Passion for learning

FIRST STIRRINGS

t r kakkar

 

Passion for learning

He is the only person who has worn four uniforms in his professional life, missing the chance to wear the fifth by a whisker.

 

do you know of a police commissioner, who has rubbed shoulders with three Prime Ministers, who rejected Sanjay Gandhi’s offer of a foreign posting; and who arrested a Chief Minister and an underworld don, not having any property in Delhi upon retirement? That is Tilak Raj Kakkar, a bureaucrat no politician could bend. Within a week of retiring as Secretary, Internal Security, he was out on the streets looking for a job? His new job, besides enabling him to buy a house, a car and other luxuries, provided him with the satisfaction of managing many education institutions, something he always wanted to do having not attended college himself.

 

He is the only person who has worn four uniforms in his professional life, missing the chance to wear the fifth by a whisker. As the youngest of three children of a well-to-do forest officer in frontier Pakistan, life was initially a bed of roses. But partition changed all that; his father and mother died in quick succession; poverty, pain and hunger became essential companions in the refugee camp that they moved into. This continued till his eldest brother managed to find a low-paid job and with it a ramshackle place to stay in Delhi Police lines. One of his early memories is of playing as a half-naked urchin with the children of other policemen. Hunger taught him many lessons in life, the most important being that ‘greed is bad. There is no need to be impatient. You will get what is due to you, sooner or later’....Read More