Kerala ex-CM Pinarayi Vijayan waiting for a train at Kannur station… it reminds me of those earlier gestures of ordinariness my father Sankara spoke of—Achutha Menon quietly boarding a KSRTC bus back to Thrissur, EMS living in a small party flat in Thiruvananthapuram till the very end. Power there is not a throne to cling to, but something handed back without fuss.
Kerala, God's own country and devil's too, carries this paradox in its people. Educated, alert, unwilling to tolerate arrogance—even when the government has achievements to show, they vote it out. And those who lose power do not resist returning to ordinary life. They stand at bus stops, railway platforms, in small apartments, blending back into the crowd.
Once, Sandeep Dixit came to APU as a guest lecturer on Policy and Politics. I asked him about his mother Sheila Dikshit—who governed Delhi for fifteen years, who held a capital city of millions in her hands, who oversaw its transformation through the Commonwealth Games years. He answered without performance, without pride or self-pity. She lives in a small apartment, he said. No lift. Knee pain keeps her from going down the stairs, from attending any public function.
That detail landed quietly but hard.
Power is partly logistics—cars, offices, access, priority, crowds parting. The moment it ends, you discover how much of your physical world was organised around that apparatus. The knees that once carried her through rallies and corridors now needed a lift that wasn't there. The radius of a former Chief Minister reduced to the walls of a walkup flat.
And yet—no bitterness in how Sandeep said it. Just a fact. This is where she lives. This is her world now.
It rhymes with the Pinarayi photograph in a way that surprises you. Both images strip away the Monroe mask and leave just a person. One sitting on a platform bench, waiting for a train that will not wait for him. One sitting inside, unable to go down the stairs.
But you don't have to lose power to practice this ordinariness. Some carry it while still at the peak.
At Wipro, I saw Azim Premji walk into the cafeteria many times — then Chairman of one of India's great corporations — and simply join the queue. No aide holding a tray, no table reserved, no subtle parting of the crowd. He would stand and wait his turn like everyone else, and he always chose the Healthy Menu. Now, I was never entirely sure whether that was a genuine commitment to nutrition or simply the wisdom of a shorter queue — and I say this having tasted it once, it was not particularly appetizing. But there he was. The chairman. Waiting. Choosing the simpler thing.
There is something in that image that belongs alongside the railway platform and the walkup apartment. Not loss, not limitation — but choice. A daily, quiet, almost stubborn insistence on not letting the Monroe mask harden into the only face you have.
And then there is Fr. AMA — our Zen Master at Kanzeon Zendo. His ninetieth birthday was not a different day. As usual, he was there for early morning zazen, sitting in silence as he has through decades of dawns, as if the years themselves were just passing weather. After the sitting, we all joined together to cut a cake and wish him. Before that I asked him — how does it feel to be ninety?
He smiled. And said: "Tired and peaceful."
Not grateful. Not blessed. Not the performance of a milestone. Just two words carrying the honest weight of ninety years, with nowhere left to hide and no desire to hide anywhere. A man who never put the Monroe mask on in the first place — and so had nothing to remove, nothing to hand back, nothing to prove by standing in a queue or sitting on a platform bench.
The cake came after the silence. That detail is everything.
There is a teaching here: roles dissolve, presence remains. The train platform, the bus seat, the cafeteria queue, the apartment without a lift, the zazen cushion on a ninetieth birthday morning — these are not falls from grace, but reminders that masks cannot last forever. Kerala's greatest gift may not be its backwaters or greenery, but this democratic ordinariness — where even ex-Chief Ministers wait with the people, unadorned, unafraid. And perhaps Delhi's most honest image is not its monuments or its power corridors, but a former CM quietly watching the city she built from a window she can no longer easily leave. And perhaps corporate India's most quietly radical image is a billionaire chairman holding a cafeteria tray, wondering, like the rest of us, whether the healthy option is really worth it.
And perhaps the most radical image of all is a Zen master on his ninetieth birthday, sitting in the same silence he sat in on every other day — because for him, there was never a mask to slip.
It is both God's country and devil's country because it refuses to sanctify power. What it sanctifies instead is the ordinary pulse of life.
The train platform, the apartment without a lift, the cafeteria queue, the zazen cushion — all say the same thing.
You were never the chair. You were always just yourself.
