A Comma in a Sentence- Extraordinary Change in an Ordinary Family Over Six Generations

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A simple, heart-warming tale of an ordinary family from South India living through extraordinary times of change.

In the early 1800s, in the small, sheltered village of Vilakkudi in the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu, Ranganathan, a small-time landowner, was raising his children, at the time unaffected by British rule in India or upheavals in the rest of the world. As time passed, railways were built and newspapers appeared; isolated villages like Vilakkudi were exposed to social and cultural change. It is this transition that the author. Ranganathan's great-great-great grandson, tries to trace through the story of his family.

Anecdotal and fascinating. A Comma in a Sentence includes the experiences of Ranganathan; of Ooshi, the author's great grandfather, who was deeply concerned by the mismanagement of the great Madras famine by the British (an incidental benefit was that the family could earn a wee bit more out of paddy in those years); Gopalan, the author's grandfather, who encouraged modern school education for his children; Rajam, the author's father, whose generation moved to the cities for the first time to find work in colonial Calcutta; and R. Gopalakrishnan himself, whose generation was the first to attend college and whose children-the present generation-were fortunate to study in universities like Stanford and Harvard.

Told in lucid, insightful prose, this story provides a microcosmic view of the societal changes India has seen over the past two hundred years.

R. GOPALAKRISHNAN (Gopal to friends) is a reputed business leader who spends his early mornings doing what he loves most: pondering and writing. An inspiring speaker and a deep thinker, he loves to connect stand-alone dots to weave distinctive and masterful narratives.

He has authored three bestselling business books during the last eight years. A Comma in a Sentence is his first book outside of the business genre.

Gopal lives in Mumbai with his wife, Geeta. Their three children have the traditional and the contemporary embedded in them.

Every narration in this book is real, based on real characters. My grandfather's grandfather, Ranganathan, was born around 1824. This book traces the evolution of our family from that period. In the interests of narrative continuity, I have traced the descendants of Ranganathan via his son, Ooshi, and my father, Rajam, onwards to the next generation.

Nineteenth and twentieth century colonial Indian society evolved differently than those of Europe and America. During the 1850s, Europe was experiencing what history has come to recognize as the spring of nations. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Austrian Empire, all experienced revolt against their leaderships. America was torn between the Unionists and the Confederates, and held together by a lion-hearted Abraham Lincoln. Our village was sequestered, not just from such global events but even from much of what was happening within India.

Unlike western countries where birth and death registries and church records exist, in India we have no such records.

I first met the author, Gopal, as I came to know him, when he was sitting behind a spacious desk set in his tastefully but unostentatious office in Bombay House, the headquarters of India's largest business conglomerate, Tata. On that occasion I described him as 'nattily dressed, with his matching shirt and tie, fashionable rimless spectacles, and neatly trimmed graying hair'. He seemed every inch a top modern executive. That impression was confirmed by the staccato but polite sentences in which Gopal talked and his mastery of all aspects of the highly varied twenty-seven publicly listed companies in the Tata group.

The next time I met Gopal he was emerging from the changing room in Mumbai's Bombay Gymkhana after playing tennis, before heading for work. He was greeted by several members and was clearly popular and respected. Yet this executive-who has succeeded outstandingly in the highly competitive world of two multinational conglomerates, and is totally at home in the top echelons of Mumbai society who are to be seen in the Gymkhana club-does not come from a privileged background.