I may as well be honest with you, folks. I was never a potential Nobel Prize winner at school. Indeed, if prizes had been given out, the one inscribed with the words ‘Somewhat thick, but we like him anyway’ would have occupied pride of place on my mantelpiece. I drove my chemistry tutor to within touching distance of a straitjacket, a succession of math tutors would get nervous tics at the very sight of me and my prowess at physics can be judged by the fact that I once connected an extension-board plug to itself.
I enjoyed marginally higher strike rates in subjects like English and geography, but not high enough to get those teachers whooping and hollering. Among all the gloom and despair, however, one subject stood out like a beacon – history. I nonchalantly aced every test, exam and project that was thrown at me, to the extent that my tutor proudly held me up as an example of a model history student. She needn’t have bothered with the praise, really, because I would have happily sat through class after class of history lessons, rapt in attention. No matter how badly the textbooks were written (and they were quite spectacularly awful), history was endlessly fascinating. Art, culture, architecture, wars, battles, taxation systems, myths, legends – I devoured it all with relish. To me, history was something I could reach out and touch, and one of the reasons it was so energising was that it was replete with characters. Imagine history without names like Alexander the Great, Chandragupta Maurya, Shah Jahan, Napoleon, Hitler and Che Guevera. Or, in this case,Tipu Sultan.
As I stood in front of a life-sized portrait of Tipu in Dariya Daulat Bagh, his summer palace in Srirangapatna, I thought that however interesting a character he was, he certainly looked nothing like he did in the textbooks. The image I had in my mind was the classic Tipu profile – a slightly round face, slender eyes and a gravity-defying moustache. His portrait, however, showed him to be of medium build, with a rugged, intelligent face and piercing eyes, and wherever I went in the room he seemed to be looking directly at me (he was, as I discovered – it was one of those nifty portrait techniques where the subject always looks at you, no matter what the viewing angle). Regardless of how he looked, I was convinced that he was the classic case of a man far ahead of his time.
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