Fly Me to the Moon

Born in Bombay on 27 March 1937, Prafull Goradia spent the first seven years of his life in Morbi state where his late grandfather had been Divan, and subsequently, his father, Private Secretary to the Maharajah. Right from his college days, longed to pursue a political career. His first real break came, when, in the late Eighties, L.K. Advani singled him out for some issues of national concern he had raised in letters to newspaper editors, an old hobby of his. Advani advised him to start discussion groups with party workers, and he met Narendra Modi very soon thereafter. Modi, too, felt Goradia should keep in touch with the ideologues of the party. He was elected to Parliament in 1998. As a member, he intervened in several important matters that came up for discussion, making several significant speeches on contemporary issues, participating in debates and contributing to policy making. He was also instrumental in the construction of forty-nine shauchalayas from his MPLAD Fund. Prafull Goradia has penned several books: Profiles of Tea, The Saffron Book, Hindu Masjids, Muslim League's Unfinished Agenda, Anti-Hindus, and The Saga of Indian Tea. He has also written over 500 articles on issues of both national and global significance. His letters to editors of national dailies, numbering over 2,800, are useful for transporting contemporary readers over a period of modern India's political journey. He presides over The Indian School in Delhi which has earned a reputation for offering modern education entwined with traditional Indian ethos, a project close to his heart.Goradia strove heroically to conquer stage fright, and at the age of forty, learned to learned to deliver speeches in Urdu, having lived all his life in Bengal since the age of seven. He found himself drawn towards Hindutva, his form of cultural nationalism which meant upholding Hindu values, though not at the exclusion of other communities. Such valiant efforts found him a place in Parliament, although his tenure as a Rajya Sabha MP of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was cut short-a happening for which he holds no one culpable. What this writer avers is that even though he did not renew his role as a parliamentarian, his political thought processes continue as before. For a man whose life has spanned princely times, wartime rationing, Independence, the grisly spectacle of Partition, new threats on the Indian horizon and the purblindness of some of the nation's leaders, Prafull Goradia has plenty to write about.When Prafull Goradia was barely two years old, he made the kind of demand only a child can make of his parents. Looking up drowsily at the night sky above his grandfather's house in present-day Saurashtra, he told them authoritatively: 'Take me to the moon, or I won't go to sleep.'