MORGANTOWN — It was nearing 12 a.m. on the quite-new day of Aug. 15, 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru calmly stepped to the podium to deliver a speech, in English, to the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi.
Make that, the speech.
“Long years ago,” he began, “we made a tryst with destiny …”
An inaugural prime minister of a country, one as roughshod and rambling as it was reverent and quietly defiant, pushed on.
His audience sonically locked to his lilting cadence.
“And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially,” the new leader continued.
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
At that moment and that midnight, nothing mattered but Nehru’s words.
India, indeed, was her own.
Today, the country of 1.3 billion embarks on the 75th celebration of its independence from Colonial rule.
“Nation First, Always First” is the theme of the year-long noting of the struggle and victory.
Parades, prayers and dinners — and all with complete, cheerful disregard to class, caste and religion.
Access – physical, spiritual (or otherwise)
You can add “Always Heart,” to that theme if you like, Ranjit Majumder said this past Friday in Morgantown, as he readied for his own personal observance of the milestone.
Majumder, who just celebrated his 90th birthday, was a young college student in Calcutta when Nehru spoke into that microphone.
One of his professors who had studied in Illinois said he would help with the paperwork and particulars if he ever decided he wanted to journey to America.
That student smiled and nodded and was soon buckled into an airplane seat.
Majumder came to the Mountain State in 1969 to teach and do research at WVU after earning a doctorate in psychology from the University of Oklahoma.
The teaching was in the Department of Counseling, Rehabilitation Counseling and Counseling Psychology.
His research contributed to the founding of the Job Accommodation Network. Based in Morgantown, the nationwide network helps workers with disabilities get jobs, while giving guidance to employers who want to make sure their spaces are accessible to all.
It’s more than 8,000 miles from Calcutta to Morgantown, but Majumder was already doing the intellectual vectoring before he had his boarding pass for the plane.
He was long impressed that Gandhi was a devotee of Henry David Thoreau. The spiritual leader, in fact, even co-opted the Yankee writer’s principles of civic disobedience for his own course to country.
Gandhi’s example, in turn, grabbed Martin Luther King Jr.’s heart and thoughts for the Dream.
Before COVID clamped down, Majumder regularly made trips back with his pediatrician wife, be it through their local Rotary membership or their own medical volition.
Their main missions were to volunteer and be of service, he said.
His is the religion of simply reaching out a hand, he said.
“We all live on the same planet.”
Visions of service
Almost a decade after Majumder, physician V.K. Raju arrived in Morgantown from London.
In that royal city, he staffed emergency rooms, practiced internal medicine and began building success as an ophthalmologist.
Raju was recruited to WVU because of his expertise in corneal transplants. That made him a medical pioneer. No one else in the Mountain State was doing them in the late 1970s.
His growing-up years in Rajahmundry, a city known for its culture and commerce in Indian’s southeastern Andhra Pradesh region, graced him with Gandhi-like empathy.
The future physician was a child when his father died. That left his mother to raise him as a single parent. On top of that, she grappled daily with diabetes.
He knows what diabetes can do to eyesight. Same for other optical maladies, many of which are easily preventable and treatable on these shores.
Through his Eye Foundation of America — call it an Ophthalmologists Without Borders-type concern — he and his other colleagues who volunteer have tended to more than 2 million patients, while performing some 300,000 vision-saving surgeries in 21 countries, including, and especially, India.
Like his friend and fellow Rotary Club member Majumder, the fulfilling work comes from helping West Virginians and the others, in their home cities and provinces in India.
“It’s a blessing to be in both places,” Majumder said, “and to salute India on its 75th.”
Majumder’s India is diversity, he said. His India is Bollywood, beating hearts and people getting by in a place that, while not perfect, is still something they’ll always call theirs — after that midnight tryst with destiny peeking back through scratchy, black-and-white film footage.
Passports of empathy
Raju, meanwhile, will spend part of the Mother Country’s birthday in Zoom meetings with the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
More medical missions are planned with the sanctioning and blessing of the embassy when the pandemic does lift — if it ever does.
Raju is fond of using colloquial English to encapsulate his life and times, here and there.
“I’ve got one foot in Appalachia and the other in India,” he said. “And yesterday is a canceled check. There’s always promise for tomorrow.”
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