“I saw how proud my father was when I came home for a visit; he took out his wallet and showed me all the press clippings about my posting that he had neatly cut and saved,” Mr Mahbubani writes.
The senior Mr Mahbubani had risen through a hardscrabble existence, wound up as a salesman in a Sindhi textile merchant’s shop, and got into trouble with the law – fetching him a jail term that would break up the family.
Mr Mahbubani’s narration reveals he himself was firmly on his mother’s side, and he credits his late mother for his own in-built resilience – even if your tummy is churning, walk around as though you have ghee (clarified butter) on your lips!
Anyone who watched Dean Mahbubani endure the travails that followed his Op-ed in The Straits Times on Qatar’s lessons for Singapore, and the Huang Jing episode, would know the good professor learnt that lesson well.
Years later, his elan is intact, and he continues needling Western audiences to rethink attitudes to China, and much else.
That said, this isn’t as much a column on Mr Mahbubani as about parent-son relationships, which can be complicated. In the best of times, it is said that male children start out as mama’s boys and end up as father’s best friends.
But it isn’t always so.
Frosty fathers
In the era that Mr Mahbubani was born, it was common in many Indian families for fathers to keep children at a frosty distance – no doubt, all part of creating the aura required to assert authority over what often were large households.
That was the case with my friend, M, who gained fame as a broadcaster on the BBC’s Hindi service.
Some three decades ago, when he published his first book, M proudly took a copy back to his father who lived in Lucknow, the state capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh.
Living The Asian Century by Kishore Mahbubani. PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO
When he entered the household the womenfolk – his mother, sisters and the domestic help – received him with raucous glee. His father, it appeared, was as usual alone in his study.
Freeing himself from mother and sisters he timorously opened his father’s study door to confront his sire who looked up at him inquiringly, affecting faint irritation.
‘Ah, you are here,” said the old man. “What’s up?”
“Babu-ji, I wrote this book and wanted to give you my first copy,” my friend said, waiting to be congratulated.
“Leave it there,” came the terse instruction.
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No further conversation ensued, and M withdrew from the room.
At the back of the house the joyous reunion resumed.
Several months later, when M went back to Lucknow, the events were a repeat of what had happened previously when he entered the family home.
Although he had no new book to bring to his father, as usual, he went to pay his respects.
“Ah, you’ve come,” said the old man, gruffly. “I have read your book.”
Was that all? There was not the faintest word of encouragement, much less praise. Rather crestfallen, M returned to the back of the house.
The following day M went to call on the neighbours.
In every home he entered, he was congratulated about his book.
It turned out that in the intervening months M’s father had visited them all and pressed the book on them – “Read this, my son has written it. It’s an excellent book!”
Like M, I, too, had a stern father, a man whose temper I quailed at, on the rare occasion it flashed.
Totally self-made, he could be infuriatingly inflexible, and I tended to keep a safe distance from him. Only when I was sick did I see his mellower side; several times in the night he would enter my room, feel my forehead for fever, and ask in a soft voice if I was fine.
Even so, I thought him to be dreadfully dull for a long time, until an incident changed my perception and he let me glimpse his fun side.
I was 16 when I entered university, weighed 47kg and was a mere 157cm tall – I would grow through my college years, eventually reaching a height of 179cm by the time I completed my master’s degree five years later.
At Bangalore’s St Joseph’s College, hazing was common, and the smaller boys got the brunt of it. In the hostel, it often turned to outright bullying. In an effort to appear tougher – and capable of handling myself – I had fallen into the habit of smoking. Cigarettes, which I thankfully junked many years back, also served as convenient bribes to soften bullies.
One weekend, I was visiting my uncle, the editor of Bangalore’s then dominant broadsheet Deccan Herald, when to my surprise I found my father at the dining table.
Uncle had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour and father, a senior civil servant in New Delhi, had flown down for a day to see him. A quick look of scrutiny of his first-born, and father resumed his conversation with Uncle.
After an hour, he suddenly turned and said to me: Let’s go have a look at your hostel.
My heart sank into my socks; my room was a mess of cigarette butts, pinups of Lamborghini Miura cars, Clint Eastwood and Raquel Welch. The bed was always unmade, football socks unwashed.
What was I in for?
As we walked through the hostel gates, I saw the warden, Reverend Valerian Farias, sitting on the stone bench in front of the grotto.
“Father, meet my father,” I exclaimed, and as dad paused, fled upstairs to my room. I had barely swept away the stubs, flung the ashtray beneath the bed, and taken off the Welch poster before there was a knock on the door.
Jesuit lodgings are spartan and there was little to see. When father extracted a cigarette from his folder I, affecting my sanctimonious best, offered to get him an ashtray from my smoker-neighbour’s room.
Not a man to waste his moment, father didn’t tarry long. He took out his wallet, counted out some currency notes and explained that this much was for my college fees, this for the hostel dues – and the extra was my allowance for the month.
I walked him back to the waiting car. Just before entering, he took his wallet out again and gave me a little more money.
“You’ll need this for cigarettes,” he said drily, and didn’t look back as he was driven away.
I stood there dumbly, the currency note flapping in the wind.
In their own way, even the most uncommunicative men, I am inclined to think now, have a special communion with their male offspring.
Perhaps some also feel a special responsibility to prepare them for the inevitable challenges of life.
Mr Mahbubani says he often works with songs from the late Bollywood singer Mohammed Rafi playing in the background. He might want to also listen to the country music legend Johnny Cash, particularly the ballad titled A Boy Named Sue.
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Gotta be tough
The song tells of a lad who grew up resenting his wayward and absent father, and for planting that name upon him, particularly. Running into each other as grown-ups, father and son brawl and the unlikely lyrics end with the father explaining that he named him Sue because “the world is rough/ and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough”.
Fathers influence sons – even the best of mama’s boys – in ways we don’t always recognise.
Years ago at our Lakeview home, I was taking my then toddler downstairs to play when, entering the lift with me, I saw him taking a quick glance upwards and swiftly adopt my posture: weight slightly more on one foot, a hand in the pocket. It was a sobering moment about parental responsibilities.
After reading Living The Asian Century, I spoke to some people who knew the late Mr Mohandas Mahbubani, and the picture that emerged was of a man who doted on his only son, intensely proud of his many achievements.
Apparently, he also was a consummate textile salesman.
Those who attended Dean Mahbubani’s very successful book launch would remember that one of the speakers noted his proclivity, when addressing the media or audiences over Zoom, to always have his books displayed prominently in the background.
At the recently held Caixin Asia New Vision Forum, where he was invited to speak on geopolitics, Mr Mahbubani spent the first few minutes talking about his books.
Where would you think all that superb – and in some ways, endearing – salesmanship comes from?
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