Many times people ask me on when exactly my thinking took a certain turn. The answer to that is when a guy called Satyendra Sunkavally came into my life. Undoubtedly, he is the most intelligent and knowledgeable man I have ever met in my life. He was a couple of years younger than me and my junior at the Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. I was studying civil engineering, he was in the mechanical branch.
He was a voracious reader and would analyse the book and its author with such depth and detail that one would understand what motivated the author to write. He could point out every book’s shortcomings and the impact his words would have on different individuals depending on their sensibilities.
Not only the students but even the lecturers were scared of his intelligence. I could see the tension on a lecturer’s face whenever Satyendra raised his hand to ask a question.
He used to come to college in Hawaiian rubber chappals, sit in the last bench, borrow a paper torn from another student’s book and jot down some points during a lecture. He would leave the class abruptly once he felt he had understood the lecturer’s point or if he felt that the lecturer was useless.
Satyendra read textbooks as one would read a fiction novel. His interests were unimaginably varied and intense. I thought I knew at least a little bit about cinema but he understood cinema much more deeply, and his interests were varied.
He introduced me to the teachings of the various philosophers starting from Plato, Emmanuel Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Ayn Rand and, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. He would talk about these philosophers to me as if they were kids. At that time and even now I believe Satyendra was more intelligent than all of them perhaps because his understanding of them was far greater than mine. I couldn’t question Satyendra on their thoughts. So for all practical purposes he was superior than them for me.
He would see things beyond the obvious. Once, we had gone to see the medical thriller called Coma adapted from a novel by Robin Cook. A scene in the film showed the leading lady getting trapped in a hospital morgue with dead bodies hung in plastic sheets. Everyone, including myself, was terrified, concerned about the plight of the young woman. But Satyendra talked about the dead bodies as individuals. They would have laughed, cried and nurtured their own dreams but now they were all reduced to mere props so as to invoke fear among the audience.
On another occasion we went to see the film Papillon. In the interval we bumped into our college principal. Satyendra told him he was watching the film for the seventh time. The principal said that he didn’t find anything in the film to merit so many viewings — to which Satyendra said that obviously he saw something in it which the principal couldn’t. To this the principal countered that if he was so observant, why see the film seven times, to which Satyendra replied, “Why do you make love to your wife every day?”
Much later after his retirement that principal wrote an article for a magazine. It was about “The one student I will never forget”, based on his interaction with Satyendra.
Obviously my four-year association with Satyendra and my understanding of him cannot be encompassed in the space of a single column. After finishing college we were out of touch not by my choice, but because he was bored of me. When I was shooting a film in his town, I tried to trace him. I found him in a windowless room filled with piles of books. His eyes were filled with boredom. Perhaps he was saturated with knowledge, it seemed as if there was no more excitement left in his life.
My relationship with him varied between awe and fear. I feared him because I was insanely jealous of his brilliance. I was angry that he could make me feel like a nobody.
Now I fear him because I have seen the negative effects of his brilliance. He is bored to death of everything and everyone in life. He’s almost as good as dead. His eyes were unseeing when I met him last. I could see his mind was not responding, he cannot relate to any of the stuff that common people like me get excited about. As a result, he seems to have cut himself off from the world.
The greatest thing that happened to my life was that I had a few conversations with Satyendra Sunkavally which changed my life. And the greatest fear he put in me is the realisation that there can actually be such a thing as too much intelligence.