In London, a perfect Gandhi Jayanti day

Just a perfect day, drink Sangria in the park/

And then later, when it gets dark, we go home.

So sang Lou Reed in Perfect Day, from his remarkable, rock-music-transforming 1972 solo album Transformer.

I myself had just such a perfect day as Lou Reed described this Gandhi Jayanti. I didn’t drink Sangria, of course, but I was in the park. In the park in Bloomsbury, London, where the rather gauche Gandhi statue occupies the centre. And then, later, when it got dark, I went home -- to Gandhi’s home. In fact, I went to two of his homes, at least two that are publicly recognised in London with Blue Plaques affixed to the building facades declaring that Gandhi had lived in them.

Gandhi stayed in several other places in London as well, including at least one night at what was called India House in the early 1900s, a hostel set up for Indian visitors that later ended up housing the Indian Home Rule League headquarters. Savarkar lived in that house from 1906-1909 -- as a Blue Plaque affixed for him attests -- while he was studying for the bar at Gray’s Inn. I believe it was there at India House, on an evening in 1906, that Gandhi and Savarkar met in person for the first time.

There is another Gandhi residence out in the east end of London, in what was a poor, working-class neighbourhood, where Gandhi chose to stay, dressed in a dhoti and living amongst the English poor, while representing the Indian National Congress during the second Round Table Conference in 1932.

So, that’s two of Gandhi’s residences and one of Savarkar’s, all memorialised by Blue Plaques. But this only scratches the surface. You can also happen across the houses where Tilak, Nehru, Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, etc., lived during their various sojourns in London. Or the cottage in Hampstead Heath where, in 1912, Tagore set to work on translating Gitanjali into English, leading the following year to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first non-European to win it. In all cases, again, marked with Blue Plaques commemorating the illustrious occupants of these variously situated digs.

As someone who thinks incessantly about history, I am absolutely elated visiting these houses. Whenever I have the opportunity, I will spend my weekends trekking from one of these Blue Plaque residences to another. I get transported, walking those same pavements as these persons did a century or so ago. I imagine what their occupants would have been thinking, what they would have said. I lose myself in admiring the buildings around their homes that they themselves also must have taken the time to admire.

Just a perfect day, problems all left alone/

Weekenders on our own, it’s such fun/

Just a perfect day, you made me forget myself/

I thought I was someone else, someone good.

It is not, obviously, only the giants of modern Indian history whose houses across London get marked with these Blue Plaques memorialising their famous inhabitants. On the days before and after Gandhi Jayanti, I took strolls to and/or through the houses of Sigmund Freud, Isaac Newton, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats — the list goes on and on…

Oh, it’s such a perfect day/

I’m glad I spent it with you/

Oh, such a perfect day/

You just keep me hanging on.

At the end of each of these long pilgrimages through London, when the adrenaline begins to thin, I begin to wonder why Delhi or Mumbai — just taking two cities I know well — have nothing like this network of Blue Plaques. Sure, we have illustrious persons that we grandly recognise, and often their residences are marked, but we always bureaucratise everything, creating museums, rules, colossal statues, and red tape. I think this may serve to distance us from these remarkable persons rather than allowing us to imagine being amongst them, walking and seeing and breathing with them. And especially becoming them. Also, what about our novelists and poets and scientists? Don’t we want to see, in a quotidian, non-bureaucratic way, how and when and where they lived among us?

I honestly don’t know what Lou Reed meant to say in the outro to Perfect Day, but I heard it in a special way this Gandhi Jayanti. I think it’s a warning about what happens when a culture doesn’t take small steps to breath real, human, everyday life into the arts and sciences. I know he was on heroin, but I think Lou Reed may be telling us that our cities need Blue Plaques:

You’re going to reap just what you sow/

You’re going to reap just what you sow/

You’re going to reap just what you sow.