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Теги: magazine magazine reader's digest
Год: 2024
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APRIL 2024 AL SPECI R’S CTO COLLE ION EDIT FROM 1977 Agatha Christie: Queen of Mystery PAGE 48 `100 E L B A T T E G R O F UN S C I S S A CL S E R U G I F C I N O C I MEET S E V I H C R A E H T M O FR 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.
A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie Vice Chairperson And Executive Editor-In-Chief Kalli Purie Group Chief Executive Officer Dinesh Bhatia Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa Chief Executive Officer Manoj Sharma APRIL 2024 editor Kai Jabir Friese group creative editor Nilanjan Das group photo editor Bandeep Singh IMPACT (ADVERTISING) sr associate publisher Suparna Kumar sr general managers Mayur Rastogi (North & East) Jitendra Lad (West) general manager Syed Naveed (Chennai) chief manager Pushpa Hn (Delhi) senior associate editor Ishani Nandi features editor Naorem Anuja editorial coordinator Jacob K. Eapen senior art director Angshuman De associate art directors Chandramohan Jyoti, Praveen Kumar Singh chief of production Harish Aggarwal assistant manager Narendra Singh SALES AND OPERATIONS senior gm, national sales Deepak Bhatt general manager, operations Vipin Bagga general manager (north) Rajeev Gandhi regional sales manager (west) Yogesh G. Gautam BUSINESS group chief marketing officer Vivek Malhotra sr general manager, marketing Ajay Mishra general manager, itcms G. L. Ravik Kumar dep. general manager, marketing Kunal Bag asst. general manager, marketing Anuj K. Jamdegni Reader’s Digestt in India is published by: Living Media India Limited (Regd. Office: F-26, First Floor, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001) under a licence granted by the TMB Inc. (formerly RDA Inc.), proprietor of the Reader’s Digestt trademark. Published in 43 countries, 22 editions and 10 languages, Reader’s Digest is the world’s largest-selling magazine. It is also India’s largest-selling magazine in English. TRUSTED MEDIA BRANDS, INC. (formerly RDA Inc.) President and Chief Executive Officer Bonnie Kintzer Founders: DeWitt Wallace, 1889–1981; Lila Acheson Wallace, 1889–1984 HOW TO REACH US MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS/CUSTOMER CARE: Email rdcare@intoday.com Phone/WhatsApp No. +91 8597778778. Mail Subscriptions Reader’s Digest, C-9, Sector 10, Noida, UP—201301, Tel: 0120-2469900. Toll-free No 1800 1800 001 (BSNL customers can call toll free on this number). For bulk subscriptions 0120-4807100 Ext: 4318, Email: alliances@intoday. com. For change of address, enclose the addressed portion of your magazine wrapper. ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES: Phones Mumbai: 022-69193355; Chennai: 044-28478525; Bengaluru: 080-22212448; Delhi: 0120-4807100; Kolkata: 033-22825398, Fax: 022-66063226, Email rd4business@intoday.com. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Email editor.india@rd.com CORPORATE/EDITORIAL: Address Reader’s Digest, India Today Group, 3rd Floor, Film City 8, Sector 16A, Noida, UP—201301; Phone: 0120-4807100. We edit and fact-check letters. Please provide your telephone number and postal address in all cases. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ReadersDigest.co.in; Instagram: @readersdigestindia; Twitter: @ReadersDigestIN; Website: www.readersdigest.in/ © 2016 Trusted Media Brands, Inc. (Reader’s Digestt editorial material). © 2016 Living Media India Ltd. (Living Media editorial material). All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, in whole or part, in English or other languages, is prohibited. Printed and published by Manoj Sharma on behalf of Living Media India Limited. Printed at Thomson Press India Limited, 18–35 Milestone, Delhi–Mathura Road, Faridabad–121007, (Haryana). 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 readersdigest.in 19
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. readersdigest.in 21
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 22 2 april 2024 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 readersdigest.in 23
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 24 4 april 2024 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 readersdigest.in 25
Reader ’s Digest 26 6 april 2024
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 rreaders reader e ade r sdigest.in s dii ge g e s t.in .i 27 27
Reader ’s Digest 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 readersdigest.in 29
Reader ’s Digest 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 30 april 30 a p r il 2024 2024 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. r e ade r sdigest.in reader s dii gee s t.in 31 31
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 32 3 2 aapril p rril i l 2024 2024 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. readersdigest.in 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 readersdigest.in 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 readersdigest.in 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 r eaa d e r ssdigest.in reader d ig g e s t.ii n 39 39
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. readersdigest.in 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. 42 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, readersdigest.in 43
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 44 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 readersdigest.in 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 46 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 readersdigest.in 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 r e ade r sdigest.in reader s dii gee s t.in 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. readersdigest.in 51
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 . readersdigest.in 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, readersdigest.in 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 readersdigest.in 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 readersdigest.in 61
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 readersdigest.in 63
Reader ’s Digest 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 reader sdiges t.in 65
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, readersdigest.in 67
Reader ’s Digest 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 readersdigest.in 69
Reader ’s Digest 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. readersdigest.in 71
Reader ’s Digest 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.” 72 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. readersdigest.in 73
Reader ’s Digest 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 readersdigest.in 75
Reader ’s Digest 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 readersdigest.in 77
Reader ’s Digest 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.” readersdigest.in 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. readersdigest.in 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 82 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 readersdigest.in 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 86 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 readersdigest.in 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 readersdigest.in 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 92 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 readersdigest.in 93
Reader ’s Digest 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. 94 4 april 2024
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 readersdigest.in 95
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 96 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 readerr sdigest.in reade 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.” 98 april 2024 — 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 readersdigest.in 101
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,
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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- 104 4 april 2024 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 readersdigest.in 105
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 106 6 april 2024 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 readersdigest.in 107
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 readersdigest.in 109
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 readersdigest.in 111
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. readersdigest.in 113
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). 114 4 april 2024 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 d i g e s t.in n 115 115
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 116 6 april 2024 —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.