Rita Nanda is one of the youngest persons I have met because she’s a learner. ‘Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young,’ Henry Ford had famously said, and Rita is the best example of what he was trying to portray. And she’s a good learner, perhaps, because she’s a good teacher (of political science for nearly three decades). After retirement she taught herself painting inspired by the European masters, long dead, via YouTube. This was after she learned French, when she was confined in her Shantiniketan house for a couple of months.
She will be 70 soon, and wonders loudly: why do people sit idle to ‘relax’? Sitting idle makes her restless. She needs to do something—and that invariably is very artistic. She has taught herself many skills, she’s not just a proficient painter, but also a master cook; knitting, stitching, embroidery, and a host of other things, are all her forte. The list is long and growing.
Though, now she says, ‘I’m getting weaker.’ Maybe physically, but the mind is firm and resolute, and that’s what matters. Her pursuit of happiness by being an active learner has kept her in good stead. And as she puts in more years, her desire to learn will only become stronger.
She has a special talent of being passionately curious—a twisted version of Albert Einstein's famous quote 'I have no special talent. I'm only passionately curious'—describes Rita well. Curiosity fuels her learning.
Learning to do new things is her way to interact, give back and look within. She helped set up the college library, where she was a teacher, with the help of some former students. It was a humongous task requiring cataloguing and methodological arrangement of thirty thousand books. To accomplish the task, she taught herself the library science and did so in quick time. She is the best working model of how small efforts add up to big results.
Rita dons designer-wear sarees that she designs herself. When she visited me, (thank you for the homemade teacake with chocolate chips and nuts), was wearing a black saree with brown motifs embroidered on it, in columns, at equidistance. The open side of the saree, in contrast, had a brown—with a golden tinge—floral-geometric pattern on a white base. The end was attached to a black silk cloth with intricate embroidery that she had painstakingly done with a lot of pleasure. While I was praising the intricate work on the saree, she interjects to say, ‘I also design jewellery.’ My attention shifted to the rings she was wearing, one of them studded with a big Emerald. ‘Green is my favourite colour,’ she retorts.
I’m bamboozled by her prolific artwork . Creativity, I reckon, comes to her like an upsurge, a tsunami wave. Perhaps, that explains why she has rendered so many ‘waves’ paintings inspired by Hokusai—the celebrated Japanese artist. She paints for hours, yet slowly, every day, and creates a body of work in a few months.
Impressionism is her genre; she’s inspired by the works of Claude Monet. The natural beauty of southern France has enthralled so many masters, not just Monet, but also Van Gogh, I tell her.
I gifted her a book by a renaissance master on painting techniques. It’s a short, yet, a comprehensive text on perspective and finer points of the craft. She read it in a few days, and acknowledged that it was complicated and meant for ‘the serious students of art.’ ‘That you’re,’ I said. She betrayed a smile.
Rita wonders, why do people sit idle to ‘relax’? Sitting idle makes her restless. She needs to do something—and that invariably is very artistic. Learning and doing new things is her way to interact, give back and look within and has kept her in good stead.
While she was reading it, the philosophical construct of capturing a moment by way of frantic brush strokes, ‘I was reminded of Rabindranath Tagore,’ she said. It was heartening to know that her artistic quest of global dimensions is anchored in Bengal. She’s from a family where music was a way of life, grew up listening to classical music, both vocal and instrumental; her father playing sitar is etched in her memory.
Rita is a mother of two grownups, both accomplished lawyers in their own right, Ritwika and Saurajay (I struggle to pronounce his name correctly, so she told me his nickname), they’re three years apart, and have done well for themselves. Her husband, Sanjay Prakas Nanda, an intellectual and a writer, worked with the American Consulate in Kolkata. Both the children were in college, when he passed away after a brief illness. Rita held the family together, and despite the setback, things have happened as they were supposed to. Ritwika and Saurajay are very different, yet similar in their devotion for their mother.
She mostly lives in Delhi with them, but misses tending to her garden in Shantiniketan (She’s learned gardening too). Rita gives them their space as she needs her own to learn new skills as part of her perpetual pursuit to be ‘relaxed’. She does things for the love of it, the process is important not the outcome. The process is the learning. One can’t miss the silent vitality she embodies. Perhaps, that explains why one experiences joy in her presence.
A certain condition of the knees has slowed her walk, but not her wandering spirit. She plans to visit Kerala with a bunch of friends around Christmas time. And this article will not be complete if I don’t mention that she's a great cook. There’s hardly anyone who feeds people like her, standing by their side. Ritwika was a bit embarrassed by what she felt was her overbearing hospitality; to me she was just forthright about her affection.
‘I tell my children and students to read the book and try to understand what’s being explained,’ she says. Self-study is ‘slow’ learning. It’s the metamorphosis caused by imbibing a skill by practicing–aligning your mind on doing something specific, repetitively.
Slow learning is like controlling the rhythms of your own life in a certain way, therefore, it's lasting. And becomes an integral instrument of self-expression. Rita has garnered varied means to express herself variously, to give voice to experiences and ideas that don't lend itself to words.
There will come a day, sooner than later, when Rita will have her own quintessential painting style like the sarees she wears.
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