. Dhangde.”
Now, Ganesh didn’t dare speak, but
showed her the tattoo. Mother and son
embraced, crying for a long time. Finally,
Manda took Ganesh inside to meet his
stunned but overjoyed family.

“Ramesh,” Manda told a tall, lean
21-year-old standing by, “your brother
has returned.”
Ganesh learnt that Manda, by now
widowed once again, had three more
children: Vanita, 18, Hrithik, 13, and
Vandana, 12, was the girl who had
brought them up the hill to her home!
Coincidentally on a day dedicated to
those who had left them.

SOON AFTER
R the reunion in October
last year, Anna, the old cook with the
sharp memory, passed away—he had
lived just long enough to become a key
link in this story. Ganesh has moved
back to his Mama-Bhanje home, eager
to make up for two lost decades. Back in
the old environs, his childhood memories too returned. He also learnt that his
classmate Kharavi and the teenager who
took the boys on that train were never
seen again. “I want to take care of my
mother now,” Ganesh says. “I must educate my brothers and sisters and give
them a good future. My life has been full
of unusual experiences. I’m just happy
I finally have a family.”

NOVEL SOLUTIONS
The St. Louis Police Academy bought 180 dictionaries in an effort to improve the
language and spelling used by police officers. “I hope never again to read in a report
that an accident victim had his foot decapitated,” said Police Chief Eugene J. Camp.
—UPI, JUNE 1972

When two feuding Sikh Factions lined up, swords in hand, to fight it out, a social worker
persuaded them to settle their differences peacefully. But Sikh honour demanded
that blood be spilled, so the blood bank was called and each man donated a pint.
— H I N D U S TA N T I M E S , D E L H I , M AY 1 9 7 8

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47

JUNE 1977

R
E
D
R
MU
BY THE BOOK

More widely read than any other
English writer, she baffled the world with
masterly tales of murder and remained
something of a mystery herself

by Virginia Kelly

48 april 2024

ILLUSTRATIO N: SIDDHAN T JU MDE

Reader ’s Digest
nnoisseurs of dely turned the pages
special and appreNot only was it the
ie book to be pubentitled Sleeping
re rumours that in
Miss Marple, one of
er sleuths ever creer match and die.
Happily, as critics noted with relief,
this particular Agatha Christie trail—like
so many others, ingeniously woven into
her plot—proved false. The author who
in Curtain, hadn’t hesitated to kill off her
similarly renowned detective, Hercule
Poirot, allowed Miss Marple to surmount all perils, alive and triumphant.
The Times critic, H. R. F. Keating,
gladly recorded Miss Marple’s survival
and enthused: “It’s vintage Christie,
marvellously easy reading, constantly
intriguing. How does she do it? Timing.
Unerring timing.” But Agatha Christie
remained modest about her achievements. She even played down her prodigious output, once calling herself
“a sausage machine”.
By the time of her death, a year ago,
last January, at the age of 85, the high
priestess of detective fiction had 110
titles to her credit—66 of them fulllength murder mysteries—with estimated sales of more than 350 million
copies. She has been translated into 157
languages, 63 more than Shakespeare.
Her stories have inspired 15 films,
and 17 of her plays have been staged.
The Mousetrap is the world’s longest

running play, having opened in London
24 years ago; it is still going strong. Curr
tain was heading bestseller lists on both
sides of the Atlantic the week she died.
In all, Agatha Christie earned an
estimated `15 crore from her detective
stories. She reputedly made more
money than any writer in the English
language. She may well have made
more money than any writer in history.
Before Sleeping Murderr was published,
the American paperback rights were
sold for an unprecedented `75 lakhs.
Born Agatha Miller in Torquay,
Devon, she grew up in a well-to-do
home with an American father and an
English mother who took the unconventional view that schooling was hard
on a child’s eyes and brain.
Her parents tutored her, and she
read a lot, especially romantic novels,
and The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes—an influence on her subsequent writings, as she freely admitted.
One day, when she was ill, her mother
suggested that she while away the time
by trying to write a short story. That
started her on a series of tales of “unrelieved gloom, in which most of the
characters died.”

Murder is Announced
In 1915, during the First World
War, her eldest sister bet her that she
couldn’t write “a good detective story.”
She accepted the challenge.
By then, Agatha was married to
Archibald Christie, a Royal Flying
Corps officer, and working as a Red
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49
49

Reader ’s Digest
Cross volunteer in a Torquay hospital.
Belgian refugees were billeted around
town, and from observing them, she
evolved the prototype of Hercule
Poirot, with his egg-shaped head,
waxed moustache and shiny patent
shoes. He came up with a solution in
Dame Agatha’s first detective novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
For three years, The Mysterious Affair
at Styless was turned down by one publisher after another. Finally, it appeared
in 1920, sold fewer than 2,500 copies and
earned her £25. It was not until her sevv
enth book, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
d
was published in 1926, that Agatha
Christie became famous. At the time, she

and her husband and daughter, Roseland, were living in Berkshire. Not long
after, her comfortable life started coming
apart. Her mother died, and her husband fell in love with another woman.
Agatha simply vanished. Her abandoned car was found in a local country
lane, and for 10 days, thousands of
policemen and volunteers combed the
nation for her. Following a telephone
tip, the police found her in a hotel at
Harrogate, registered inexplicably under the name of the woman her husband was later to marry. The story
made headlines, and some cynics
called it a publicity stunt to plug The
Murder of RogerAckroyd.
Although it was confirmed
that she had been suffering
from amnesia, Agatha Christie remained uptight about
her disappearance for the
rest of her life. However, it
had made her name known
throughout the land. The
book eventually sold more
than a million copies.
Two years later, she divorced Colonel Christie, but
kept his name for her crime
stories. In 1930, she married
Max Mallowan, an eminent
archaeologist who was
knighted in 1968. For years,
she accompanied him on
digs in the Middle East, helpChristie wrote her first book in
1920, and made only £25 off it.

50 april 2024

Agatha Christie: Murder by the Book
ing him photograph and tabulate artefacts. In a book written under the name
Agatha Christie Mallowan, Come Tell Me
How You Live, she gave a light-hearted
account of their expeditions. She also
wrote short stories in a book of verse, and
under the name of Mary Westmacott,
was author of several romantic novels.

PH OTOS: ALA MY

Appointment with Death
But it is as a purveyor of the fine art
of murder for relaxation that Agatha
Christie made her mark. Her books
were painstakingly researched. Her
hospital work gave her first-hand
knowledge of poisons. Her husband’s
archaeological expeditions provided
occasional background material (Murr
der in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile)
and she even set one story—Death
Comes as the End—in Egypt in 2000
BC, doing “endless research on everyday details.” One skeptical reader took
the Orient Express across Europe just
to be sure that Agatha Christie was
right about the train switches in Murr
der on the Orient Express. She was.
The tightly constructed Christie
plot—some were thought out while she
was in the bath, munching apples; others when she was washing up or cookk
ing—earned her the title ‘Queen of the
Maze’. She loved to bamboozle, but
maintained that she never actually misled the reader; she allowed the reader
to mislead himself.
For example, a murder suspect is
asked to verify a date. He crosses the
room and squints at a calendar. The

Many of Agatha Christie’s stories were first
published inThe Strand Magazine, such as
this one from February 1936.

reader is misled into thinking the date he
tells us is relevant, but the clue is that the
suspect is too short-sighted to see across
the room.
Another Christie gimmick is the overthe-shoulder ploy. Someone looks
straight ahead over another person’s
shoulder and is stunned by what he sees.
The scene is described to us in detail, so
we know exactly what people and things
are in the line of vision. The tell-tale clue
is tossed off so casually that we fumble
it in a series of red herrings.
In one of her most ingenious plots,
Dame Agatha made one of the victims
the murderer. Another time, she made
her detective a killer. Such masterly
sleight of hand won her royal approval.
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Reader ’s Digest
When the BBC asked the late Queen
Mary what she wanted for a birthday
programme, she requested a radio play
by Agatha Christie. The author obliged,
then rewrote it as a short story and
finally a full-length play. She called it
The Mousetrap, from the “play within a
play” in Hamlet.

The Midas Touch
Dame Agatha never dreamt the
play would be so successful, but the
royalties which she turned over to her
grandson have made him wealthy. In
fact, she gave away the rights to many
other works while she was still alive,
thereby avoiding omnivorous death
duties and keeping her estate down
to about `15 lakhs when she died.
In later life, she said she wrote only
one book a year, delivered to her
publisher in time to assure the public
‘a Christie for Christmas’, because if
she wrote more, the
greater part of the proff
its would have gone
to the government to
be spent “mostly on
idiotic things.”
A shy, retiring woman
who loved her garden,
Dame Agatha, was described by her literary
agent as “an old-fashioned gentlewoman.” She
moved, as did her murderers, in a world
of large country houses where people
dress for dinner and lament the passing
of good servants, where the silver is

highly polished (to show fingerprints),
and where young girls never walk but
“run lightly” across the lawn, which is
well-manicured (to show footprints).
There are no four-letter words, no
Freudian implications, since sex is confined to a chaste kiss. “I don’t like messy
deaths. I don’t like violence,” Dame
Agatha insisted. Although it was said
that she profited more from murder
than any woman since the Lucrezia
Borgia. “I know nothing about pistols
and revolvers, which is why I usually
kill my characters off with a blunt instrument—or better still, poisons.”
Since she despised characters who
“go around slugging each other just for
the sake of it,” she made the dapper
little Hercule Poirot rely on “the little
grey cells” of his mind to solve his cases.
Poirot—fussy to a fault, supremely
sure of himself, constantly flicking minute specks of dust off his sleeve and
punctuating his sentences with bits of
schoolroom French—is
probably the most famous fictional detective
since Sherlock Holmes.
When Dame Agatha
invented him, she described him as a famous
Belgian sleuth who had
retired before the first
World War. That would
have made him about 120 at his death
in 1975, a literary event which The New
York Times marked by flashing his obituary across the front page.

THE TIGHTLY
CONSTRUCTED
CHRISTIE PLOT
EARNED HER
THE TITLE
‘QUEEN OF
THE MAZE’.

52
2 april 2024

Agatha Christie: Murder by the Book

PH OTO: A LAM Y

St. Martin’s Theatre has been home to Christie’s The Mousetrap since 1974 till date—
making it the longest running play in the world.

Dame Agatha admitted that Poirot’s
popularity surprised her since he wasn’t
“the kind of private eye you’d hire today.” But it is not hard to understand the
universal appeal of Poirot or, for example, of the elderly lady’s sleuth, Miss Jane
Marple, a character inspired by Dame
Agatha’s grandmother and great aunt
who first appeared in 1930, solving
Murder at the Vicarage. They represent
logic in an illogical world. Virtue always
triumphs; villainy is always found out.
The detective story is thus profoundly
moral. Agatha Christie has spun her stories for more than half a century while

teaching a lesson in moral responsibility: “It’s what is in yourself that makes
you happy or unhappy.”
By the time she died, she had lived to
see ‘an Agatha Christie’ become a synonym for a detective story. Tributes to her
poured in from every continent. She was
called a legend, one whose name would
outlive most of her contemporaries, a
magnificent source of entertainment.
Perhaps a tribute that said it best was a
newspaper editorial that ended: “She
gave more pleasure than most other people who have written books.” And that is
no mean achievement.
readersdigest.in

53

MARCH 1990

SUNIL
DUTT
Through many personal tragedies, this
favourite matinee idol finds strength
and solace in helping others
BY V. Gangadhar

54
4 april 2024

image: alamy

Born in Khurd, now
in Pakistan, Sunil Dutt,
fled to India during the
1947 Partition .

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55

Reader ’s Digest

O

n 29 March 1987, the 63rd day of his peace march
from Bombay to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, film star
Sunil Dutt woke up dizzy, nauseous and with a high
fever. But there was no time to lose. Dutt and fellow
marchers had to reach the shrine on 13 April, Baishaki
day. And Amritsar was still more than 300 kilometers away.
Wrapped in a shawl, walking stick
in hand, Dutt forced himself to resume the march. Three hours later,
however, he stopped at a clinic in
Karnal for blood tests. The diagnosis
was jaundice. Dutt’s physician, Satish
Puri, flew in from Bombay and pleaded
with the star to give up his venture.
Although Dutt refused, he did agree
to go on a special diet and rest more
frequently. Thankfully, his fever subsided three days later, and on Baishaki,
watched by a crowd of 35,000, Dutt and
his 80 pilgrims entered the Golden
Temple and worshiped at the holiest
of Sikh shrines.
The 78-day, 2,500-km ordeal was
Dutt’s attempt to focus India’s attention on Punjab’s turmoil. For years, he
had agonized over the blood-letting,
and when the terrorists murdered a
handicapped girl, he could bear it no
more. “We must arouse our people,”
Dutt told family and friends. “Let’s
march to the Golden Temple and
show that we are one nation.”
The police warned Dutt he could
be the terrorist’s target, but he refused
to even wear a bulletproof vest. And
as the group marched through seven

56
6 april 2024

states, public response was heartwarming. Motorists stopped to wish
him luck. Thousands of barefoot villagers walked long distances to catch
a glimpse of him. Dutt held nearly
500 roadside meetings and kept reiterating his theme: “Violence will not
solve our problems.”
The Peace March was yet another
reminder of the unique place Sunil
Dutt occupies in India’s public life.
A matinee idol who has starred in
70-odd films, he is also a devoted
family man, a member of Parliament,
and a tireless social worker. Remarkably resilient, he's recovered from one
personal tragedy after another, only
to return to the aid of others. Clearly,
he’s a celebrity with a conscience.
Born Balraj Dutt on 6 June 1929,
in Khurd, West Punjab, now in Pakistan, Dutt lost his father, a civilian in
the army, when he was only five. His
strong-willed mother, Kulvanti Devi,
single-handedly tended the family
farm and raised Balraj, his brother
and sister, even putting the three
through high school.
Fleeing to India during the 1947 Partition, the Dutts lost everything. “It was

The Many Roles of Sunil Dutt

Actors , Sunil Dutt and Sadhana
in a film still.

image: alamy

horrible,” Dutt recalls. “At a refugee
camp in Ambala, I saw people mourning over a dead body while only a few
metres away, a marriage ceremony was
taking place.” The family was finally allotted a piece of land in the village of
Mandoli, near Ambala, as compensation for property lost.
But Dutt, now 18, wasn’t content to
be a small-time farmer. He wanted to
go to college and support his family in
style. So in 1949, with two kurta pajamas and `25 in his pocket, he moved
to Bombay, enrolled in Jai Hind College, and got a `100-a-month, clerical
job with the Bombay Electric Supply
and Transport. “I lived in a room with
six others,” he remembers. “It was so
small that most nights I slept out in
the pavement.”

Rugged Good Looks
While Dutt was narrating a ballet
in college, his voice attracted the

attention of an advertising firm, which
asked him to interview film stars for a
weekly 15-minute radio show. Dutt
was good at drawing people out and
soon became the host of one more
programme, Filmi Khabrein, based
on news from the studios.
Sensing that Dutt’s rugged good
looks would be a draw at the box office, producer Ramesh Saigal offered
him the lead in his film, Railway
Platform. But at first, Dutt was nervous before the camera, especially
in romantic scenes. A village lad, he
had never mixed freely with girls.
His worst moment came during a
nightclub scene with co-star Sheila
Ramani, who wore a tight blouse and
knee-length trousers. “Get down on
your knees, embrace her legs, and
gaze at her with a lovelorn expression,” ordered Saigal. Trembling, Dutt
bent down, but when he touched her
legs, his hand began to shake.
Furious, Saigal shouted, “Do it
again.” In fact, the scene had to be
shot several times before Dutt got it
right. Deeply embarrassed, he resolved that if he ever directed a film,
he would be more sensitive to his
actors’ feelings.

Happiest of Marriages
Released in 1955, Railway Platform
was only a modest success. But The
Times of India’s review praised Dutt’s
performance, and soon more roles
followed. In 1956, director Mehboob
Khan signed him up for Mother India,
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57

Reader ’s Digest
a saga on Indian womanhood. Dutt
was Birju, the earthy, no-good son
of the film’s heroine, Radha, played
by Nargis, then India’s most popular
actress. During the filming, Dutt became preoccupied with a domestic
problem. His sister needed surgery,
and he did not know any surgeons
in Bombay. One evening on the set,
Dutt was brooding over what to do
when Nargis asked him why he was
looking so miserable. Dutt poured
out his heart to her. When he reached
home late that night, Dutt found
his sister happy and relieved. “Nargis was here,” she told him. “She says
she’ll take me to a good doctor.” Dutt
was overwhelmed.
Mother India, released in 1957, was
shortlisted for an Oscar, and Nargis
won several international awards.
The following year, Nargis and Sunil
were married. She quit the screen
and concentrated on raising a family.
Sanjay, Namrata and Priya arrived in
quick succession, and Dutt’s marriage
turned out to be one of the happiest
in Bombay’s film world.
The Dutts were now comfortably
off. Sunil regularly sent money to his
mother, and she also stayed with him
in Bombay for several months a year.
However, Sunil and Nargis were always conscious that few people were
as fortunate as they.
During the disastrous 1962 SinoIndian War, the Dutts donated
` 1,00,000 to the National Defense
Fund. Dutt also asked Prime Minister

58 april 2024

Nehru if he could serve the country
in any other way. “Why not perform
before the troops?” Nehru suggested.
“It will boost their morale.” The Dutts
readily agreed, and in 1962, founded
Ajanta Arts Welfare Troupe that performed variety shows for the jawans.
They also persuaded Lata Mangeskar,
Talat Mehmood, Mukesh, Rafi, and
Kishore Kumar, and other leading entertainers to join them from time to
time. “We lived in tents in remote areas and often performed in sub-zero
conditions,” says actress Shammi, a
member of Ajanta. “But it was an exhilarating experience.”
Now acknowledged as a major star,
Sunil Dutt began making his own
movies. “I was sick of the masala
films I was starring in and wanted to
experiment with more realistic productions,” he says. One of his earliest ventures, in which he played the
lead, was based on the life of dacoits
in Madhya Pradesh, and won Dutt the
Filmfare Best actor award.
Incidents from Dutt’s life, too, became themes for his films. Once returning home earlier than expected
from a trip to Delhi, Dutt found his
house empty. Although Dutt knew
Nargis and the children were out of
town for a few days, he felt oppressed
by his loneliness. This experience
sparked Yaadein, a one-actor movie
in which Dutt plays a self-obsessed
man who comes home one evening
to find that his wife is not there.
Assuming that she has left him, the

The Many Roles of Sunil Dutt
man is furious. Then, memories of their happy times overwhelm him. Deeply depressed,
he tries to hang himself. But at
that critical moment, she returns and promises never to
leave him. Widely acclaimed,
Yaadein won the Grand Prix
at the 1967 Asian Film Festival.

Dutt, with writerdirector Gulzar.

image:alamy

Financial crisis
As a director, Dutt didn’t forget his resolve to treat young
artists well. “Sunil was easy
to work with,” says actress
Waheeda Rahman. “If you
were nervous, he helped you relax. He never rushed anyone.” Thus
encouraged, some of his discoveries, including Vinod Khanna, Leena
Chandavarkar, Shakti Kapoor and
Ranjeet, became big stars.
Dutt sought high technical standards
too. Spurning studio-made sets, he
filmed on location no matter how diff
ficult the terrain. He spent five months
in late 1969, and early 1970 shooting
Reshma aur Shera in Rajasthan for
some breathtakingly beautiful desert scenes. “Movies like Yaadein and
Reshma were ahead of their time,” says
veteran film journalist, B. K. Karanjia.
Critics acclaimed Dutt’s films, but
shorn of traditional themes, cheap
comedy, and loud music, they failed
at the box office. Dutt lost so much
money on Reshma, ironically chosen as India’s entry for the Oscars,
that in 1972, he suffered a severe

financial crisis and ended up owing several lakhs of rupees. Dubbed
a financial failure, he was ignored
by the industry. Then in 1974, his
close friend, the well-known director Raj Khosla, offered to direct a film
for him. With Khosla backing him,
Dutt was able to raise money for the
project Nehle Peh Dehla, an actionpacked song-and-dance entertainer
starring Dutt, was a hit, and producers once again flocked to sign him
on. Within five years, he was able to
repay his debts.
In April 1980, Nargis, who had been
working on behalf of disabled children
for several years, was nominated to the
Rajya Sabha. But that August, she fell
ill. When doctors diagnosed cancer of
the pancreas, Dutt rushed his wife to
the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center in the United States. Nargis
underwent five operations, but the
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59

disease was too advanced, and she
died on 31 May 1981.
His wife’s death left Dutt heartbroken. To add to his grief, his son, Sanjay,
had become a drug addict. Why should
all this happen to me?? Dutt wondered
bitterly. He began to drink and smoke
heavily. In his agony, he often thought
of his mother, who had also passed
through difficult times, yet had lived
and worked for her children. I must do
the same, Dutt decided.

Family ties
Sunil’s first job was to save his son.
It took three years and four clinics for Sanjay to free himself from
his addiction, but his father stood
by him through it all. Nargis’ death
also brought Dutt closer to his
daughters. “Dad filled the gap left by

60 april 2024

Mother,” says Priya. “He began helping with our homework, attending our
school functions, and discussing our
problems with us.”
During this time, Dutt was also
thinking of a suitable memorial to
Nargis. “When we were at SloanKettering,” he says, “Nargis used to
tell me how she wished our hospitals
had similar facilities. After her death,
I was determined to make her wish
come true.”
In 1982, Sunil founded the Nargis
Dutt Foundation. Based in New York
and backed by Indians living abroad,
the foundation has so far spent half a
million dollars on equipping Indian
hospitals with modern cancer-fighting equipment. It pays for internationally renowned cancer specialists
to lecture and operate in India, and

image: alamy

Actor, filmmaker and politician: Sunil Dutt—seen here at a protest rally—wore several
hats throughout his lifetime. He supported various campaigns, including one for the
legalization of Bombay’s squatter settlements.

The Many Roles of Sunil Dutt
for promising local doctors to train
abroad. The foundation has also
set up the Nargis Dutt Intensive Care
Unit at Bombay’s Tata Memorial
Cancer Hospital. Says Dr Praful Desai, Director of Tata Memorial, “Sunil
takes a personal interest in our patients. He frequently visits the wards
and pays for entertainers to perform
at the hospital.”
In December 1981, Dutt had
been appointed Sheriff of Bombay.
Three years later, he was elected
to Parliament. “I felt that as an MP, I
could help people more,” says Dutt.
He has campaigned for the legalization of Bombay’s squatter settlements
and helped squatters get the government amenities to which they are
entitled. Dutt is also active in the campaign against drugs, urging parents to
stand by their addicted children. “This
is what we did for Sanjay,” he tells
them, “and he came back to us.”
Meanwhile, Sunil Dutt’s more
recent films deal with social issues that concern him. Though
the anguish of cancer is the major

theme of Dard ka Rishta, this 1983
film also stresses national integration.
The hero’s home is a mini India with
a Hindu cook, a Muslim watchman,
and a Christian servant. The cook
initially bars the watchman from his
kitchen, but is finally convinced that
such discrimination is wrong. “Films
influence the public,” says Dutt.
“Why not use them to propagate the
right values?”
Though he no longer plays romantic roles, Dutt, now 60, is still
mobbed wherever he goes. Visitors
also throng his Bombay office, seeking favours, hospital admissions,
jobs or his presence at functions.
“Sunil just can’t say no,” says Dr Puri.
Despite the personal tragedies that
beset him—recently, his daughterin-law, Richa, was operated on for
the removal of a malignant brain
tumour—Dutt keeps going.
“Where do you get your strength?”
I ask him. “I take things as they
come,” he replies, “and I help others
as much as I can, for that is what gives
my life meaning.”

SORRY ABOUT THAT!
Apology from the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Eagle: “I originally wrote,
‘Woodrow Wilson’s wife grazed sheep on the front lawn of the White House.’
I’m sorry typesetting inadvertently left out the word ‘sheep’.”
From the New York Times: “Because of a transmission error, an article about the
situation in Israel during the Persian Gulf War mistranslated a Hebrew expression,
nahash tzefa. It means ‘poisonous snake’, not ‘poisonous snack’.”
—FEBRUARY 1992

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Reader ’s Digest

Life’s Like That
1950s
ALWAYS APPREHENSIVE about flying, I boarded the plane and chose a
seat next to a solid-looking citizen. I
tried to settle back to endure the six
hours ahead of me but found my eyes
glued to the engine within my view.
After an hour or so my fellow passenger turned to me with a kindly
smile. “Miss,” he said, “if you would
like to rest for a while, I’d be glad to
watch that engine for you.”
—JOAN EDWARDS, JULY 1959

1960s
MY NEIGHBOUR, a long-distance
telephone operator, put through a
call for a man using a pay booth and,
when he hung up, rang him back
to tell him he owed her five cents. Indignant, the man refused to pay and
after giving her an argument asked
why she was putting up such a fight
for a nickel.
“Same nickel you’re fighting for, sir,”
she snapped. She got her overtime.
—MRS L. J. FLAATTEN, APRIL 1963

BEING STRUCK by a wordy muse, a
friend of mine concluded her paper
for a Shakespseare course with the
statement: “Pusillanimity was, to the

62
2 april 2024

end, his downfall.” When the paper was
returned, her professor had added:
“As obfuscation is thine.”
—KIM H. PARKER, OCTOBER 1966

1970s
LAST FALL my husband decided he
wanted to change jobs. He placed
‘blind’ ads in several business publications, describing his present job and
the sort of position he hoped to find.
He received a number of responses,
but the one we cherish most was a
note from a fellow jobseeker who enclosed one of his own resumes. The
note read: “Sir: Please give my resume
to your present employer when you
find another position. I’ve been lookk
ing for a job like yours since 1971.”
—M. LYN MARTIN, SEPTEMBER 1973

1980s
OUR 22-YEAR-OLD-SON, the last of
our five children to leave home, was
about to move into his own apartment. I had decided to redecorate his
room, and asked him to please get all
his things out of it.
Roger took the news in an apparently blasé manner. Then, as he left
the house, he betrayed his real feelings with this poignant farewell:

“I’ll be back next week to pack up
my childhood.”
—ALLAIRE B. NOWNES, OCTOBER 1985

1990s
AS A STUDENT, I ate my meals at a
seaside boarding house. The landlady’s husband was a fisherman, so we
always had fish for dinner. Eventually I grew tired of fish and began
throwing it under the sofa, where
the family cat would devour it. This
worked very successfully (apart from
a slight telltale aroma) until one day
the landlady tiptoed up behind me
and said, “Young man, our cat was
run over by a truck three weeks ago.”
—BEN BRASH, JANUARY 1995

WHEN OUR SON came home from
college for the summer, I asked him,
“How are things going? “
“Good,” he said .
“How’s the food?” I asked.
“Good.”
“And the dormitory?”
“Good.”
“They’ve always had a strong football team,” I said, trying to draw him
out. “How do you think they’ll do
this year?”
“Good,” he replied.
“How are your studies going?”
“Good.”
“Have you decided on a major yet?”
“Yes.”
“What is it? “ I asked .
“Communications.”
—ORBEN’S CURRENT COMEDY,
Y MAY 1997

2000s
COMING HOME from work, a man
finds toys and clothes strewn all over
the house, piles of dishes in the
kitchen and mess everywhere.
“What happened?” the man asked
his wife.
“You know when you come home
everyday and ask me what I did all
day?” replied his wife. “Well, today I
didn’t do it.”
—SHARON BATEMAN, MAY 2000

BEFORE GOING OUT to a movie, my
husband and I stopped at the town
dump to drop off some garbage. As I
waited for him in our pickup truck, a
man walked by. Glancing at my dress
and jewellery, he said, “I certainly hope
this isn’t your first date.”
—VIDA McHOES PICKETT, NOVEMBER 2008

I WAS DRIVING around and around
a parking garage in search of an available space. Nothing. Then I noticed a
couple walking ahead of me. “Going
out?” I called to them.
“No,” said the man. “Just friends.”
—GEORGE TOBIN, APRIL 2009

MY SISTER AND I decided to reframe a favourite photograph of our
mother and father from when they
were dating, some 60 years ago. After
removing the picture from the frame,
I turned it over, hoping to find a date.
I didn’t. Instead, my mother had written, “58 kgs.”
—JEAN TATE, SEPTEMBER 2009

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Christian the lion plays
in Bourke and Rendall’s
London flat in 1970.

64 april 2024

LI
MAY 2009

DEREK CATTANI

N
O
by Heidi Krause

Five decades after
two young men
brought a playful
cub into their London
n
home, the tale has
touched a whole
new generation

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Reader ’s Digest

T

London in the
exotic-animals
ry department
motto Omnia
things for all
lion cub sits in
hionably longearing young
ll and Anthony
upon the little
e to buy him.

66
6 april 2024

Rendall and Bourke name the cub
Christian and raise him as a pet in their
groovy pad in the city’s affluent Chelsea area. Their domesticated charge
eventually becomes too big for their
flat and for London, so they take him to
Africa in August 1970.
A remarkable story so far, but it’s
what occurred after this which made
Christian the lion a 21st-century popculture sensation.

DEREK CATTANI

Bourke and Rendall were careful about bringing Christian into public spaces, but a
ride in an open-top car is too much to resist.

Lion in the Living Room
A year after parting with their beloved pet, Rendall and Bourke travelled
to northern Kenya, where Christian
had been successfully assimilated into
the wild. Their reunion with the lion
was filmed. A few years ago, the
moment was posted on YouTube,
where it has generated more than a
hundred million hits and went viral,
becoming a staple for email forwards.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the threeminute clip shows Christian perched on
a rock as the two men wait expectantly
about 70 metres away. The animal stares
at the men, before taking a few steps
closer for a better look. Suddenly there
is an undeniable flash of recognition
and the young lion leaps into action,
grunting with excitement as he makes a
beeline for the waiting pair and bounds
into their open arms. Wrapping his huge
paws around their shoulders, the lion
fervently licks his old friends’ faces and
nuzzles at their necks.
The scene has such emotional power
it could be mistaken for a scene from a
choreographed Hollywood movie that
employs modern animatronics. But
this is no fictional tale; rather, it’s an
enchanting glimpse into the true story
of a lion called Christian.
For many viewers, no doubt, the
clip’s appeal may stem from simple
amazement over the fact that the wild
animal did not attack the men. But its
emotional impact on others is something Rendall and Bourke, almost 43
years on, are still trying to understand.
“Is it the depiction of such a close

THE CLIP’S APPEAL
MAY STEM FROM
SIMPLE AMAZEMENT
OVER THE FACT THE
WILD ANIMAL DID
NOT ATTACK.
bond between animals and humans?
Is it about growing up and separation?
Is it about loss and loneliness and the
joy of reconnection? Is it the unconditional love Christian demonstrates?”
They pose these questions in the
introduction of A Lion Called Christian
(published by Random House), a revised 2009 book released to fill in the
gaps behind the popular video (the
book’s original version is from 1971).
Today, Bourke, 66 and Rendall, 68,
remain close friends. “Sitting and looking over old photographs, and talking
about him, we’ve fallen in love with
Christian all over again,” says Rendall,
now a committed conservationist who
divides his time between London and
Sydney, Australia, working as a public
relations consultant on travel and
wildlife projects.
Bourke lives in Bundeena, on Sydney’s southern outskirts, and has become one of Australia’s leading curators
specializing in Aboriginal and colonial
art. He, too, is involved in “the urgent
fight to preserve the world’s wildlife.”
There is no doubt their experience
with Christian has left an indelible
mark. The cub was not born in the wild,
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but in the now-closed Ilfracombe Zoo
in Devon on England’s south coast.
Nine weeks later he was sold to Harrods and sent to London by train. At the
time, there were no laws restricting the
sale of exotic species.
“Animals were traded without limitation and no reliable records were kept,”
says Rendall. “Looking back, we should
never have been allowed to buy a lion
and were unwittingly supporting the
trafficking of animals, which we are
definitely against. But this was the ’60s.”
Things changed in 1973, when UK introduced the Endangered Species Act.
The male cub captivated the two
friends, who were both raised in rural
areas and had an affinity for animals. In
Australia, Bourke grew up with dogs on
the edge of the bush, and rescued his
first cat at age 11. Rendall was raised on
a farm in with kelpies and blue heelers,
both Australian breeds of dog.
“Ace and I both had a very strong
reaction to the little cub and sat
enchanted by the cage for hours,” Rendall recalls. “We were shocked to see
this irresistible creature for sale and
confined to a small cage, and felt compelled to do something. We decided we

“CHRISTIAN WAS
HIGHLY INTELLIGENT,
HAD A LOVELY EVENTEMPERED NATURE
AND A GREAT SENSE
OF HUMOUR.”
68 april 2024

must be able to offer something better
for the cub.”
It was an impractical idea and a huge
commitment for two men in their early
20s, living and working with the owners
of an antique-furniture store on London’s trendy King’s Road. They’d left
Australia three months earlier with 11
friends from university and travelled
through Europe independently before
meeting up in London. After a few
weeks of careful deliberation and a
thorough interview process by Harrods, the friends paid nearly £12 and
took the cub home. “Even though we
knew it would only be a short-term
commitment of six to nine months at
the most, we had to put everything else
on hold,” Rendall says.
The large basement level of their
aptly named shop Sophistocat was
transformed into Christian’s bedroom
and play area: toys and special food
were purchased, and an arrangement
made with a church minister for Christian to have free run of large walled
gardens in the neighbourhood for daily
exercise. “It was a terribly exciting, creative time to be in London. There was
already a group of Australians, like artist Brett Whitely and writer Germaine
Greer, making waves in the art and
publishing world. It was a rite of passage and we were all, in our own way,
trying to do something different with
every opportunity,” says Bourke.
The King’s Road was a Mecca for
designers, musicians, artists and creative types, so a resident lion was not

Christian’s first night in the African bush was spent with a comfortable pillow and a
reassuring paw on Rendall’s face.

out of place. On weekends, the street
was transformed into a parade of the
flamboyant and the beautiful, and
“exotic animals were part of this glamorous mix,” they write in their book.
Rendall and Bourke had no idea what
to expect, nor to what degree the cub
could be domesticated. Harrods put
them in touch with a couple who’d
bought a puma the year before, but
nothing could adequately prepare them.
“We had to wing it in many respects,”
laughs Bourke. “There was no one who
could give you advice, really. But Christian really was exceptional. He was
highly intelligent, had a lovely eventempered nature and a great sense of

humour. He was also incredibly charismatic. People just fell in love with
him and it made our job easier.”
Christian quickly settled into a routine, sleeping in his well-equipped
quarters and being fed four meals a day
according to a carefully balanced diet
sheet. The first and last meals were a
concoction of baby foods and vitamins,
with two main meals of meat during
the day. On occasion Christian gratefully gobbled up fillet steak treats from
a local French chef who had a soft spot
for the lion.
Sophistocat was a “jungle of furniture” and Christian loved a game of catand-mouse with his owners. “He was
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inexhaustibly playful,”
Bourke recalls. “He would
come up in the evenings and
create these games, positioning himself behind pieces of
furniture, insisting we ‘hide’
and then stalk us all around
the shop. He also loved
wastepaper baskets, the
friends write in the book,
“first to be worn on the head,
totally obscuring his vision,
and then ripped apart.”
Unlike many other cat
family members, lions are
social creatures that prefer
to live in an extended family pack characterized by affection and intimacy.
“We were Christian’s pride,” explains
Rendall. “He automatically took us into
his orbit, and accepted and loved us as
if we were his family.”
Christian quickly became a popular
fixture in the neighbourhood. He had
a steady stream of admirers stopping
by for a game, a cuddle or to observe
him from a distance as the ever-growing cub lounged on an antique table in
the shop window. “Late in the afternoon he loved to sit in the window,
watching the passing activity. He was
the area’s star attraction and locals
were fiercely proud of him,” they write.
“One actress friend of ours, Unity
Bevis-Jones, became particularly
attached to Christian, stopping by every
afternoon to play with him,” says
Rendall. “They were mutually besotted.”
Photos of Christian being driven

70 april 2024

One year after they left him with George
Adamson in Kenya, Christian greeted his
former owners with great excitement.

around in a car and eating out at
trendy restaurants reflect his celebrity
status—he would receive movie premiere invitations and a starring role in
a modelling shoot for nightgowns in
Vanity Fair. “He was even interviewed
by [legendary BBC radio presenter]
Jack de Manio,” laughs Bourke.
Nevertheless, his owners were protective and rarely took him outside
Sophistocat or the church grounds.
“He liked outings, but they were infrequent. We had to ensure Christian’s
and everyone else’s safety, so we were
cautious,” Bourke continues.
Rendall nods vigorously in agreement. “We had to always stay one step
ahead and pre-think every situation.
Are there windows? Are there open
doors? Are there going to be children

Lion in the Living Room
or dogs?” Fortunately, nothing untoward ever happened, and Rendall
and Bourke were at pains to make sure
Christian knew who was boss.
“He very quickly grew too big for us,
but we never let him know,” says
Bourke. “We simply ignored any overt
demonstrations of his superior
strength. If we had put him in a situation where he was unhappy and felt the
need to turn on us, we would not have
been able to control him because of his
size and strength, and the sharpness of
his teeth and claws. But thankfully, that
kind of situation never arose.”
From the outset, Bourke and Rendall
were aware that the environment
they’d created for Christian at Sophistocat was a temporary solution. As he
grew from 15 kilos to 85, so too did
their concerns about his future.
Then, by sheer coincidence, the two
lead actors of the 1966 hit wildlife film
Born Free, Bill Travers and Virginia
McKenna, came into the shop to
browse for furniture. “They fell immediately under Christian’s spell and
wanted to help. They subsequently
contacted their great friend George
Adamson, one of the world’s foremost
lion experts, who agreed to take on the
challenge of introducing Christian to
the wilds of Africa.”
Together with the animal star of
Born Free, a tame lion called Boy,
Christian would form the nucleus of a
new man-made pride. Travers and
McKenna produced documentaries on
animal conservation and, to cover

expenses, proposed the filming of The
Lion at World’s End to follow Christian’s training and journey to Africa.
“It was the perfect solution. We were
so thrilled and relieved,” says Bourke.
“George warned us a King’s Road lion
may have trouble assimilating, but we
grabbed at the opportunity with both
hands.” In 1970, after lengthy negotiations with the Kenyan government, the
two Australians flew to Nairobi with
one-year-old Christian. The pair
watched on in Adamson’s shadow as
Christian instinctively removed thorns
from his tender paws during his first
walk on African soil and valiantly
attempted to stalk his first prey. Curiously, of all the lions under Adamson’s
care, Christian made the transition
with the greatest ease.
“Apart from initial toughening up, he
required no training,” wrote the late
Adamson in the 1971 edition of A Lion
Called Christian.
“No one knew lions better than
George did,” says Bourke. “He had an
extraordinary understanding and love
for them. So although it was difficult to
say goodbye, this was the outcome we

“LOOKING OVER
OLD PHOTOS AND
TALKING ABOUT HIM,
WE’VE FALLEN IN
LOVE WITH
CHRISTIAN ALL
OVER AGAIN.
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all wanted. We still can’t believe it all
worked out so beautifully.”
Over the course of the next year they
kept abreast of Christian’s progress and
in 1971 returned to the reserve. Adamson had advised the pair that Christian
was likely to remember them, something
that is often misquoted in media articles
and YouTube’s opening commentary,
but even Adamson was surprised by the
extreme tenderness of Christian’s greeting. “The questions everyone asks us
after watching the video are: ‘Weren’t
you worried?’ ‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘Didn’t you think he was going to attack
you?’” says Rendall. “The truth is, we
were absolutely not afraid and never
doubted for a second that he’d be
happy to see us and it would be a wonderful greeting. We recognized his
body language, his loving expression
and we knew he was excited. He was
bigger, but he was still the same lion we
had known intimately for a year, and it
was as simple as that.”
When you watch the video, continues Rendall, “you see him looking as if
he’s thinking, Is it them? Is it them? We
couldn’t bear to wait a minute longer, so
we called out to him. And there’s that

“WE WERE
ABSOLUTELY NOT
AFRAID AND NEVER
DOUBTED THAT HE
WOULD BE HAPPY
TO SEE US.”
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2 april 2024

priceless moment when you can see
that he knows, and down he comes.”
Rendall is barely able to hold back
the tears as he reminisces about the
excitement of that day—Christian lookk
ing so healthy, the head of his new
pride, showing his old affection. “It
encapsulated our friendship, our love
for him and his love for us. It was the
culmination of all the time and love we
put into him.”
In 1972, Rendall and Bourke had one
final reunion with the lion who was
now fully integrated into the wild. At
that time, Christian was about 230 kilos
and one of the largest lions Adamson
had ever seen. A letter Bourke wrote to
his parents at the time reads: “We saw
Christian every morning and evening
for a walk and a chat. He is much
calmer and more self-assured than last
year, and stunning to be with. Just as
silly. Huge. Jumped up on me only
once as before on his hind legs and did
it extremely gently. He licked my face
as he towered over me. He nearly
crushed John trying to sit on his lap!”
They spent nine full days with their
former King’s Road pet and were introduced to his pride of lionesses before
Christian disappeared into the wilderness, never to be seen by the friends
again. Today, Christian has his own
Wikipedia entry, Facebook page and a
lasting legacy through the work of the
George Adamson Wildlife Preservation
Trust. The friends marvel at what could
be achieved if everyone touched by
Christian’s story worked together to

Lion in the Living Room

Who was George Adamson?

GETTY IMAGES

George Adamson was one of the
founders of wildlife conservation.
Renowned as the ‘Lion Man of Africa’,
he became famous through the book
and film Born Free. Written by Adamson and his wife Joy, it is based upon
the couple’s experience raising an
orphaned lioness, Elsa, and returning
her to the wild. Adamson worked as a
gamekeeper in Kenya for more than
20 years before retiring in 1961 to
work permanently with the lions. In
1970, he moved to the Kora National
Reserve, 280 km north-west of Nairobi, Kenya. There, he and his associate, Tony Fitzjohn, reintegrated hundreds of big cats to the wild. Adamson
was murdered by Somali bandits at
Kora in 1989, at the age of 83.

address some of the world’s most
urgent social and environmental
issues. According to Rendall, education
is one of the most important pillars of
the George Adamson Trust.
“The tragedy of Africa at the moment
is that so many educated people are
leaving. And many of those left behind
are dying of cholera. If you are dying,
you are not going to be concerned about
wildlife. And if you are starving, the animals become much-needed food to
survive. And who are we to say what
people can or can’t do to survive?”
The revival of interest in Christian’s
story, Bourke says, has highlighted
how dependent people become on their

pets in these stressful times. “We form
such close relationships with them. I
think that’s one of the main lessons to
come from all this.”
YouTube visitors all post their heartfelt responses and repeatedly echo the
same sentiment: “Thank you for showing the world that all wild animals
deserve to be treated with love and
respect. You are an inspiration.”
Editor’s Note: Rendall passed away on 20
January 2022. Yet, their bond continues
to inspire awe among millions. Google
‘Christian the lion video,’ to view Ace and
Rendall’s reunion with the lion, a year
after he was released into the wild.
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Babasaheb continues to
be a symbol of Dalit
resistance. Pictured here:
Activists protest the death
of a Dalit man in the
protests against the 2018
Supreme Court verdict on
the SC/ST Act.

74 april 2024

DECEMBER 2006

Discovering
Babasaheb
This Dalit history
month—which also
marks the 134th birth
anniversary of Dr B. R.
Ambedkar, we recount
four momentous
incidents from his life

P HOTO: ALAM Y

by Ashok Mahadevan
and Sushan Shetty

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H

e towers above us, forever frozen in stone, a
bespectacled man in a
suit, the index finger of
his right-hand pointing
forward, his left arm holding a book
close to his heart. Statues similar to this
one are dotted all across India. Indeed,
there are almost certainly more of them
than that of any other figure, not excepting even Gandhiji.
Yet, if Dr B. R. Ambedkar has passed
into legend for the Dalits among us, he
remains, for too many others, a shadowy or much misunderstood figure.
But the amazing life and trenchant
teachings of this great Indian still hold
valuable lessons for everyone.
TURNING POINT
The tall, stout young man with a receding hairline and scholarly mien, stood
in Baroda railway station wondering
what to do. He had just been appointed
military secretary to the Maharaja of
Baroda, and although orders had been
issued for him to be met at the station,
nobody had shown up.
The reason was obvious. During the
four years, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
had studied in New York in London, on
a Baroda government scholarship, it
hadn’t mattered at all who he was. But
now he had returned home, and in the
India of 1917, it mattered a great deal.
His academic accomplishments
couldn’t undo the incontrovertible fact
that he was an Untouchable.
Given his appearance, it wouldn’t

76
6 april 2024

have been difficult for the 26-year-old
Ambedkar to pretend to be a Brahmin
and check into a Hindu hotel. But his
identity was bound to be discovered
before too long, and the consequences
could be dire.
Could he stay with one of the Indian
students from Baroda he’d known in
New York?? Ambedkar wondered. But
how could he be sure that they wouldn’t
be embarrassed at an Untouchable entering their home?
Learning from one of the station’s
tongawalas that there was a Parsi inn
in Baroda cantonment, Ambedkar decided to seek shelter there. After all, Zoroastrians didn’t have a caste system.
At the inn, an elderly Parsi caretaker
took him to an upstairs room. But on
learning shortly afterwards that
Ambedkar was a Hindu, he asked him
to leave since the inn was for Parsis
only. Desperate, Ambedkar offered to
register under a Parsi name. Fortunately, the caretaker, who hadn’t had
any guests for a while, agreed and set
the charge room and board at a rupee
and a half a day.
Once he started going to the office,
though, Ambedkar was granted no reprieves. He was never told what exactly
he was supposed to do. Moreover, his
subordinates were insolent. They ran
him down openly and flung files on his
table so that they wouldn’t have to
come too near him. He was given no
drinking water, and at the officer’s club,
he had to sit in a corner and keep his
distance from the other members.

Discovering Babasaheb

PHOTO : ALA MY

Dr Ambedkar, chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, pictured here
with the members of the Committee.

Not a man to take things lying down,
Ambedkar often gave back as good
as he got. But whenever possible, he
went to Baroda’s public library to
read books on political and economic
subjects. He also applied for a government bungalow.
Then one morning, as he was
getting ready to go to work, a dozen Parsis, all wielding sticks, rushed upto his
room, screaming that he’d polluted the
inn and insisting he leave immediately.
Ambedkar begged them to let him stay
for a week longer since he had hoped to
get his government bungalow by then,
but they were obdurate. If they found
him at the inn that evening, they said,
God help him. So after spending much

of the day in a public garden, Ambedkar
left Bombay by the 9:00 p.m. train.
Author’s Note: Writing about the incident
18 years later, Ambedkar confessed that
he could never recall it “without tears in
my eyes”. And one scholar contends that
it was a turning point in Ambedkar’s life,
setting him on the path to fight casteism
and injustice. At any rate, it is reminiscent
of what had happened to another Indian
rebel 24 years earlier, when Ghandhi was
ejected from his first-class train compartt
ment in Maritzburg, South Africa.
THE RIGHT TO WATER
As Brahman priests chanted mantras,
108 earthen pots were dipped into the
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tank and pulled out. Then the water in
each pot was mixed with cow dung,
curds, milk and cow’s urine, and the
pots lowered into the tank again. Now,
declared the priests, the water in Chowdar tank in the Maharashtrian town of
Mahad was again fit to be drunk by
caste Hindus.
That ceremony on 21 March 1927,
was performed to purify water supposedly polluted by Ambedkar and more
than a thousand other Untouchables
when they’d drunk from the tank the
previous day. Although the Mahad municipality had—in line with the government directive—passed a resolution
three years earlier, allowing Untouchables access to the tank, no Untouchable had dared to go near it until Ambedkar and his followers tested the waters.
And that had led to a riot in which caste
Hindus had attacked Untouchables.
About 100 Untouchables, mostly
men who had served in the army, had
been eager to retaliate. One word from
their leader would have been enough
to send them on a rampage, but
Ambedkar calmed them down.
However, after the Mahad municipality revoked its earlier resolution,
A mb e d k a r a n n o u n c e d t hat a
satyagraha would be held in Mahad
that December to reassert the right of
untouchables to the Chowdar tank’s
water. But before it could take place,
Orthodox Mahad Hindus got a court
injunction, restraining Ambedkar and
other untouchables from going to the
tank. Once again, showing his prefer-

78 april 2024

ence for not settling matters in the
streets, Ambedkar persuaded the 3,000
enthusiastic Dalit satyagrahis not to
break the law. They’d already made
their views clear the day before when
the Manusmriti—the law book of Brahmanic Hinduism—was placed on a
pyre and burnt.
Author’s Note: The Mahad satyagraha
was seen by many Dalits as the beginning
of their political awakening. Of course,
nobody then could possibly have dreamt
that 20 years later, Ambedkar would
oversee the writing of the Constitution of
a free India and be hailed as the modern
Manu. Ambedkar’s rise to the leadership
of the Untouchable community, (then
officially called Depressed Classes) was
rapid. He was the only Dalit post-graduate at the Bombay presidency, and within
a few years of the Baroda humiliation, he
started newspapers, established the Dalit
self-help and self-respect organizations,
and began lobbying the British government to improve the lot of his community.
But amidst his trials, there was heartt
break, too. In July 1926, his favourite son,
Rajaratna died—the fourth of Ambedkar’s five children to die in infancy. The
distraught father wrote to a friend, ‘Life
to me is a garden full of weeds.”
CLASH OF TITANS
Gandhiji got up at 2:30 a.m. on 20 September 1932, and wrote a few letters,
including one to Rabindranath Tagore.
After breakfasting on milk and fruit, he
listened to a recital of the Gita. At 11:30,

Discovering Babasaheb

PHOTO :ALA MY

Ambedkar with his second wife,
Dr Savita Ambedkar.

he drank lemon juice and honey with
hot water. Then, as the Yerwada prison
bell struck noon, the Mahatma, just a
couple of weeks shy of 63, began the
only fast he had ever directed at an
Indian politician. His target was
Ambedkar, and the fast was, in the
Mahatma’s words, unto death.
At stake was the issue of separate
electorates a matter that had been bedevilled Indian politics ever since the
British began allowing Indians to
choose their representatives and government councils. Under a separate
electorate system, each of India’s various communities—such as Hindus,
Muslims, Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, Untouchables—would vote independently
of each other. To Gandhiji, separate
electorates were anathema because they
promoted communalism and division.

He’d accepted separate electorates for
Muslims and Sikhs with reluctance, but
to him, untouchables were not a separate community—they were Hindus.
Ambedkar, on the other hand, reasoned that untouchables had little in
common with caste Hindus—as he once
memorably put it, “I am not a part of the
whole, I am a part apart.” Given this,
separate electorates were the best way
for the Depressed Classes to get real political power: in joint electorates, they’d
always be outvoted by caste Hindus.
The difference in perspective
stemmed from each man’s assessment
of the nature of Untouchability. Gandhiji
felt it was a corruption of Hinduism and
that it could be removed by appealing to
the conscience of caste Hindus; Ambedkar was convinced that Untouchability
was an integral part of the Hindu caste
system and would persist unless the
caste system itself was destroyed.
The two men had not hit it off from the
time they first met in August 1931.
Ambedkar felt that the Mahatma had
been rude and condescending, and Gandhiji—incredibly—had then assumed
Ambedkar was an intemperate Brahmin!
The two men clashed again that
December at a British-sponsored conference in London to discuss the political
future of India, claiming that he—not
Ambedkar—represented the Untouchables, Gandhiji criticized the demand for
separate electorates.
“I cannot tolerate,” he said, “what is in
store for Hinduism if there are these two
divisions ... I will resist it with my life.”
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79

Reader ’s Digest
The clash with Gandhiji earned
Ambedkar, the ire of Congressmen and
much of the Indian press. He was called
an enemy of Hindus, a traitor, a stooge
of the British. Such vilification did not
faze Ambedkar; his priorities were
clear. He once described his position
thus: “As between the country and myself, the country will have precedence,
as between the country and the
Depressed Classes, the Depressed
Classes will have precedence ...”
The British who had arrested
Gandhiji soon after he returned from
London, granted the Depressed Classes
a separate electorate in August 1932.
Soon after, the Mahatma announced
his fast, and Ambedkar became the
most hated man in India.
The possibility that Gandhiji might
starve himself to death horrified not just
Indians, but people around the world.
Millions prayed for his safety and fasted
in sympathy. And in a show of Hindu
solidarity, temples, wells, and public
areas hitherto closed to the Depressed
Classes were thrown open to them.
Initially, Ambedkar described the
fast as a political stunt. “I trust the
Mahatma will not drive me to the necessity of making a choice between his
life and the rights of my people,” he
said. “For I can never consent to deliver
my people bound hand and foot to the
caste of Hindus for generations to
come.” But he negotiated with other
Hindu leaders for a compromise and
also met Gandhiji on a couple of
occasions as he lay on his iron cot

80 april 2024

under a mango tree in the prison yard.
Once, Ambedkar began by saying,
“Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair
to us.” Gandhiji replied that it was
always his lot to appear unfair, and reiterated his opposition to separate
electorates. “You are an Untouchable
by birth,” he told Ambedkar. “I am an
Untouchable by adoption. We must be
one and indivisible.”
As the negotiations dragged on,
Gandhiji began to sink and Ambedkar
came under tremendous pressure to
give in. Then on the fifth day of the fast
with Ghandiji near death, M. C. Raja, an
Untouchable leader from Madras, told
Ambedkar: “For thousands of years, we
have been downtrodden, insulted and
despised. The Mahatma is taking his life
for our sake, and if he dies, there will be
such a strong feeling against us that the
… Hindu community … will kick us
downstairs further still.”
Soon after, Ambedkar agreed to a
settlement, and Gandhiji broke his fast
by accepting a glass of orange juice
from his wife, Kasturba.
Author’s Note: Actually, the complicated
settlement, known as the Poona Pact,
did little more than confirm Ambedkar’s
leadership of the Depressed Classes, and
highlight Gandhiji’s commitment to
combat Untouchability. Both, Caste
Hindus and the Untouchables felt too
many concessions had been made, and
Ambedkar, who later described the pact
as “a mean deal”, reverted to his demand
for separate electorates.

Discovering Babasaheb

PHOTO :WIKIMEDIA/INDIA POST

In November 1933, Gandhiji started
a nine-month, 20,000-km tour of the
country to combat Untouchability. It
was not a great success. One 1939 survey
revealed that out of 15,751 temples in
the Bombay presidency, which received
government grants, only 501 had been
open to Untouchables.

Marathi, then bowed thrice before a
statute of the Buddha and offered white
lotus flowers.
Thus, Ambedkar fulfilled a pledge
he’d made 21 years earlier when he’d
said: “Unfortunately for me, I was born
a Hindu Untouchable ... I solemnly assure you, I will not die as a Hindu.”
Now that he was a Buddhist, Ambedkar addressed the throng, asking all
those who also wanted to convert to
stand up. Everyone did, and he administered the oaths to
the entire gathering.
Never before had so
many
people
changed their religion simultaneously.

BORN AGAIN
14 October 1956 was Dussehra, but
thoughts of the festival were not uppermost in the minds
of the three to five
lakh people, most
of them dressed in
white, who filled
the 5.6 hectare
maidan on the outA u t h o r ’s N o t e :
skirts of Nagpur
Ambedkar was very
that morning. They
ill and politically
broke into cheers
as, shortly after This commemorative Ambedkar stamp very isolated at the
nine, Ambedkar issued in 1991, had a print run of 1,00,000. time of his conversion. Not only were
appeared, wearing
t
a white silk dhoti and a white coat, his his great days as chairman of the draftwife, Savita, and his secretary on either ing committee of the Constitution and
law minister of India long past, he was
side of him.
The Ambedkars were escorted to a not even a member of Parliament: two
dais on which sat five saffron-robed years earlier, he had been defeated in a
Buddhist monks, one of them, the bye-election to the Lok Sabha. But his
83-year-old Mahasthaveer Chandram- hold on the Dalit imagination remained
ani, the oldest Bhikku
u in India. After the as secure as ever. And when he died less
t
vast gathering observed a minute’s si- than two months later, Bombay witlence in the memory of Ambedkar’s nessed an unprecedented outpouring of
father, whose death anniversary fell on grief. And by the time of the 1961 census,
that day, the five monks chanted the more than 3.25 million Indians were
oaths of conversion in Pali. Ambedkar Buddhist, an 18-fold increase over the
and his wife repeated the mantras in 1951 figure.
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81

Picturesque Speech
TOWARDS MORE LIVELY LANGUAGE

1930s

SEPTEMBER 1944

DECEMBER 1934

Spiced Tongue
He’s a very small patch on the seat
of government.
—MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
He knows so little, and knows it
so fluently.
—ELLEN GLASGOW
A dogma-in-the-manger attitude,
discouraging argument.
—WEARE HOLBROOK

She was built in terraces ...
—DOROTHY PARKER

Across the floor they sailed, a
coquettish yacht convoyed by
a stately cruiser.
—O’HENRY
Already a second edition of his chin
had been published.
—P. G. WODEHOUSE
DECEMBER 1939

One of those women who go through
life demanding to see the manager.
—G. PATRICK

He steered by the fixed star of
self-interest
—HERVEY ALLEN

Eloquent by Nature
Rain typing on the roof ...
—MARY WILFRED, QUOTED BY WALTER WINCHELL

A woodpecker riveting outside
the window.
—NEAL O’HARA
Sand dunes autographed by the wind.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE
The sort of fine drizzle that makes a
bluebird bluer.
—MARY E. MCDONALD
The nervous fingers of a windy day
drumming on loose windowpanes.
—WALTER WINCHELL

Somewhere a thrush sang, the notes
were loneliness carved in sound.
—MARGUERITE MCLNTIRE

Heard it on the Radio
That sailor came in with the tide and
went out with a wave.
—JOAN DAVIS
The metal shortage may have taken
the hooks off dresses, but it will
never take the eyes.
—BOB HOPE
My troubles always come in the
large economy size.
—EDGAR BERGEN

1940s
M AY 1 9 4 2

Love thy Neighbour
Our friends have taken a place in the
country this summer—our place.
—JACK GOODMAN AND ALAN GREEN

He was scared—looked as if he’d
seen a guest!
—WALTER WINCHELL

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2 april 2024

1960s
APRIL 1961

Kid Bits
My third-grader returned from his
dental checkup and reported: “The
dentist says my six-year morals
are just fine.”
—MRS ALFRED DEMANDER

Reader ’s Digest
My husband and I suddenly realized
that our three year old was ending the
blessing before each meal with a
sincere “Ah-mean-it!”
—MRS URIA H GREY FLOWERS, JR

Overheard in the first grade:
“There are two boys in our family,
and then there’s a baby—he’s
turning into a boy, too.” —MYRTLE SHIMOTA

They’re printing answers about
sex these days that I never even
knew there were questions for.
—BERYL PFIZER IN LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL

Do you realize how many economic
advisers the President has? Talk
about excess prophets!
—ORBEN’S CURRENT COMEDY

1980s
JANUARY 1967

MARCH 1981

Rhyme Lines
Following package directions
is a virtue I lack,
My thumbs are both nail-less
from “Press here—pull back.”
—GWEN DISHER

The older I get the less I pine for
things that I have to stand in line for.
—RICHARD ARMOUR IN THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

1970s
SEPTEMBER 1970

Wait a Second!
The owner of a second-hand
car knows how hard it is to
drive a bargain.
—BANKING

Thinking before you speak
enables you to have your
second thoughts first.
—MAURICE SEITTER IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Some men get in trouble when they
buy a second car, acquire a second
mortgage, or order a second martini.

Double Takes
TV: The eternal rectangle

—EARL WILSON

—SHELBY FRIEDMAN

Cocktail waitress: Glasshopper
—RAMONA ZIEGLER

Gardening: Soil sport
—OUR NAVY
Graffiti: The ham writing on the wall.
—RAYMOND J. CVIKOTA IN QUOTE

Pessimistic: Tied in nots.
—DINAH BROWN

NOVEMBER 1972

Quip Quotes
Don’t drive as if you own the road—
drive as if you own the car.
—QUOTED BY EARL WILSON

SEPTEMBER 1989

Face Value
She had a smile that could
clear the weather.
—BONNIE MAY MALODY

His eyes darted around like blips on
a video game.
—JOHN LUTZ

Her smile rose and set behind
the newspaper she handled like
a geisha with a fan.
—PAUL ZALIS

His face was creased like an oftenread letter.
—LAURA KALPAKIAN
readersdigest.in

83

JUNE 1959

BY
Y Douglas F. Storer

84
4 april 2024

illustration: getty images composite

Reader ’s Digest

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85

Reader ’s Digest

first saw Bob Ripley, the creator of ‘Believe
It or Not’, on a December evening more
than 30 years ago. I was the brash young
director-producer of a new coast-to-coast
radio programme sponsored by the Hudson
Motorcar Company, scheduled to go on the air in
exactly 78 minutes.
We’d wanted an original and striking
feature for the broadcasts and had
hired Ripley sight unseen. During the
rehearsal-time bedlam, I was handing
out scripts, barking orders, yelling for
quiet, when a large man, grinning like
an embarrassed schoolboy, edged timidly through the studio door. He wore
an ensemble straight out of a haberdasher’s nightmare: pale blue shirt,
batwing tie of flamingo orange,
checked horse-blanket jacket, fawncoloured slacks and gleaming blackand-white sports shoes.
He gave a nervous little bow. “You’re
Bob Ripley?” I asked, blinking. He
blushed and nodded. Speechless, I
handed him the script.
All he had to do was read a 30-second introduction to a dramatized
Believe It or Nott story, and then at the
end, authenticate the story and say
good night. It sounds sweet and simple, but by the time we went off the air
that memorable night, I was a tottering
wreck and Ripley was even worse.
Microphone fright? It was fantastic. His
script rustled like a palm tree in a

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6 april 2024

hurricane. Four times he dropped it,
picked it up and each time nearly
knocked over the microphone stand.
He mumbled his lines, but he kept on,
to the bitter end. When it was over, he
reeled to the control room. “H-h-how’d
I do?” he stammered.
His flushed face held an expression
so boyish and appealing—so earnest
and honest—that my professional outrage melted. I stuck out my hand. “You
need a little practice. Outside of that,
you were great.”
The show stumbled along. In fact,
the public liked Ripley’s awkward manner. We became friends, and before
long Ripley asked me to be his personal
representative. From that time, until
his death in 1949, I travelled and
worked with him, arranged his lectures
and radio and television shows, and
helped him with his motion pictures.
As I look back on it now, Ripley was
probably the biggest yokel ever to succeed in show business or gain world
renown as a newspaper artist. He had
no polish. He was shyer than a white
rabbit, painfully conscious of his

The Unbelievable Mr Ripley
buckteeth and his lack of education.
But he threw himself heart and soul
into everything he did, blundered
through and, win or lose, he had a
wonderful time.
Once in Marineland, Florida, the
script called for Ripley to go down into
the big saltwater aquarium in a diver’s
suit, hand-feed a school of sharks and
describe the experience to the radio
audience through a microphone in
his helmet.
“Terrific!” he said.
“Where’s the helmet?”
I was amazed. “Have
you ever been in a
diver’s suit?”
“Heck, no,” he said. “I
can’t even swim.” But
down he went.
He did a hundred
other crazy and sometimes dangerous things.
Once he made a broadcast from a pit full of live
rattlesnakes. No matter what things
he tackled, he plunged into them
with the tremendous zest that made
them adventures.
Ripley was born in California. His
father died when Bob was in kneelength pants, and he left school to go to
work. All he had in the world was a
knack with a pencil—and a milliondollar curiosity. In his teens he kicked
around as a sports cartoonist on a San
Francisco paper, then—fired for asking
for a raise—headed for New York and

landed a job on the old New York Globe.
One dull day in 1918 he filled a hole
in the sports page with drawings of a
sprinter who ran the hundred-yard
dash backwards in 14 seconds. He
added other sporting world oddities,
slugged them Champs and Chumps,
and tossed them on the copydesk.
The copy editor thought the heading
was weak. Ripley then changed it to
‘Believe It or Not’.
“That’s better,” the
editor said, and sent
the material to the
composing room.
‘Believe It or Not’
caught on. The Globe
began running it twice
a week, then daily, and
Ripley cast around for
oddities outside the
field of sports. His
mail increased. He
accumulated a staff—
two secretaries and a
researcher. In 1923 he moved over to
the New York Post.
Rip always said that out of his tens of
thousands of cartoons he owed his
fame and success primarily to two. In
1927, a few weeks after Lindbergh’s
flight to Paris, Ripley ran in ‘Believe It
or Not’ a drawing of the Spirit of
St Louis winging across the sea. Underneath was the caption: “Lindbergh was
the 67th man to make a non-stop flight
over the Atlantic Ocean.” The day the
cartoon appeared, the Postt switchboard sizzled for hours. Ripley received
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87

Reader ’s Digest
more than 2,00,000 telegrams and letters, every one a scream of protest. He
was in seventh heaven. He pointed out
that before Lindbergh, the Atlantic had
been crossed by two Englishmen in a
heavier-than-air craft, by 31 others in
an English airship and by 33 Germans
in a German airship.
Then in 1929 ‘Believe It or Not’ made
the astonishing announcement that
the United States had
no national anthem;
what Americans sang
instead was in reality
an old English drinking song. How come?
Francis Scott Key
wrote the words to
‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’, then put them
to the music of a
rousing tavern ballad
which he had discovered in a songbook.
More than five million
indignant letters funnelled into Washington from every state. In 1931 Congress rectified the oversight and formally declared ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’—words and music—to be the
US national anthem.
When William Randolph Hearst saw
the first book of ‘Believe It or Not’ cartoons he sent a two-word wire to his
King Features Syndicate: “Hire Ripley.”
Overnight, Ripley’s income soared
from $200 a week to $1,00,000 a year.
Suddenly he was the highest-paid,

88 april 2024

most widely-read cartoonist in the
world. He bought a rambling 29-room
house on an island in Long Island
Sound and had the time of his life
cramming it with Aztec masks, Buddhist shrines, the shells of man-eating
clams and other exotic curios.
But he never sat back and played
lord of the manor. He was the hardest
worker I ever knew. By 6:30 every
morning of the year, he
was at his drawing
board. He never paid
for an item, people from
all over the world sent
him suggestions. In
addition, a full-time
assistant dug up historical oddities. Ripley himself made the drawings
and wrote the captions.
He was a fanatic on
accuracy. Every item
had to be verified, witnessed, notarized.
Much of his material he gathered
first-hand. Mention some distant curiosity of person or place, and his eyes
would light up. He’d take a deep breath,
as though he could already sniff the
trade winds, and start packing. He’d
toss his drawing materials into one
suitcase, travelling gear into another,
and take off for the ends of the earth.
Once he heard about a mountaintop monastery in Greece that one
could reach only by being hauled up a
300-metre cliff in a wicker basket. So he
went to see it for himself.

The Unbelievable Mr Ripley
I remember when he heard about
the Bell of the Maiden, outside of Tartar
Gate of Peiping (now Beijing). It was
supposed to be the largest hanging bell
in the world. The legend was that in
order to satisfy the emperor’s wish for
the sweetest-sounding bell in China,
the bellmaker’s daughter threw herself
to her death in the molten bronze, just
before the bell was cast. Ripley travelled all the way to China to see the bell
and sketch it.
Another time he heard a fantastic
story about some German scientists
who froze to death in the middle of
Africa. Soon he was on his way to the
Belgian Congo. Sure enough, he found
the story was true. In 1908 an expedition of 20 men had died of exposure at
–51°C on the glacial slopes of Mount
Karisimbi, a volcano only 160 kilometres from the equator. He hired a plane
and flew over the place.
The years swirled by for Rip in a
montage of trips, radio shows, lecture
tours, television programmes—and
very little rest. One night at a party at
his house just after World War II, he
and I were sitting to one side, talking.
He looked tired. He was in his 50s and
some of the snap was gone from his
brown eyes. “Rip,” I said, “why don’t
you quit and take it easy?”
Thoughtfully, he picked up a Canton
ivory ball—one of those hollow, filigreed balls within balls—that had taken
a Chinese craftsman a lifetime to carve.
He turned it over in his hand. “It’s
impossible, isn’t it, for anyone to have

done this? Yet there it is. A hundred
years ago a man sat down and devoted
his life to making this ball. It’s things
like that that keep me going. Proving
that the impossible can happen—that
it happens all around us every day.
Trying to make people see that they
themselves can do the impossible if
they try hard enough.” He grinned,
and added, as if to take the edge off
being so serious, “Believe it or not.”
Ripley never did quit, even though
hypertension had caught up with
him. On Tuesday, 24 May 1949, he
appeared as usual on the weekly
Believe It or Nott TV show from New
York. Three days later he was dead.
‘Believe It or Not’ cartoons, drawn
by others, still appear in hundreds of
newspapers every day. I think of him
every time I see them—also, every
time I look out the window. On our
lawn in New Rochelle, New York, there
is a big hand-carved Alaskan totem
pole. Rip sent it to me 30 years ago as
a house-warming present. When I
protested about what my neighbours
might say, he only chuckled, “The
kids’ll love it.”
Today Rip’s totem pole is a neighbourhood institution. Each year new
classes of school children come to see
it. Strangers stop to inspect it. It’s a
landmark. And it’s Ripley. To me,
looking at it is just like hearing Rip’s
voice again, with the old ring in it, saying that the world is filled with
romance, and there are lots of places
and lots of things he’s got to see.
readersdigest.in

89

JANUARY 1972

“You don’t just sit and wait for adventure
to come,” famed polar explorer
Knud Rasmussen liked to explain.
“You go out and make it happen!”
by Allen Rankin

90 april 2024

Reader ’s Digest

PHOTO ALA MY

UP THE

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91

Reader ’s Digest

during that winter of 1923 to 24, members
Eskimo* tribe, peering from the entrances
os, could hardly believe their eyes. Through
he howling wind and lashing snow, came
man. Ignoring any weapons aimed at him,
ed a grin and joked in fluent Eskimo lanat any way to greet a friend who has come
What are we having for dinner?”
Thus, Knud Rasmussen, the inimitable Danish explorer and ethnologist,
forged and charmed his way steadily
westwards across the whole bleak and
stormy roof of North America. When
he reached Nome in mid-1924, he had
completed the longest, most remarkable sledge journey in Arctic annals.
The winding course he had followed in
order to seek out hundreds of tribal villages scattered from Hudson Bay to the
Pacific had taken him, in three years,
some 32,000 kilometers.
The feats of this master explorer
are still relevant today. Thanks partly
to Rasmussen’s wanderings, his native Greenland, once a precariously
claimed Danish colony, is now undisputedly Danish territory. Thus, little
Denmark holds sway over a 217.5 million hectare area, 50 times the size of
herself, and not quite as large as India.
The outpost of Thule [now called
Qaanaaq], Greenland, founded by
Rasmussen, is still the northernmost
major settlement on the globe** as well
as the site of the free world’s largest

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2 april 2024

ballistic missile centre and early warning station. Today, Rasmussen’s writings remain the leading authority on
the more primitive Eskimo tribes.
Born in 1879 in the village of Jacobschaven [now known as Ilulissat] on
Greenland’s Central West Coast, Rasmussen got a head start on other Arctic
explorers of his generation. Before he
was six years old, he was accompanying his father, a Danish missionary, on
sled trips among the local Eskimos.
At eight, he was driving his own dog
team; at 10, joining the native men in
hunts. The local schoolmaster complained that the parson’s son was truant too often, but Knud was developing
a powerful physique and acquiring an
intimate knowledge of the Eskimo’s
language, customs and legends.
Far over the mountains, went one
*The term ‘Eskimo’ is still prevalent but fading from popular use. ‘Inuit’ is currently the
more accepted term to refer to the indigenous
peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
**Today, Alert, in Nunavut, Canada is the
world’s northernmost permanent settlement.

P HOTO: THE ROYAL LIBRARY

He Opened Up the Arctic
myth, in the dark “Kingdom of the
North Wind himself, right at the end of
the world,” there lived a ferocious race
of people who wore polar bear skins
and ate their enemies. The tale became
a challenge to the boy.
The year Knud was 12, the Rasmussens moved to Denmark. Although
he felt caged up there, he struggled
through Copenhagen University.
But the urge back towards the Arctic
was strong in him. At 23, he wangled
a job as scout for a Danish expedition,
which planned to explore the Cape
York region of north-west Greenland, part of the fabled “Kingdom of
the North wind”.
The ‘ferocious’ Cape Yorkers, it
turned out, were Eskimos like the others he had known. But never before
had they known a visitor like Knud
who spoke their language and threw
himself into their hunts, feasts and
the dances. Kununguak, (Little Knud),
they called him, and “Kununguak
danced with me!” became the boast of
women of all ages. Hunters snatched
bits of his fur clothing for good-luck
charms; and nearly everyone poured
out to him thoughts and stories that
no white man had ever heard before.
Knut eagerly recorded them.
Back in Copenhagen, Knud wrote
a popular book, The People of the
Polar North, which, published in
1905, gave the world its first wellrounded picture of these valiant and
colourful primitive tribes. The same
year, he married Dagmar Anderson,

Greenlandic–Danish explorer and
ethnologist, Knud Rasmussen is often
called the father of Inuitology.

an elegant Danish débutant. They had
two daughters and a son.
The government turned a deaf
year to Rasmussen’s plea that it establish trade with the fur hunters of
Greenland’s north half. This vast ‘no
man’s land’ was then barren and unclaimed. So in 1910, Knut set up a
private trading post on the coast near
Cape York, which he named Thule.
Knut personally went out and recruited workmen, nurses, even a doctor for his settlement, and eventually
a small church, school and a six-bed
hospital sprang up there.
Soon, Norway and other countries
began to covet this region. They were
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too late. Knut had unofficially claimed
the land for Denmark. Rasmussen
invested his profits from this northernmost shop in the world into further exploration of the Arctic. Over a
period of 21 years, he launched seven
major expeditions.
One thing marred the joy that
Rasmussen took in this strenuous outdoor life. He was frequently in pain
from a spinal injury received in a motorboat crash at age 30. In 1912, three
years after the accident, Knud and
Peter Fruygen, the Danish naturalist
and author, were crossing 1,125 kilometers of inland ice to map Greenland’s northeast Coast. When a glacier

“You go out and makee it happen.”
At age 42, Rasmussen was ready to
meet the challenge for which his earlier expeditions had prepared him. In
June 1921, the fame-bound Fifth Thule
Expedition to Arctic North America,
sailed out of Copenhagen. It consisted
of Knud and five scientists, plus a
handful of Eskimos.
For two years, they headquartered
on Danish Island, south of Canada’s
Melville Peninsula, and fanned out on
explorative treks in all directions. And
then, Knud began his major mission,
the main lap of his Great Sledge Journey to the Pacific. Watching him depart
that morning of 11 March 1923, his

blocked the way at Cape Schmelck,
Knud, with a harness strung across
his forehead, painfully pulled his big,
heavily loaded sledge for seven hours
over the sheer 1,000-metre ice barrier.
News of such feats reached Copenhagen. Returning there in 1913, Knud
found himself a celebrity, greeted by
cheering crowds and honoured by
torchlight parades. The Rasmussen
legend continued to grow, and he
kindled in everyone some of his own
enormous enthusiasm him for life.
“You don’t just sit and wait for adventure to come,” he liked to explain.

colleagues wondered if they’d ever see
him again. With him, there were only
two Thule Eskimos and two six-metre
sledges, each drawn by 12 Huskies.
There was danger in every new
meeting with wild, roving Eskimo
bands, some of whom had never
seen a white man before. Often, the
expedition was greeted with threats,
sometimes with warning shots. Knud
smiling, would walk boldly up to
his challengers. “I have come to see
what you are made of,” he joked.
Invariably, all tribes accepted him as
one of their own.

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He Opened Up the Artic

PH OTO : TH E ROYAL LIBRARY

Knud Rasmussen (fourth from left) with other members of the Fifth Thule Expedition.

To Rasmussen, rushing to record
the ways of these people before advancing civilization could change
them too much was the height of excitement. He saw in them a “witness
to the strength and endurance and
wild beauty of human life.”
On the Kent Peninsula, the small
task force was joined by Leo Hansen, a
Danish cameraman who documented
the rest of the journey with historic
films. By November, each day held
only an hour and a half of light, and in
the minus 50 degree cold, the camera
froze every five minutes.
About 17 months after being swallowed up by the wilderness, Rasmussen’s expedition emerged on Alaska’s
Pacific Coast. Then, to meet tribes still
farther west, he chartered a ship and

crossed the Bearing Street to Siberia.
He wanted to mush home via Northern
Europe, but startled Russian officials
sent him back to North America.
In daring to realize his dream, Rasmussen made several discoveries
about the Eskimos: that all their tribes,
many of them isolated from each
other by thousands of kilometers, and
for perhaps thousands of years, speak
basically the same language, and that
most of them, along with some Indian
[Native American] tribes, share similar
customs and myths. Thus, he offered
important confirmation of a now generally accepted theory: All Eskimos, as
well as the American Indians, came
from Asia and migrated to America
across the Bering Strait.
Somehow, Knud had managed to
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collect—and ship home—some
15,000 ethnographical and archaeological objects, ranging from
small ambulates to kayaks and entire tents of wood and skin. This
treasure, lodged at Denmark’s National Museum in Copenhagen,
remains the largest and most complete collection of its kind. Furthermore, Rasmussen offered mankind
a complete and unique description
of the Eskimo’s intellectual culture.
Rasmussen was honoured at
home and abroad, but glory was
tempered with regret. The man of
action wanted to go on exploring.
Yet he knew that if his experiences
on the Great Sled Journey were
to have full value, he must record
them for posterity, and so he spent
the next five years writing Across Arctic America: The Eagle’s Gift,
t one of his
best collections of Eskimo folk tales
and several more technical works.
In 1932, at age 53, Rasmussen
topped off his career by going before
the International Court of Justice at
The Hague to argue against Norway’s
long disputed claim to East Greenland.
Denmark was granted complete sovereignty over the land of his birth.
Knud seemed indestructible, but
time was fast running out for him.
On an expedition to East Greenland
in 1933, he contracted a rare meat
poisoning. When his ship docked at
Copenhagen in November, he was
fatally ill. He heard the cheers of the
waiting throng and forced himself to

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6 april 2024

Rasmussen (left) with Mrs Arnalulunguak
and Mr Meetek, Inuit hunters who were
part of the Fifth Thule Expedition crew.

get up from the stretcher. Proud and
erect, he walked on the gangplank and
managed his old confident grin before
being driven off to a hospital. When he
died seven weeks later, all Denmark
joined Greenland in mourning.
Today, on the road north of Copenhagen, a massive 30-ton statue stands
looking out to sea. The familiar face
that springs from the granite has a look
of cheerfully boyish expectation. The
inscription from an Eskimo song reads:
“Only the spirits of the air,
Will know what I shall find beyond
the mountains,
Yet I will urge my sledge dogs,
Forward, forward, forward ...”

PHOTO: NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Reader ’s Digest

Reader ’s Digest

Viewpoints
MUSINGS AND OPINIONS

1930s

1940s

THIS AN AGE OF SPEED, but a
hurry-up age doesn’t require us
to be a hurry-up people. I’ve seen
motorcar drivers who insist upon
being the car—on a long hill they
lean forward, jaws set, muscles
strained, and work hard. They
think they’re speeding things up;
but we can speed up things only
with skill, and skill is acquired
slowly and patiently.
Racing motorcars and airplanes
aren’t driven by tense, hurried
men, but by calm and skillful ones.
Fast thinkers grow from painstaking students and careful observers.
Looking at life from a pitcher’s
box, I don’t think we have to break
our necks to keep up. If I should
let the yells of the grandstand panic
me into hasty action, I’d get tense
and shoot wild. There’s a great diff
ference between handling a ball and
being one. Baseball is a fast game,
but you’ve got to slow down to play
it. And life is that way, too, I think.

IT SEEMS TO ME that a critic who
is not keenly aware of the defects of
a lovely thing is but a crude critic.
My attitude is the same even in love.
The women whom I have loved are
women of whose defects I have been
poignantly aware. The lover who is
not thus aware seems to me scarcely a
lover at all, merely the victim of a delusion. I feel contempt for the ‘love’
that is blind; to me there is no love
without clear vision, and perhaps,
also, no vision in the absence of love.

—CARL HUBBELL, STAR PITCHER FOR THE NEW
YORK GIANTS, IN THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
FEBRUARY 1938

—— HAVELOCK ELLIS, IN MY LIFE,
MARCH 1940

1950s
SELFISHNESS IS NOT living as
one wishes to live; it is asking
others to live as one wishes to live.
And unselfishness is letting other
people’s lives alone, not interfering
with them. Selfishness aims at
creating around it absolute uniformity. Unselfishness recognizes
infinite variety as delightful, accepts
it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.
—OSCAR WILDE, AUGUST 1951

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97

Laughter
THE BEST MEDICINE

1950s
AS I PASSED a stunning blonde, a
sleek car slid by and the driver gave
her a wolf-whistle. The young lady
smiled and at the same moment
caught my eye. “I certainly get a
thrill out of that,” she said. “Imagine
two thousand pounds’ worth of car
whistling at half-a-crown’s worth
of peroxide.
—L.J. BRADLEY, OCTOBER 1959

We knew that Bill was her steady
beau, but we were shocked at her
being in his rooms so late and were
certainly not prepared for what was
to come.
“Guess what?” she asked.
“We’re engaged!”
The best her mother could muster after a confusion riddled pause was a
weak, “In what?”
—L. LYLE ROBERTSON, DECEMBER 1963

1960s

1970s

BEFORE I sang for the women at
a Quaker home for the aged, the
matron warned me that it was hard
to predict what kind of reception
I would get. To my delight, they
applauded vigorously after each
number, and I felt the programme
was a success.
The matron was pleased, too. “It
was wonderful!” she said enthusiastically. “I wish you could come more
often—clapping their hands is so
good for their arthritis.”

HAVE YOU noticed that some of
the rooms in new apartments are so
small that when you put the key in
the door, it cuts off the ventilation?

—MARGARETE H. KOCH, APRIL 1963

LATE IN THE evening we received a telephone call from our daughter, who is
away at school. “Mom,” she shouted excitedly, “I’m at Bill’s apartment.”

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— LOU ERICKSON, ATLANTA JOURNAL,
AUGUST 1977

1980S
JUST BACK from the grocery store,
I was unpacking my purchases when
my 15-year-old son walked into the
kitchen. “What did you buy that’s
good to eat?” he asked.
“Lots,” I answered. “Grapes,
oranges, apples—”
“Let me ask it a different way,
Mom,” he broke in. “What did you
buy that’s bad to eat?”
—MARCIA LEVY, APRIL 1988

Reader ’s Digest

1990s
WE HAD JUST MOVED to a lovely,
quiet area, but my husband and I
were a little concerned to discover
that the neighbours all seemed to be
elderly. We wondered how they would
react to our baby and our large, boisterous sheepdog.
My fears were heightened one afternoon when I answered the doorbell to
find a frail-looking woman leaning on
her cane. Assuming she had come to
complain about the infant’s crying, I
began to stammer an apology. But she
lifted one hand to halt my outburst
and said, “I just wanted to know if
your dog could come out and play.”
—NANCY SWERDLOW, JULY 1991

ONE SUNDAY, while driving out
from our Bombay suburb, we encountered a traffic jam. In the distance we
could see a large group of people
blocking the road, holding banners
and placards.
“What sort of demonstration could
this be, on a Sunday?” asked my husband, as he made a U-turn to get to
an alternate route.
But we soon realized that that road,
too, was jammed because scores of
other motorists had also taken it. After
nearly an hour of wasting a lot of petrol, idling or crawling along, we had
only covered a distance that normally
would have taken us less than five
minutes. We finally got out of the jam
and passed the banner-waving group.

The banners read: “OIL-SAVING
WEEK” and “SAVE PETROL.”
—SHEILA SIVANAND, JANUARY 1995

2000s
DANCING AT A PARTY, I tripped
and stubbed my toe. Days later, my
toe swollen and purple, I went to see
a podiatrist. I told him how I hurt myself. After X-raying my toe, the doctor
said he didn’t need to do anything.
Anxious to speed the healing, I asked
whether there was something I could
do: “Should I soak it? Put it on on ice?
Is there anything you recommend?”
He smiled and said, “Take
dancing lessons.”
—BARBARA NANESS, FEBRUARY 2001

I WAS TRYING to discuss plans for
the weekend with my husband and
said that I wanted to see the movie,
An Ideal Husband. Wearily he put
down his newspaper. “I’m sure you
do, dear,” he said. “But let’s face it,
you’re stuck with me.”
—GAEL GILBER, MARCH 2001

BEING A TEENAGER and getting a
tattoo seem to go hand in hand these
days. I wasn’t surprised when a friend
of my daughter’s showed me a Japanese symbol on her hip. “Please don’t
tell my parents,” she begged.
“I won’t,” I promised.
“By the way, what does that
stand for?”
“Honesty,” she said.
—LINDA SINGER, JANUARY 2004

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FEBRUARY 2005

THE GOOD

BADSHAH
Bollywood’s Top Gun,
he’s here to charm
and entertain
BY Monisha Pratap Shah

102
2 april 2024

PHOTO: AL AMY

I

t was late in the evening and
Shah Rukh Khan had been nursing a bad cold all day. “Fifteen
minutes, right?” He said as he
ushered me, swagging into his
plush mahogany office.
“That’s not enough!” I wailed.
Shah Rukh turned on his dimpled
smile and I’d realized he’d been
teasing me. And sure enough, he
then kept talking—fast, animated,
and often bursting into laughter
between the sniffles—for the next
90 minutes long after his staff had left
for the day.
Here I was with a man who’s arguably been, for well over a decade,

Reader ’s Digest

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Reader ’s Digest

RD: Let’s begin with you and your wife.
What brought you Gauri together?
Shah Rukh Khan: I have known her
since I was 18 and she was 14. She
was the first girl I asked for a dance.
I was shy with women.
RD: Did you face opposition at the
time of your marriage?
SRK: There were organizations
that kept a lookout at the civil courts
to see which Hindu is getting married
to which Muslim. But we gave
wrong addresses.
RD: What about Gauri’s parents?
SRK: it was strange for them, for I am
from a different religion. I don’t have
parents, and I wanted to join Hindi
films. I, too, would be a little wary of
somebody like that. But once her parents met me, they were quite all right
with it. Now her parents shout at her
more than they shout at me.
RD: What were you like at school
and college?
SRK: I was naughty in school. In col-

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lege, I spent most of my time on
sports. My school was very strict. At
that time, my discipline seemed
harsh, but as time goes by I think this
has helped me a lot. Discipline to me
means: If you have to do something,
you follow it to the end.
RD: If you weren’t a film star, what
would you have been?
SRK: Perhaps I would have gone
into advertising, making ad films.
Perhaps I would have been a teacher;
I like teaching.
RD: For a Hindi actor, you are not a
traditional good-looker.
SRK: Yes, I’ve been completely unconventional [laughs].
RD: Besides the fame, what pleasure
do you get out of acting?
SRK: For two and a half hours I am
able to control people’s emotions in
the sense that I lend a smile to their
faces, and take them away from everyday problems. That’s a great achievement. The rest is peripheral—the
labels attached to me, King Khan,
Badh Shah of Bollywood, XYZ ...
RD: Earlier, top Muslim stars like
Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari
changed their names to mask their
identity. Today’s top stars are openly
Muslim. Do you see films as a secularizing force?
SRK: I don’t think they changed their
names to conceal their religion. Non-

PHOTO: IMDB

Bollywood’s top star, heartthrob-inchief, and winner of innumerable
awards. But not once did Shah Rukh,
do or say anything to suggest any
of that. Instead, he reflected cheerfully on the things he holds most
dear—among them, his marriage and
family, his work, religious beliefs,
favourite books, and his weakness
for video games.

The Good Badshah

One of Bollywood’s most beloved pairings, Kajol and SRK in a still from K3G.

Muslims like Jeetendra saheb and
Ashok Kumar changed their names. I
think there was a time when there
used to be stage names for all actors.
Our industry is so secular—so many
Muslims in it are doing so well. Art is
not unsecular.

SRK: I’m here to entertain, not to promote secularism.
RD: Whom do you turn to in times
of trouble?
SRK: I talk to Allah—I pray to him.

RD: You
u are secular. You have ‘Om’ and
‘Allah’ inscribed in your house. Did
your parents instil this attitude in you?
SRK: Yes. My parents always told me
that God is one. I go to temples with
my friends. I celebrate both Eid and
Diwali. I’m teaching my kids to read
the Koran in English.

RD: You stopped praying after you
lost your mother—what made you reconnect to God?
SRK: I was very angry with God for a
little while, but then I realized if I remain angry with God there is no
chance I will ever meet my mother
again. If you are not friendly with God
there is no heaven and no hell.

RD: Would you promote secularism
through your work?

RD: You lost your parents when you
were very young. Has this made you
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Reader ’s Digest

RD: What memories do you have of
your parents?
SRK: Mom taught us that if you need
something, you must work for it, not
just sit and pray for it. Mother has been
dead for 15 years, my father for 25. One
memory I have is of them being both
soft and stern at the same time. They
were physically demonstrative, they
used to hug us a lot, and so that’s
something I do to my children.
RD: A children’s ward has been
named after your mother at Mumbai’s
Nanawati Hospital. How did you think
of donating for the cause? Are you doing other charitable work as well?
SRK: I went to that hospital one day
to see the child of someone who was
working with me. I felt conditions
were not very good, and when I asked
why, they said they needed funds. So
I decided to donate money, and they
were kind enough to name the ward
after my mother. I’ve seen it once—
when I went to open it—and I felt it

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was wonderful. I want to do more
charity, Inshallah. We are trying to see
that whichever film makes money, a
part of it will go for charity. We have
to do something with Main Hoon Na.
Maybe a cancer ward ...
RD: Any desire to do something for
the country? Have you thought of
joining politics?
SRK: I think I do my bit—I entertain
the country! But no politics for me. I
don’t think I’ll be good at it.
RD: Apart from spinal surgery, have
you faced any other difficult times?
Has surgery changed your perspective
on life?
SRK: I’m a believer in divine retribution. I believe I got the injury because
I deserved it. I must have done something that made me deserve to be in so
much pain. Now that I have gone
through the pain, I have absolved myself of the wrong that I must have done.
RD: do you believe in astrologers?
SRK: I don’t believe in astrology. I
believe only in God. I don’t mean
Allah, but the God I think is close to
my heart—I don’t know what he or
she looks like.
RD: Any fears now, especially while
doing action scenes?
SRK: I’m scared every time I exert
myself or travel a long distance, because the pain comes back. But it’s
something one has to live with.

PHOTO: IMDB

insecure in terms of spending time
with your kids?
SRK: I don’t think so. But it’s important that in their formative years, they
do not feel that their father has not
been around because he is busy making movies. I like to be home by 6:30,
so I can spend a couple of hours with
them before they sleep. I put them to
bed, take them to school. I go for PTA
meetings like any other parent. All the
normal things everyone does.

The Good Badshah
RD: It’s been said that you’re prone
to insomnia.
SRK: Not really. When I sleep, I sleep
like a log—nobody can wake me up. I
sleep for four to five hours. If I sleep
longer, I have a problem.

RD: You’re a chain smoker—any plans
to give up smoking?
SRK: I’m not really a chain smoker—if
I don’t have cigarettes, I don’t smoke.
But I’m planning to quit and I have
cut back.

RD: One keeps reading about your
high energy levels.
SRK: Strange, I too hear about it. I
thought everyone was like that. Everybody has to get up in the morning and
go about his life and that’s what I also
do. I have a simple middle-class lifestyle, but because it is larger than
life on screen it seems that way in
real life, too.

RD: You are writing your autobiography. Is it cathartic? Does it help you to
get over unpleasant issues?
SRK: By nature, I leave the good and
bad behind—it’s not because of writing the book that I’ve become like that.
I understand very deeply that things
only matter at one point in time. If
you’re hurt, you must let the moment
be and go on. But I don’t forget. I

A still from the massively successful Kuch Kuch Hota Hai—2023 marked the movie’s
25th anniversary
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remember everything that is said or
done to me, but I don’t hold it to heart.
RD: You are a gizmo freak—computers and video games are your passion.
Does technology stimulate you?
SRK: Technology to me is a great
thing. New things turn me on. I get
video games for my kids that are too
I’ve advanced for them, and I play
with them myself.
RD: You are a voracious reader. Which
book are you reading currently?
SRK: I read three or four books at a
time. I’ve just finished a thriller called
Digital Fortress, and now I’m reading
a book on the Kabala, an ancient religion. I’m also reading The Five People
You Meet in Heaven, [a novel about
how every person on Earth matters].
Before that, I read a book called The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time. I go to bookstores when
I’m in London or America. I get a
coffee and I keep browsing for
hours—something I can’t do in India.
I come back home with a bag full of
books. I’m always stopped at customs
as they think I’m carrying some heavy
electronic items!
RD: Your business venture, Dreamz
Unlimited, did not do too well. Now,
you have started a production
company called Red Chillies. What
kind of movies will you make?
SRK: I’ve always made movies close
to my heart. Any story is nice as long

108 april 2024

as it makes you feel good. I have no
socially relevant or women emancipation subjects close to my heart. I’m
an entertainer.
RD: Are you a good businessman?
SRK: I don’t think so. I don’t know
how to ask for money. I don’t know
how to deal with money. But I’m not
I’m not a fool either—I am very clear
in my business dealings; they are very
transparent and up front. Also, very
few people tend to cheat me. They
know I’m the means to an end—so
why kill the golden goose? [Laughs].
Also, I do carry a bit of clout.
RD: Are you interested in directing
films?
SRK: Directing is a very lonely job.
The responsibility and the stress are
so great, and the end result is never
your own. But if I become a director, I
must have enough money to produce
my own films. I’d be an expensive director, and I don’t want to utilize
someone else’s money for my whims
and fancies.
RD: You’ve tried your hand at almost
everything—recently, you even lent
your voice to a cartoon film. What if
you reach a stage where you find that
nothing stimulates you?
SRK: I hope I never reach that stage.
If things don’t happen to you, you
have to make them happen. You never
wait for life to happen to you—you
rush towards life with open arms.

College Rags
1960s
A FRESHMAN HOME from college
advanced some theories that his
parents thought were a bit far out.
His father stood it as long as he
could before shouting, “I sent you
to college to get an education, not
a lot of ideas!”
—GEORGE H. DENNY, OCTOBER 1967

1980s
WHEN 4,600 Virginia Tech graduates
gathered in the football stadium for
commencement ceremonies in 1981,
the exuberance of the occasion led to
chants as the degrees were conferred.
Graduates of the College of Engineering
rose en masse, enthusiastically chanting, “We’ve got jobs! We’ve got jobs!”
To which the graduates of the College
of Business cheerfully responded,
“Working for us! Working for us!”

time produce millions upon
millions of sperm. Why are so
many sperm produced?”
One young woman’s answer:
“Because they won’t ask for
directions, either.”
—G. A. PEARSON, OCTOBER 1995

2000s
I CALLED MY SON ONE DAY, a
sophomore at Mars Hill College
in North Carolina, and heard this
message on his answering machine:
“A is for ‘academics’, B is for ‘beer’,
It’s one of these reasons we are
not here.”
Startled by his poem, I left him my
own in response:
“M is for ‘mom’, G is for ‘groan’,
If you don’t change your message,
you’re soon coming home!”
—LYNN CRATER, FEBRUARY 2000

—CINDY MASSIE, JUNE 1982

1990s
Biology
class I teach at a Texas university,
we had been studying human reproduction. For an exam, one of my
questions was: “Female humans
are born with a limited number
of eggs, while males during their life-

OUR BUSINESS PROFESSOR at
Texas Tech University was lecturing
about different ways to bill customers. He asked, “Who can give me an
example of a system where you are
billed before you actually receive
your goods?” One student piped
up, “College tuition!”
—BLAKE BEEDY, NOVEMBER 2000

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Reader ’s Digest

Notes from All Over
NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

1940s

1970s

UNITED STATES As a necessary
part of their education, rich little
boys and girls at a New York prekindergarten school are taught how
to walk up and down stairs. Living
in elevator apartments, they never
use stairs and have to be trained.
—MEYER BERGER IN N. Y. TIMESS, JANUARY 1940

1960s
JAPAN Romantic young men in
Kyoto, Japan, who are interested
in an outing on nearby Lake Biwa,
can rent a rowboat complete with a
pretty girl. The motto on the boat
landing reads: “Enjoy yourself as
if you and your companion were a
couple in love.” Informed sources
warn, however, that the girls are
trained to dunk troublemakers.
—SHUKAN BUNSHUN, QUOTED BY UPI,
JANUARY 1966

INDIA At the New Delhi Golf Club
in India, the ground rules specify
that, if a monkey picks up a ball, it
must be played wherever he drops it.
—CASKIE STINNETT IN HOLIDAY,
Y
FEBRUARY 1967

110 april 2024

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Suitors are dealt with tactfully in
parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina
in central Yugoslavia. The young
man is wined and dined by the girl’s
family, and all aspects of the prospective marriage are talked over.
But the girl’s family doesn’t come
out with a flat yes or no. Instead,
at the end of the discussion, coffee
is served. If it is sweet, the suitor
knows he is accepted. If bitter—
better luck elsewhere.
—ASSOCIATED PRESS, MARCH 1977
—

SCOTLAND The tour guide at
Edinburgh Castle, which sits high
atop a volcanic rock, was explaining
the protocol behind the custom of
firing an 11-kg field gun next to a
parapet overlooking the Scottish
city. “The gun is fired at exactly
one p.m., resounding loudly across
the city below,” the guide explained.
“This helps us tell the tourists from
the natives. When it’s fired, you see,
Edinburghers check their watches.
The tourists jump two feet.”
—JOANNE L. IZZO, JULY 1978

1980s
UNITED KINGDOM Cats have
been on the official payroll of the
British Post Office for more than a
century. They’re not hired to sort or
deliver mail, of course, but to keep
letters from being eaten by mice.
The problem was especially
bad in London in the mid-1800s,
when mice invaded the mail-sorting
rooms. Traps and poisons proved ineffective, and in 1868 the Secretary
of the Post Office approved the hiring of three female cats at a weekly
allowance of two cents each.
Within months the rodent population had shrunk dramatically, and
the other post offices received the
go-ahead to hire. Many did and, as
the felines became more prominent
in the work force, their pay improved.
In 1953 the Assistant Postmaster
General assured the House of Commons that female mouse-hunters
received ‘very adequate’ maternity
benefits and enjoyed the same wages
and employment opportunities as
male cats.
Today, cats are on the payroll of
at least three London postal sites, at
an average wage of $1.60 a week.
—IRVING WALLACE, DAVID WALLECHINSKY
AND AMY WALLACE IN PARADE, MARCH 1983

CHINA In some major cities the
crowds are leaping, twisting and
twirling frenetically to American
rock ‘n‘ roll. The People’s Republic

of China has caught Saturday night
dance fever! The usually dour
Communist Party officials who are
monitoring all this arm-twisting diversity seem to have made the decision
that dancing is not a bad way to let
off steam, and that disco in particular
may not be the decadent Western
activity that they deemed it during
the Cultural Revolution. Rather, they
claim, it is a kind of folk dance. It also
turns out to be good exercise.
—DANIEL SOUTHERLAND IN WASHINGTON
POST, APRIL 1986

1990s
BRAZIL The flooding of thousands
of square kilometers of rain forest
in Brazil has given birth to an unusual industry—the extraction of
underwater wood.
Millions of tree trunks, below the
waters of a lake formed by the 1980
construction of the Tucuruí hydroelectric dam in Para, captured the
entrepreneurial vision of Juarez Cristiano Gomes. He invented an electric
saw that works underwater and set
up a company to extract this wood.
The lumberjacks wearing air tanks
go down as far as 164 feet, but are
never in danger of being smashed by
trees they cut since they ‘fall’ upward
to the surface. The trunks are then
towed to sawmills. But there is another risk—last year a lumberjack
was bitten by a piranha.
—DESPERTAIL, FEBRUARY 1992

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Cartoon Quips
QUIPS AND PUNCHLINES FROM THE FUNNIES

1950s
NOVEMBER 1958

Chairman of the board to other members: “Of course, it’s only a suggestion,
gentlemen, but let’s not forget who’s
making it.”
–SATURDAY EVENING POST
Father greeting daughter’s date:
“You must be the one who defies
description.”
—DATEBOOK

One woman to another: “Of course I
don’t believe in this astrology nonsense. We Virgos aren’t easily taken in.”
–HOEST, KING FEATURES
Man on office telephone: “Good
morning from Wirtz, Miesbauer, Holan,
Gehagen and Associates, and also from
me sir—a pleasant, nameless cog in
the wheel.” — THAVES, NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE

Teenager coming home from dance
to mother: “Roger was the life of the
party—that gives you an idea how
dull it was.”
—KATE O’HARA,
A NEA

Gas station attendant to Arab sheik
motorist: “ I don’t know how to tell
you this, sir—you need oil.”

Real estate agent to young couple:
“Yes, I do have a house in your price
range, but it’s in Guatemala.”

1980s

—GEORGE DOLE IN NATIONAL ENQUIRER

AU G U S T 1 9 8 6

Shivering wife in boat to duck-hunting
husband: “Tell me again how much fun
we’re having—I keep forgetting!”

Elderly person holding some bottles
to neighbour: “I take this pill for energy. I take this one for endurance.
I take this one for appetite. And I take
this one when I find out what all
the others cost.”

—SATURDAY EVENING POST

—BEN TEMPLETON AND TOM FOREMAN,

—SATURDAY EVENING POST

TRIBUNE COMPANY SYNDICATE

1970s
Waiter to customer: “What do you
mean the service is poor ? I haven’t
given you any yet.”

Ma, after buying some brushes and a
canvas to art-supply store clerk: I
need enough paint for two mountains, five trees and a small lake.”

—BUSINO, KING FEATURES

—JIM UNGER, UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

O C TO B E R 1 9 7 5

2 april 2024
112

IT PAYS TO ENRICH YOUR

Word Power
OUR COLUMN FROM APRIL 2001

Here’s a little April Fools’ trick in this month’s quiz.
For each word, two of the definitions are right. See if you can identify
the correct two in each case, then turn the page to check your results.
(Give ourself half a point for each correct definition.)

1. jig—A: fast dance. B: job.
C. mechanical guide.
D: temporary solution.
2. maverick— A: large firearm.
B: unbranded calf. C: dissenter.
D: law officer.
3. stay—A: walking stick. B: supporting rope or cable. C: period of
analysis. D: delay.
4. capital—A: involving death.
B: coin. C: original. D: first-rate.
5. bloom—A: undergarment. B: algae
growth. C: fruit. D: youthful glow.
6. garnish—A: to seize legally.
B: embellish. C: strangle. D: prepare
soil for planting.
7. litter—A: absorbent paper.
B: stretcher. C: luggage. D: rubbish.
8. hail—A: to call out to. B: pull.
C: compel. D: acclaim
9. inertia—tendency to A: remain
at rest. B: keep moving. C: inspire
action. D: stumble.
10. pad—A: to fail. B: swim. C: fill.
D: walk softly.

11. quarter—A: to limit portions.
B: provide with lodging. C: suppress.
D: divide into parts.
12. close—A: dry. B: confining.
C: open and shut. D: intimate.
13. compact—A: cosmetics case.
B: collision. C: bundle of herbs.
D: formal agreement.
14. relief—A: foolishness. B: aid.
C: projection from a flat surface.
D: steadiness.
15. mean—A: excellent. B: soothing.
C: displaying fine bearing. D: nasty.
16. buckle—A: to dislodge. B: become tense. C: crumple. D: fasten.
17. blaze—A: mark on a tree. B: ennui. C: flood. D: fire.
18. moot—A: debatable. B: not
worth discussing. C: not able to
speak. D: uncaring.
19. coif—A: velvet-covered shoe.
B: cap. C: pastry. D: hairstyle.
20. green—A: naive or inexperienced. B: flourishing. C: immature.
D: ecologically concerned.
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Reader ’s Digest

Word Power

ANSWERS
1. jig—A, C: Fast dance; also, guide,
as for drilling. Origin uncertain.
2. maverick—B, C: Unbranded or
stray calf; also, dissenter; nonconformist. After Samuel A. Maverick, a
Texas rancher in the 1800s who did
not brand his calves.
3. stay—B, D: Supporting rope or cable, as for a ship’s mast, also, delay;
postponement; as, a stay of execution.
From Latin staree (to stand).
4. capital—A, D: Involving death; as,
capital punishment; also, first-rate.
Latin capitaliss (of the head).
5. bloom—B, D: Sudden growth of algae in a body of water; also, youthful,
healthy glow. Old Norse blomi (flowers and foliage on trees).
6. garnish—A, B: To seize by legal authority; as, His wages were garnished;
also, to embellish; decorate. Old
French garnirr (to furnish).
7. litter—B, D: Stretcher for carrying a
sick or injured person; also, scattered
rubbish. Middle English litere (bed).
8. hail—A, D: To call out to; as, He
hailed a cab; also, to acclaim; greet.
Middle English hailen (to salute).
9. inertia—A, B: Tendency of matter
to remain at rest, if at rest; or to keep
moving, if in motion, unless affected
by an outside force. Latin (lack
of skill).
10. pad—C, D: To fill with cushioning
material; also, to walk with soft, noiseless steps. Dutch pad (path).

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11. quarter—B, D: To provide lodging;
also, to divide into four equal parts.
quartus (fourth).
12. close—B, D: Confining; as close
rooms; also, intimate; as, a close
friend. Middle English clos.
13. compact—A, D: Small case for
cosmetics; also, formal agreement.
Latin compingeree (to join together).
14. relief— B, C; Aid in time of need;
also, projection from a flat surface.
Latin relevaree (to lift up again).
15. mean—A, D: Excellent; as, a mean
game of bridge; also, nasty; as, a mean
dog. Middle English mene (common).
16. buckle—C, D: To crumple, as under pressure; also, to fasten; as, Buckle
your seat belt. Latin buccula (cheek
strap of a helmet).
17. blaze—A, D: Mark made by cutting
a piece of bark from a tree; hence, to
blaze a trail; also, intense fire. Middle
English blasee (flame).
18. moot—A, B: Debatable; open to
argument; as, a moot question; also,
not worth discussing, having already
been decided; as, The subject is moot.
Old English mot (meeting).
19. coif—B, D: Tight-fitting cap; also,
hairstyle. Late Latin cofia (helmet).
20. green—April Fools’! All are correct.
A green person lacks experience.
Green pastures are flourishing. Green
apples are immature. Green politics
emphasize ecological concerns.

Vocabulary Ratings
9–11: Fair 12–15: Good
16 or more: Excellent

Reader ’s Digest

Virtual Hilarity
1990s
JANUARY 1998

EAGER TO MAKE full use of my
new computer’s capabilities, I asked
a customer-service representative at
my bank whether it offered online
banking. “Certainly,” she stated matter-of-factly, pointing to a crowd of
people near the tellers. “The line
starts over there.” —JOHN A. CHERMACK
I WORK IN A busy office where a
computer going down causes quite
an inconvenience. Recently one of
our computers not only crashed, it
made a noise that sounded like a
heart monitor. “This computer has
flatlined,” a coworker called out with
mock horror. “Does anyone here
know how to do mouse-to-mouse?”
—MARY BOSS
NOVEMBER 1999

WHEN OUR DAUGHTER
R was born,
my husband rushed to send an email
to our friend Steve in Florida. But
in his haste, my husband made a
mistake in the address, and the announcement went to someone in
San Diego. The next day we received
a reply: “I’m not Steve, but congratulations on the birth of your daughter.

My baby daughter is almost 16 years
old and she just wrecked my car.
Best wishes.”
—TERRI LORCH
MY BROTHER
R said “amen” after
grace one night, and one of his children asked what it meant. Before he
or his wife could respond, their fiveyear-old answered, “It means ‘send.’”
—SIMON PLEVIN

2000s
FEBRUARY 2001

ONE OF MY FRIENDS mentioned that
his colleagues had nicknamed him ‘the
computer’. I asked if this was due to his
prodigious brainpower and impressive
multitasking skills. “No,” he admitted.
“It’s because someone is always swearing at me and trying to get me to work.”
—AL GRAY

WHETHER HE’S BUYING BOOKS
from Amazon.com or day trading on
a stock brokerage site, my 23-yearold brother is constantly on the
computer. One day as we drove by a
neighbour’s house, we noticed they
were having an estate sale.
As my brother peered at the sign
in the front yard, he asked, “What’s
E-state sale?”
—RUSSELL DILLARD
r ead
reader
d e r ssdigest.in
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115

Quotable Quotes
T be interested in the changing seasons
To
iis a happier state of mind than to be
hopelessly in love with spring.
h
—GEORGE SANTAYANA, January 1963

Lord, how the day
passes! It’s like a
life—so quickly
when we don’t
watch it, and so
slowly if we do.
—JOHN STEINBECK, East of Eden
en
(Viking Penguin), May 1995

The hardest
thing to disguise is
your feelings when you put
a lot of relatives on the
train for home.

The squeaky
wheel may get the
most oil, but it’s
also the first to
be replaced.
—MARILYN VOS SAVANT, Of
Course I’m for Monogamy
(St. Martin’s), May 2001

Truth has no special time
of its own. Its hour is
now—always.
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER , March 1987

KIN HUBBARD, December 1975

—EVA HOFFMAN, Exit into History
(Viking Penguin), May 2000

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—YO G I B E R R A ,
June 2003

image: alamy x 3

There’s nothing like a gleam
of humour to reassure you
that a fellow human being is
ticking inside a strange face.

The future
ain’t what it
used to be.