Manav remarked "Oh! She was something!" I asked if he had met her. Manav smiled, and told me that Mother Theresa had presided at his naming ceremony. I asked if he was Catholic and he laughed and said no, that didn’t matter, she was an old family friend. He whipped out his wallet and pulled out a picture of himself as a baby with a smiling Mother Theresa.
I was impressed. Sam then cut in. “Oh yes, she was relentless, I remember she came up to me on the airplane once and said Sam, you must read this.” She handed Sam a card with a biblical scripture on it. She did that a lot, Sam said. He still has her cards.
I remarked that this was really quite remarkable, here we were four people having dinner and two of them knew Mother Theresa. Sam and Manav started laughing.
Dinesh is a Member of Parliament from Kolkata, where Mother Theresa had her headquarters. Dinesh smiled shyly and explained that he and his wife used to drive Mother Theresa all over town in his tiny little car. She’d be in the front seat, giving instruction to Dinesh and his wife on how to drive and where to drive. When she came back from receiving her Nobel Peace Prize, Dinesh travelled with her from Delhi to Kolkata and then accompanied her back to her house. “She had a very strong will,” Dinesh remarked.
Four of us at dinner, three of them knew Mother Theresa personally. I was impressed. India clearly had much to teach me. This is when my hope in the possible success of this satyagraha campaign was renewed. I had begun to despair hope under the legal onslaughts from the U.S. and Europe, and in India I was seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. In India, people might listen and I resolved to return frequently. I wanted to do this, as Justice Ranade so aptly put it, to educate myself and to educate my rulers. Access to knowledge is the great promise of our times and to make that promise real is the great challenge of our times. I returned from India determined to renew my efforts.
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