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Amit Mitra is the secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI)

What does spirituality mean to you?
It is an inner power, a connection with energy, a force beyond the material which I sense. And this force has articulated itself in a number of core values, most importantly karma yoga, as a result of an interesting mixture of influences in my childhood.

What were those influences?
I am a midnight’s child, born in December 1947 to a father who had headed the secret service of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. He had been death sentenced for it and it is only my mother’s plea to Gandhi that saved him. Her father was Subhas Chandra Bose’s eldest brother and Gandhiji had heard her sing at their house in Calcutta. He wrote as much as forty five letters to the British Viceroy until his death sentence was commuted into life imprisonment. In the meanwhile, unbeknownst to all, my mother had replaced him as head of the secret service and was never caught.
She was an extraordinary personality. She would wear her boots and ride horses in the morning, then morph into the perfect Hindu space performing pujas, chanting, meditating. In the afternoon, she would drive around and cater to her social development work. It was a complete schizophrenia, a mixture of absolute modernity and deep religious sentiments to the point of being superstitious.

She died young though, and the atmosphere at home was then mostly political. My father was the prime example of karma yogi. He had inherited a few houses in exchange for all the properties lost by the family in Bangladesh at the time of Partition. He simply sold them one after another, in order to fund his campaigns. He never made money out of politics and always won his races. Why did he do all this, as money was never the point? For power? There was never that much of it. For recognition? I wouldn’t say. Originally belonging to the PSP which then merged with Congress, before walking out and becoming Bengla Congress, he became Deputy Speaker of the West Bengal legislature. At home, there were always crowds of people waiting to see him, often the poorest of the poor, smoking biris on the stairs.
At the same time, I was sent to a Christian Methodist missionary school, in the most sophisticated English speaking environment, where I would attend church and sing in the choir. The school opened my mind in indescribable ways. It was a centre for inquiry. It was a very stern one though, and the Principal was known for caning as much as for his staunch anti-Communism. When he learnt I was reading Marx, I was put under coventry, meaning I could not talk to any one, for a total of eight months. As a reward for my stubbornness and capacity to stand up to him, he made me principal monitor! And over time I became a committed non Marxist. This was mostly due to my uncle’s influence. He belonged to the Democratic Socialists, typically the most anti-Communists in India, because they read Marx and deferred with him. He introduced me to Arthur Koestler’s “God that Failed” and I began to think. He would constantly feed me with books as a counterforce to a regimented undemocratic society.

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