Obituary: Valluri Sriram, An Erudite Pluralist 

The date was 27 February, 2018. His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar travelled from Varanasi to Lucknow and thence to Gorakhpur on a Rail Yatra, similar to the one he had undertaken in Andhra Pradesh in 2014.

That evening he came to our house. While ecstatic devotees were waiting to have his glimpse and seek his blessings,‘Gurudev’ as he is called by legions of his followers walked up to my ailing father, Valluri Sriram, garlanded him and uttered, “I have come to see you.”

Exactly a year later, 27 February, 2019 the mortal remains of my father, whom my younger sister Uma and I addressed as ‘Appa’ would be consigned to flames. Appa passed away last evening, after his fourth hospitalisation at Prayagraj, succumbing to multiple organ failure. He was stricken with complications of the heart, COPD (he was not a smoker), Parkinson’s and finally brain atrophy.

Witnessing the organs of a nonagenarian capitulating is a dreadful sight. It is quite like a forlorn parrot in a cage seeking freedom. There is an intense battle between the body, the spirit, the mind and the soul. Ultimately it only proves that despite modern technology at human disposal we are mere mortals. Appa seemed to have lost the will to continue once his elder brother Valluri Kameshwar Rao (ICS retd) passed away in November 2018 at the grand age of 104. Confined as he was to the wheelchair, Appa could not attend the last rites of his dear brother, something that devastated him enormously.

The youngest of six siblings, my father was born on June 10 in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh in 1927. Despite being born into an orthodox Brahmin family he had chartered a separate path altogether. He joined the non-vegetarian mess in Andhra University where he was a tutee of economics. After completing his M Phil, he migrated to Delhi University to pursue his doctorate under the towering Dr V.K.R.V. Rao. Here he was to rub academic shoulders with such intellectual giants as Dr K.N. Raj, Dr Amartya Sen, Dr Sukhomoy Chakroborty and none other than Dr Man Mohan Singh.

He was always in pursuit of perfection and excellence and thus often missed wood for the trees. He was unable to complete his thesis, though he wrote several papers on Macro and Micro Economics. Pandit Nehru was singularly impressed with my father’s intellectual prowess and Appa went on to be a member of a team that visited China in 1955 and interacted with eminent Chinese leaders like Chou-En lai and Mao Tse-tung. Appa used to narrate in an animated manner about the growth in China and the Great Wall of China, the only man made structure thought to be visible from Earth’s satellite moon.

Appa had several friends and associates. Late Shri P.H. Vaishnav, a sterling bureaucrat of the Punjab cadre was one among them. My father and Vaishnav Uncle, both avid Wodehouse fans would often recall snippets from Wodehouse and the house resonated with laughter. The turning point in my father’s life was the birth of my sister Uma. She was his talisman and soon he was to work in FICCI, followed by ASSOCHAM and finally as secretary to Shri Hari Shankar Singhania.

Shri Valluri Sriram was a socialist by heart and ideological training. He shared a close association with several socialist stalwarts including Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Shri Jai Prakash Narayan, Shri George Fernandes, Shri Chandrashekar, Shri Madhu Dandavate and the popular Prime Minister Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee. Appa was part of the committee which drafted the manifesto of the Janata Party in 1977. I fondly recall when Telugu Desam was the principal opposition party, Shri Madhav Reddy, leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Shri P. Upendra would visit our house seeking advice on a broad spectrum of economic issues.

Professor S.H. Pathak of the Delhi School of Social Work was his close friend. It was at Pathak Uncle’s house that we would meet eminent theatre and film personalities like Girish Kasarvalli, B.V. Karanth and Girish Karnad among others, which fuelled my deep interest in dramatics.

However, Appa was deeply distressed during the 1984 riots and the dismantling of the disputed structure at Ayodhya which reflected his pluralistic nature, a trait he continued to deeply cherish till his demise. Certainly he was neither religious nor spiritual by nature. He was cast more in the mould of an agnostic attempting to unravel the mysteries of the universe through the prism of Nehruvian thinking and his training in economics.

Whilst his elder siblings had unflinching faith in Sathya Sai Baba and I am ardent follower of H. H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar my father attempted to discover the virtuosity of nature by his readings of Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt, Steve Jobs, Carl Sagan among others. Obviously the logical side of his brain was developed immensely, always demanding proof. In this pursuit, he found robust companions in my children Siddhartha and Tejala, both of who are highly sceptical of ‘gurus’. My parents in particular have been highly catholic by temperament and I was educated at St Xavier’s School Delhi and my sibling at the Presentation Convent. We were also closely associated with the church through priests like Bishop Rego and Bishop Remegius and also Mother Teresa. This certainly opened several vistas to my thought process.

Among the myriad experiences I have had in life was the visit of Shri Sundar Lal Bahuguna, the noted environmentalist to our home because of my father’s association with FICCI and ASSOCHAM. Appa always rued the fact that he could not complete his doctorate or join the Indian Administrative Service, a cross he bore.

It was ironical that last evening as we stepped out of the hospital, it began to pour. Even the Gods in the empyrean had tears to shed and would be getting ready to welcome Appa (a copy of his favourite Economist magazine in hand). Today his mortal remains lie in the mortuary at the Central Railway Hospital before being consigned to flames in the evening. But when he was physically fit he flitted between dargah, church and temple in search of the quintessential truth owing allegiance only to financial and intellectual truth.

May his soul rest in eternal peace. For sure, he would now have the chance to discover the eternal truth.

Victory to the Big Mind.

Also Read: An Indian Family Sans Caste Or Religion