An ordinary day

September 22 might seem just another day in time, with no great events to mark it as extraordinary. But you realise how each day holds the s...

September 22 might seem just another day in time, with no great events to mark it as extraordinary. But you realise how each day holds the seeds of human potential when the calendar reveals a few secrets. For instance, today is the birth anniversary of some pretty interesting people who impacted on our lives as we live them now. In 1694, it was the birthday of Lord Chesterfield, better known as the English milord who wrote instructive letters to his illegitimate son on how to be a gentleman. In 1752, Lord Chesterfield effected the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which the whole world now uses.

In 1791, this day saw the birth of Michael Faraday who discovered the principle of the electric motor. In 1922 came Chen Ning Yang, the Chinese physicist who disproved parity and won the Nobel in 1957. But my favourite, because of my obsession with American musicals, is the person whose death anniversary it is: American composer Irving Berlin, who passed into the Unknown in 1989 aged 101. He was born Israel Baline in Russia, the youngest son of a cantor. The family migrated to the US in 1893 and settled in New York’s Lower East Side (Remember him when you see The Gangs of New York, the movie that’s just come to India).

As a kid ‘Izzy’ sang songs for coins in the notorious Bowery. These years of poverty affected him forever, equating music with food, so that he spent the last twenty years of his life as a “paranoid reclusive tycoon” like Greta Garbo or Howard Hughes. When Steven Spielberg wanted to use one of his songs in a movie, Berlin, then 98, refused, saying he might use it in one of his own shows. Until Elvis Presley, Berlin was American music, right from his first 1911 hit, Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Along came God Bless America, which the US Senate famously sang after 9/11 and songs that even little Indian kids in Bombay schools learnt like the untropical White Christmas or There’s No Business like Show Business. Annie, Get your Gun (1946), Call Me Madam (1950) and three scores for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were just blips on the Berlin radar of 1,500 songs. This Is the Army netted US$ 10 million, which he gave to the US government and the royalties of God Bless America went to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Italian opera king Puccini and George Bernard Shaw wanted, in vain, to write lyrics for him.

It’s sad that he died so insecure. Tagore’s The Gardener could have helped: Beauty is sweet to us, because she dances to the same fleeting tune with our lives/Knowledge is precious to us, because we shall never have time to complete it/All is done and finished in the eternal Heaven.