An ode to the country’s past, a vision for its future

On September 22, HT reflects on India's century-long journey through the eyes of centenarian voters, like 103-year-old Yog Bir Handa, witnessing the nation's transformation.

On September 22, HT turned the page on a century of chronicling India, from a fledgling country struggling to overthrow colonial masters to a mature nation flourishing as the largest democracy on earth. Also witness to this journey are India’s handful of centenarian voters whose lives have stood witness to the extraordinary transformation of this country. In a new series, HT goes back to some of them to understand their perspective on the past 100 years.

New Delhi: A large chunk of the wall facing Yog Bir Handa’s bed is plastered with photographs. The room is large enough for a king-sized bed, a couple of wooden cupboards and a pair of chairs. But the photographs, mostly pasted onto a sheet of faux brick wallpaper, stand out. An unassuming television jostles for space on the busy wall. On it is beaming a cricket match, where Bangladesh are struggling at 86-5 against a potent Indian side, coached by a man who, incidentally, finds pride of place in two of the many photographs that fence the TV – cricketer Gautam Gambhir.

“He has taken my blessings,” Handa says, looking up at the screen briefly, as Indian bowlers make light work of the Bangladeshi attack.

Handa turned 103 two weeks ago, a lifetime of memories that could populate several walls with several photographs. But his 10x16ft room at Bhagwat Dham Senior Citizen Home in Mayur Vihar offers only so much space.

“This was my choice. I decided many years ago that I wanted to live independently,” he says. “I have lived a full life and didn’t want to encumber anybody.”

But he is quick to point out, it is a century that has walked in lockstep with India – from the fetters of British rule to the flavour of freedom, from the teething troubles of a young nation to the promise of endless potential.

Handa is one of roughly 218,000 people aged above 100 in India and one of just five in Delhi, according to data from the Election Commission of India.

Born in Lahore on September 3, 1922, Handa grew up in a home, a neighbourhood, a city and a nation on edge. Independence seemed as uncertain as it did certain. Bloodshed was routine, horrors had become prosaic.

“Often, we had to step out of home wearing helmets. That’s the kind of threat we grew up in,” Handa says, sitting cross-legged on a wooden chair. But he is nonplussed. His crisp, white pinstriped shirt is tucked immaculately into a pair of beige trousers. A pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses lie on the coffee table. He needs them only occasionally.

Handa says he first left Lahore for 1942 to study engineering at RC Technical Institute in Ahmedabad. “There were no mechanical engineering programmes in Lahore in those days, and we had relatives in Gujarat at that time,” he recalls.

Ahmedabad, baked in Gandhian ideals, was his first brush with the freedom struggle. “[Mahatma] Gandhiji had influenced all of us. He had just kicked off the Quit India Movement, and we were an enthusiastic bunch of college students. We had no qualms about getting in trouble,” he says.

Even if it meant the threat of getting shot –one that stared him in the face one morning in 1942. The British had issued sepoys shoot-at-sight orders, he said. “I was told to take a bunch of boys and paste ‘Quit India’ posters across British buildings. We tried our best to go unnoticed, but a sepoy guard heard us. We heard a rifle cocking and went cold. He screamed ‘Stop! Who’s there?’”

“We would have got shot. Except, I recognised the sepoy’s voice and recognised him as ‘Khan saab’, who we would often have tea with,” he said. That chance acquaintance gave them a lifeline.

It also helped that the entire town knew Handa was the nephew of Gulzarilal Nanda, then a close aide of Gandhi’s who would go on to become India’s acting prime minister twice. “I just said I was heading back from his house to the college hostel.”

“You needed to be alert and have this presence of mind. Especially because we couldn’t allow fear to weigh the movement down,” he says.

But the spiralling violence and turbulence of the freedom struggle cut short his time in college and Handa packed off to Karachi in early 1945. A year-and-a-half later, he married Parmila, his neighbourhood sweetheart, on October 4, 1946.

“It was Dussehra evening, I remember,” Handa says, his eyes turning up to a garlanded photograph of hers that watches over the room from its western wall. They were married for 66 years, till she passed away in the same senior citizen’s home in 2012.

Months after he married, the country was at the doorsteps of freedom. But not before the bloody onslaught of Partition. “I was from a well-connected Punjabi family. Everybody thought we would be fine. But my parents, Parmila, and her parents insisted we leave when our neighbours started getting attacked.”

Parmila and he took a ship from Karachi to Bombay, where he stayed with relatives in Malabar Hills. And as the country unshackled itself from the British at the fateful stroke of that midnight hour, it stepped into the unenviable churn of nation-building – a task complicated by a raft of divergent provincial and communal forces.

Handa, who by then had snapped his ties with engineering just as much as he had with the newly formed state of Pakistan, started working with the conglomerate Larsen & Toubro in its correspondence department.

“During my interview, they asked if I knew anything about correspondence or writing. I said no,” he admits, barely able to contain his laughter. “But I did tell them that I was a fast learner and would do my job diligently. That seemed to work.”

Indeed, it worked for the next 35 years. Handa retired from the firm as its marketing manager, having travelled the company’s many offices in India and overseas, and settling in his Karol Bagh home with his family.

In many ways, Handa is most proud of the work he has done since then. “I realised that I had much more left to offer in my life, and I knew that there was no point killing the wealth of experiences I’d had,” he said.

Having cut his teeth in grassroots activism and organisation, Handa knew how to wade through layers of bureaucracy and effect changes at a local level.

The centenarian has a briefcase, for all the memories that his wall can’t hold. The stern, grey box is packed with documents, each neatly filed, pinned and stapled with other, cross-referenced relevant material. “This is to prove that your old Handa uncle isn’t just shooting his mouth off. I have papers to prove whatever I claim!”

One of his proudest achievements was in 1989, when he carried a neighbour in Karol Bagh who had been stabbed by robbers to a local hospital without waiting for help from locals or police. “All I knew was that she had to be saved. I couldn’t wait for the local inspectors to show up.” His promptness saved her life and earned him a commendation from Delhi’s then police chief. That certificate is still pasted on his wall of fame.

But, most of all, the commissioner also appointed him as the deputy chief coordinator of the local “neighbourhood watch”, a group of civic volunteers tasked with helping the police maintain law and order within localities.

He holds a laminated ID card ratifying that position close to him. “We reduced crime on New Rohtak Road to zero the following year.”

“And don’t take my word for it. Read the police report from that year,” he adds, handily pulling out a yellowed booklet from the briefcase as evidence.

But the republic has not turned entirely as well as he would have liked. “Character,” he says. It is a refrain he turns to often.

“Building a nation needs character. And somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost that character, which we worked so hard to carve out,” he says.

He points to crimes against women, communalism, corruption and the increasingly coarse political discourse as his biggest bugbears. Handa reads multiple newspapers, in English and Hindi, every morning and recollects a string of incidents to buttress his thesis.

“If a doctor is raped by a police volunteer, should we be proud of the country? If ministers call each other names, should we be proud?” he says, anguished. “We have misused Independence. This is not why we fought for freedom.”

But everything’s not lost, he insists.

“I have lived long enough to know that consensus and effort can move mountains. But, for that, you have to want to move them”.