Larger than us

Every day when I go to work, I sit in Jinnah8217;s chair. It8217;s made of solid brown leather. Solid, much used, very comfortable. The le...

Every day when I go to work, I sit in Jinnah8217;s chair. It8217;s made of solid brown leather. Solid, much used, very comfortable. The leather is a bit worn out and cracked but you could never guess its age.

It8217;s situated in the High Court Library in Bombay where Jinnah was a leading practitioner much before Independence. Folklore has it that between cases, when he had a little time, he would come and spend it in this chair. Given his bustling practice, it is doubtful that he would have had that much time. But the chair is so comfortable that I don8217;t doubt that he would have wanted to spend every spare moment in it.

I often wonder what he was thinking about when he sat on this chair. Probably about the matter he had just finished arguing and the matter which he would just go and argue. Probably wondering why the judge was being stubborn.

Jinnah at this time was very much a Bombay man and it is doubtful that he would have thought much of Pakistan. Of course, considering that a man8217;s thoughts are often not entirely known by him, much less by other people, this is just speculation.

It8217;s a small room. Twenty feet by ten and it is lined with books. If you step out of the room, you see a pine forest and if you are lucky and it8217;s a clear day, you see snow mountains. Trishul, Nanda Devi, Nandakot and many more. It is situated at Khali Estate near Binsar in the Kumaon Himalayas and Nehru spent a lot of time there when he could before

Independence. It was owned by Ranjit Pandit, Vijayalakshmi8217;s husband, and in the book Before Freedom which contains the correspondence of Vijayalakshmi and Jawaharlal, there are lots of references to Khali and life there.

Even today, there are many books of Vijayalakshmi there and once there were books and letters of Jawaharlal. My father read Nehru8217;s copy of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde at this very place many years ago.

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I cannot believe that Jawaharlal did not spend a lot of time in this little room reading, writing, ruminating when he was at Khali. And I can well imagine what he was thinking of. How to get rid of the British. The sooner the better.

Thus do mere mortals feel a connection to greatness.