Swami Vivekananda was never tired of repeating his clarion call to the youth of India, ‘You are the master of your own destiny.’ Many social reformers too have given similar calls to the youth to dream and work diligently to improve their social, academic, economic and political conditions despite being oppressed under adverse social conditions. Some listen to these spiritual and social reformers, pursue their exhortation and succeed.

One such person to succeed in our city, I do not know if inspired by such noble souls, is Narayan, who was the Mayor of our city (in 2000-01) and now, at age 60, is the Chairman of the Karnataka State Safai Karmachari Commission.

Born into a community which, under our enlightened and secular Constitution, is called Scheduled Caste of Madiga community in Karnataka, Narayan’s parents lived in a slum and worked as Safai Karmacharis, manual workers, that included manual scavenging work as well.

As a child, he lived with his parents and six siblings in an atmosphere and milieu that would not even allow one to dream for a better future. Poverty and hunger haunted him. Poverty forever degrades a person, never enables nor ennobles one unless made of a sterner stuff. Narayan apparently was made of a sterner stuff. He decided to change the course of his destiny.

Beginning as a manual scavenger at Mysuru Railway Station for about eight months, by age 16 he managed to study ending up as a class X drop-out. He got a job in the famous Ideal Jawa motorcycle factory of Farrokh Irani, a liberal, generous industrialist of our city. Many underprivileged had benefited from Farrokh Irani’s egalitarian approach to an enterprise and Narayan was certainly one such beneficiary.

From a paltry salary of Rs. 180 a month he got from the Railways for doing that dirty job, he got a decent, dignified salary of Rs. 1,800 a month at Jawa factory. Of course, in between these two jobs he had worked as a domestic help and also at the silk factory to supplement income.

From 1978 when he became a permanent employee at Jawa, he never looked back. It was a turning point in his life made possible by people who belonged to the upper class with a heart. The popular english weekly ‘The Week’ of Aug. 30, 2015 has written about him in its ‘The Indian Hero’ column under the headline “Clean sweep — One man’s inspiring journey from a manual scavenger to a Mayor and more” where Narayan has expressed his experience as a domestic help that shows his employer in poor light. May be the meaning of domestic work is different to different persons.

Nevertheless, for Narayan that was a springboard to get into Ideal Jawa that changed his life forever, for better. The service at the upper-caste house seemed better than the one Railways offered him. More than that the upper-caste family head kept his word and got Narayan the job in the factory.

Be that as it may, what is most admirable in Narayan was that despite a respectable salary in his pocket, he did not forget to help his fellow-men, the Safai Karmacharis. Whenever there were attempts to evacuate his fellow-men from their slums without showing them an alternative place, he would protest and take the lead to meet politicians and officials to get help. He was even imprisoned about four times, he says. That was when he came close to Vedanta Hemmige, MLA of Janata Parivar who made him the Director of Karnataka Slum Development Board when Ramakrishna Hegde was the Chief Minister. Later he became close to Siddharamaiah, then of Janata Parivar and thereafter never looked back. As a politician he rose to become the Mayor of Mysore City in 2001-2002. And now he has risen higher as the Chairman of Karnataka Safai Karmachari Commission drawing a salary of Rs. 1 lakh a month, riding an air-conditioned Toyota Innova car, functioning from an air-conditioned office in Bengaluru.

The Commission is a quasi-judicial body, not an implementing agency. Narayan has persuaded the Chief Minister Siddharamaiah to set up a Development Board for the over-all development of Safai Karmachari in Karnataka whose number, according to Narayan, is over 35,000. The Board is likely to be set up soon. If so, let us hope, Narayan will be its first Chairman.

‘Fame is the by-product of success,’ says the actor-poet Ayushmann Khurrana. Our Narayan is one local example where his success as a politician has brought him this fame. Let a thousand flowers bloom, like Narayan, in the garden of Safai Karmacharis and spread the fragrance of human kindness and compassion all around.

e-mail: kbg@starofmysore.com

source: http://www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore / Home> Abracadabra ..Abracadabra / by K.B. Ganapathy / Saturday – August 29th, 2015