He’s just back from Germany and has a quaint little seaport town in South India on his mind, but for Karan Singh, son of the late Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir, every now and then it is Mumbai that beckons him from the world of politics and home affairs in Delhi and Kashmir.
“The city is my second home,” he admitted, adding, “I love everything about it, the people, life and the way of living.”
He hasn’t mentioned Bollywood, one tells him. “Well, I’m not really a movie buff,” he wards it off with a touch of diplomacy, with a: “Other things fascinate me. I have six grandchildren now and I’m 77. Do I look my age?”
Of the things that dominate his thoughts, art, music and philosophy take the lead.
“Politics was half my life, it is now just a third of it. It’s a deliberate move on my part,” he laughed.
He’d rather take on a spiritual quest, one learns. A large part of his time, he spends giving lectures across the world on Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo. The one thing, he stresses the most everywhere is the importance of inter-religious harmony. Environmental issues matters are on the list too.
“Inter-faith understanding and the environment are both healing factors for any society. If we destroy our environment, we destroy the foundations of our existence,” he surmised.
The thought arises from Karan Singh’s own love for nature, one that finds him comparing even small everyday things to the beautiful valley of Kashmir.
“In an art show once I found a canvas that was in blazing orange so much like autumn there,” he said, adding, “I’m a mountain man, I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else, see — I’m stuck in Delhi for the last 40-45 years….What to do?”
With his wife princess Yasho Rajya Lakshmi, he visits older son Vikamaditya who takes care of the palace-cum-hotel in Kashmir, younger son Ajatshatru who is based in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh and manages the heritage hotels there, and their daughter who in married in Srinagar.
“I keep telling my sons that one has to look forward and work well, that has been one of the secrets of my life. The feudal system in any case is disappearing and while I have given up the royal title long ago, I’ve come to realise that being alive at this stage is a blessing, it’s an exciting stage of living,” he ended.
t_ismat@dnaindia.net
