9. A Book on the Ash Heap
I cannot say enough about the significance of the role that Youth for Christ (YFC) played in those early days of my conversion. On the day that I tried to take my life, it was these friends who prayed for me. It was Fred David who brought the Bible to my hospital room (and, by proxy, the words that breathed eternal life into my broken body). It was all of these, both before and after my suicide attempt, who showed me that I meant something, and that God loved me as an individual. It was my relationships at YFC that gave me hope of coming back to a caring group. And it was they who, as time passed, gave me opportunities for leadership.
So there it all was, the unlikely strands that came together, weaving the small patch of fabric that was my conversion — a song that I chuckled at, a soft-spoken man who drew me to the message of truth, a group waiting to share the love of Christ with me in my time of greatest need, a Bible brought to my mother for me, and a passage of Scripture that sprouted in the moisture of God’s sovereign grace. John 3:16 had given way to John 14:19, when Jesus said, “Because I live, you also will live.” It all came together for me in the hospital room, but Youth for Christ is where those seeds were sown. I had now found a new home in my faith — a new home, which I made my hangout. In these important ways I could say I was finally home.
Youth for Christ was the residence of Fred David, who lived in a one-room apartment on the roof. The main part of the roof, called the Barsati, which literally means “the place where the rain falls,” was where our group met once a week. Fred — an energetic, darkly complexioned Anglo-Indian — was the YFC director in Delhi. He was also very musically gifted, with a rich baritone voice, and he usually led the music at YFC gatherings, accompanying himself on his accordion. Although he was eleven years older than I, Fred would become one of my closest friends.
Then there was John Teibe, Youth for Christ director for all of Asia. He and his wife, Anne, lived in the upstairs flat of that residence. John was a long, lean Canadian from Calgary, Alberta, about six foot four, with an angular jaw and a permanently implanted smile on his face and personality. Along with Fred, John led most of the activities that took place at YFC.
If there was one place in Delhi where my Christian life was shaped, it was in that “upper room.” Overnight, after my commitment in the hospital, it became the place where I spent most of my free time. Monday nights were Bible study, called “TAMI Club,” an acronym for “Teens Are Most Important.” I loved every minute of those Monday evenings, soaking up everything that was taught. Each new lesson increased my hunger even more, and I hated having the evening come to a close. My parents had a stipulation that we were to be home by 9:00 p.m., and I always made it back just in the nick of time.
One of the first things I wanted to do after I came to the Lord was to bring all of my best friends to Youth for Christ. Every Monday night, I gathered a group of my buddies from university, all of whom were willing to go, and they came with me to TAMI Club. Now that I had become a Christian, this was what I had to offer them. For all those years, my Hindu friends had taken me to their temples and festivals, and now I readily invited them to come with me — Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists.
Religion was never an issue. Not one of those friends ever said, “I can’t come; I’m a Hindu,” nor was there ever any awkwardness or discomfort. We were close buddies — cricketmates and playmates from childhood, walking into each other’s homes as if they were our own — and we were as open with each other as Indian youth culture allowed. In all truth, we wanted the best for each other, and I wanted my best friends to have the hope that I had. They had been such an inspiration to me — sterling young men and women, way ahead of me in studies, yet always maintaining a close relationship with me.
In those first few months at TAMI Club, many of my buddies made commitments to Christ. I was so brand-new to the faith myself, I didn’t know the importance of following up with them on their commitments. I have always wished I’d had the wherewithal to do that. But a small core of those friends did follow through in their walk with the Lord, and they became tremendous young leaders.
Meanwhile, I was rapidly gaining a grasp on the basics of the faith: the life of Christ, the cross, God’s plan of salvation, Christ’s “Great Commission” to evangelize. During those intense months, as I gobbled up every morsel of learning I could, something changed in my life, causing an about-face I never would have expected: I became a voracious reader!
I had never been much of a reader, preferring to watch movies or discuss issues with people. I very rarely picked up a book out of interest — perhaps a Perry Mason novel by Earl Stanley Gardner or something similar from time to time. Then one evening, as I walked out the back door of our house, I saw something lying on top of the garbage heap in the alley. As I looked closer, I saw it was a book with no cover — an old, tattered copy of a volume I realized my dad must have thrown out.
Curious, I picked it up and read the title page: The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary by a man named W. H. Griffith Thomas. I had no idea who this author was, but my hunger was so fierce that I immediately opened it and began to read. Over the next few days, I devoured that book — of all things, a Bible commentary! It became a treasure, as I used it to help lead the Youth for Christ Bible studies when my turn came. I still have the tattered copy of that commentary in my possession.
Just like that, I was plunged into a world I’d never known — the world of reading. One of the first volumes I was presented with was The Cross and the Switchblade, an amazing story of the conversion of Nicky Cruz the gang leader and of the work God was doing in the lives of such young people through the ministry of David Wilkerson. I loved the book so much that I began seeking out biographies.
I lapped up the stories of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army; David Brainerd, the missionary to American Indians; and, most intriguing of all to me, C. T. Studd, the English cricketer who gave up everything to became a missionary. Studd had been the captain of Cambridge’s cricket team, had turned down an opportunity to play for his country, and even refused his family inheritance — all to help take the gospel into China and India.
As I read about these inspiring lives, the old adage became true for me: “Fire begets fire.” The standards these Christians set by their examples raised the bar for me. Though I later learned, as I grew in my faith, that these saintly lives weren’t as perfect as their biographers made them out to be, the basic truths were undoubtedly in place, and their examples stoked my consciousness as to what the Christian life could be.
Anything I could lay my hands on with the gospel message I read. As I continued to grow in my faith in the years that followed, for whatever reason the first writers I encountered were mainly English: the Oxford don and apologist C. S. Lewis, the converted journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and many of the Christian expository writers. I read everything I could of the works of F. B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, and particularly James Stewart of Scotland, whose writings were especially powerful. As I stood in a downtown bookstore poring over Stewart’s works, I thought, “Yes, this is the man I want to read.” I don’t recall anyone directing me to these writers; I just tried them out as I stood in bookstores, browsing through the shelves.
I also remained immersed in Bible commentaries, especially those by William Barclay. Commentators have the task of explaining to a biblical illiterate such as me what the Scriptures are all about, and — along with Meyer, Stewart, and others — Barclay skillfully guided me through a vast territory with great insight.
For the first time, I felt my mind being stretched — and I loved it. I realized that thinking could be fun, and with that simple realization I was sent headlong into the lifelong discipline of reading.
I was thumbing through the newspaper in our living room one day when I came across an item that left me reeling. It reported that a young man had doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire. As I read further, I learned that the young man was from our neighborhood — a classmate named Yudhvir.
My immediate reaction was, No!
Yudhvir was one of my closest buddies, a cricketmate at college and a part of our group. We all knew he was headed for a bright future in the department store his family owned.
I was stunned. Why would he do this? He seemed to have it made! Ironically, Yudhvir’s name meant “victor in battle.” Evidently, he had lost a very important one: the desire to live.
I tried to imagine the tall, lanky kid taking the measures required to end his life in such a horrific way. Then I quickly realized: I knew exactly why he would do it. I had been there myself.
That was me just a few months ago.
I jumped on my bike and rode straight to his family’s store, hoping to talk to someone. But when I arrived, the doors were closed.
That next day at school, some of my mates and I gathered together to talk. As I looked into my buddies’ eyes, I saw they all were shaken to the core. I myself wondered: “If Yudhvir did this, and I had tried to end my life, who knows who else among us might be on the edge?”
I had to challenge them.
“Guys, listen to me,” I said. “This is where all of us are headed. You need to realize, we’re all searching.”
I looked from face to face around the room. Each of my friends had taken my words at face value.
In the meantime, something significant had happened. A humble, very likable Indian man in his early fifties named Victor Manogaram, the director of India Youth for Christ, was coming to visit Delhi. John Teibe had mentored Victor, intending to one day pass on to him the mantle of the leadership of YFC Asia. Victor was never quite comfortable with that thought, although he never shirked it. You see, Victor continually battled an inferiority complex over having no education.
I don’t know if Victor even finished high school; I don’t believe he did. Yet he touched a great many lives through his simple preaching. Victor wasn’t a complicated man, and what came through to his listeners was simple humor, simple gospel, and simple authenticity. He was deeply dedicated, and he never shrank back from his calling because of self-doubt. Instead, he said, his weakness required him to constantly seek the Lord’s affirmation.
Christians and non-Christians alike were drawn to Victor for these very reasons. Both Fred and John knew the power in his preaching, and Fred tapped me one day, saying, “Victor is coming to speak this week. Can you organize a good gathering?”
At the time, our regular meetings drew about twenty to twenty-five young people. I glanced at the old typewriter on Fred’s desk and told him, “Let me use that. I’ll write a letter to everyone I know.” I spent hours typing out invitations to all my Hindu friends, as well as to any name that was given to me.
On the night Victor spoke, we had a record gathering of fifty-three people — more than double the usual turnout. The place was packed in that tiny living room, and among those attending was my brilliant, scholarly friend Sunder. As Victor delivered his simple, plainspoken message, something stirred in Sunder. That night, he committed his life to the Lord.
Years later, I would read an observation by G. K. Chesterton that, to me, summed up Victor’s impact. Chesterton says, in essence, that there is a dislocation of humility in our times. We have become more confident in who we are and less in what we believe. Our pride has moved us from the organ of conviction to the organ of ambition, when it is intended to be the other way around. In short, our confidence should be in our message and not in ourselves.
Victor Manogaram was a living example of Chesterton’s caution. It was a truth I myself was forced to draw upon throughout my life. In the years to come, with that beaver-like smile planted on his face, Victor would muse, “I cannot believe that God used an uneducated man like me to touch a nuclear physicist in the making.” Yes, that was Sunder’s future career. He was going to end up as a leading expert in the area of nuclear safety in Toronto, Canada.
In turn, Sunder’s commitment had a profound impact on his life and on our future friendship — we became soul mates. Of course, when Sunder’s parents found out about his conversion, they were stunned. Both Mr. and Mrs. Krishnan were orthodox Hindus, and this was scandalous to them. His mother was absolutely outraged and blamed me, yet his father remained silent as he pondered what it meant to the family that the oldest son had turned his back on the religion of his birth.
Many years later, I was talking with Mr. Krishnan in their living room one evening as I waited for Sunder, when a subtle shift in tone took place. Very quietly, he asked, “Tell me, Ravi. What was it that led you to your decision?”
At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Uncle,” I asked, “you mean, my decision for Christ?”
“Yes,” he said rather diffidently. “What led you to — to Christ?”
I don’t recall the precise answer I gave him. But I was intrigued that an adult — particularly this adult, for whom I had the greatest respect — would ask me this question. I had the sense that what I would tell him now would perhaps one day have meaning for him.
Sunder’s salvation was only one of the exciting things that took place seemingly every day at Youth for Christ. One Sunday, I was hanging around the office when a friend asked if I wanted to go with him to meet someone that afternoon.
“Sure. Who is it you’re meeting?”
“Kenny Gnanakan.”
My jaw dropped. Kenny Gnanakan was the brilliant guitarist for the Trojans, one of the most popular music groups in India. How this friend had made contact with Kenny, I didn’t know. But I jumped at the chance to meet this well-known musician.
As we spent that afternoon with him, I found myself sharing my faith casually but with visible effect. It was so effortless, I felt as if the Lord were giving me the words to say. Everything I had learned, it seemed, was on the very tip of my tongue. Ken at times seemed a bit distracted as I spoke, but I urged him, “Look, you’ve got to come to our club meeting tomorrow night. We’d love to have you.”
He agreed to come, but we didn’t count on him actually following through with the invitation. After all, this was Kenny Gnanakan! Yet, just as TAMI Club was starting on Monday evening, Kenny ambled in. That night, Fred David gave his testimony, and something wonderful happened. Kenny Gnanakan committed his life to Christ!
As it turned out, this was no fly-by-night experience for the talented musician. Kenny’s commitment stuck, just like Sunder’s, and it also would influence many. The die was cast; God’s hand was on our lives.
The biggest challenge I faced after my new commitment to Jesus Christ was to find a church where the Bible was preached. As I went from one to another, I didn’t understand many of the sermons I heard at some liberal churches. In one of the churches, the minister was obviously a brilliant man, but even as a newly converted teenager I knew he had very little to say on important matters. One of his sermons was titled “Adam, Where Are You?” and during his delivery, he stopped every few moments, looked out over the congregation and cried out in dramatic fashion, “Adam! Where are you?” It might have been more stirring to me had I understood a single thing he said in between these cries. Instead, I went away from most of his sermons bewildered and joking to myself, “If I were Adam, I’d hide from his preaching too.”
One Sunday, John Teibe happened to be in the same church. The pastor’s sermon that morning was “Something about Nothing,” and its effect on me was no different from most of his sermons. As John and I walked out afterward, he draped his long arm around my shoulder and said under his breath, “Well, Ravi, at least we can say the title warned us.”
I stifled a laugh. I appreciated John’s humor over something I thought he might find offensive. But John didn’t seem at all fazed by the “nothingness” he’d heard from the pulpit. Rather, he seemed to know that there was a great deal more to be said about the good news of Christ than what we’d just heard. I was eager to learn all of it.
Soon enough, I began to see how God was widening my glimpse of the Christian faith. A short time after my conversion, Bill Bright, the president of Campus Crusade for Christ, wanted to bring his ministry into India. When he applied for entry, however, the government turned down his visa. The reason for this, I’m sure, can be summed up in bureaucratic red tape.
When ministry workers in India learned what had happened to Dr. Bright, they grouped together with Christian leaders from overseas and appealed to my father. Not surprisingly, after a couple of phone calls all red tape had been cleared, and Campus Crusade came to India.
Why would my dad do this for Dr. Bright’s ministry? First, there was his nominal Christian background. I believe that this, combined with his sense of fairness, prompted him to reason, “Why should this man be turned down? He had done nothing to hurt the country. It’s not right.” I remember the night Bill Bright was in our home for dinner — little did I know what a giant in the faith he was. Years later, his stature only grew larger in my eyes when I spoke, at his invitation, at the Campus Crusade international headquarters in San Bernardino, California. What a small world, and at the same time what a large picture!
My life soon began to take surprising new directions in other areas. For years, my father had been friends with George Varghese, the general manager of Delhi’s largest hotel. Every now and then, my dad took us to visit Mr. Varghese, and I grew to admire the man. He would lead us up to the hotel’s luxury suites and along the way introduce us to the other impressive executives, as well as to industry leaders from around the world.
As we sat down with Mr. Varghese in one of the suites, the hotel staff waited on us hand and foot. My father and his friend would be talking casually, when the door would open quietly and someone would bring in a tray of food of the highest quality. Of course, that caught my attention right away. Then, before we’d noticed, our half-eaten plates were whisked away — and along would come another round of sumptuous delights.
Those experiences with Mr. Varghese resonated within me. And after my first year at Delhi University, which I somehow completed despite my suicide attempt that March, I went to my father to talk about what I wished to do with my life.
“Dad, you know how I admire Mr. Varghese,” I said. “I see all these big hotels, and I love the industry. That’s what I want to do. I want to go into hotel management. I want Mr. Varghese’s position.”
I’m not sure what my father heard in this that told him I had even a remote possibility of succeeding. I’d been a failure in his eyes in so many ways. But evidently he heard something.
“OK,” he said.
India is known the world over for its excellence in the service industry, and one of the industries that thrives in my homeland is hotel management. A great number of the people managing five-star hotels all over the world are Indian, and many were trained at the Institute of Hotel Management in Delhi. It is a renowned college, and some of its graduates go on to Cornell University, which boasts one of the world’s premier graduate programs in hotel management.
I had my sights set on the Institute, and my dad pulled some strings to get me in. Once again it was my mother who went with me to enroll, but this time it didn’t matter; I had been given a new lease on life, and I was enjoying it to the fullest.
About that time, a family we knew offered to let us use their BSA motorbike while they were on an overseas sabbatical. That bike became my transportation to the college, and day after day the twenty-five-minute ride was one of the most enjoyable journeys of my life. I can’t say I didn’t take risks, but it was a lot of fun zipping around and weaving through the traffic. And from day one, I excelled at the Institute, no matter what the subject. Business, economics, accounting, marketing, human resource management, reservation systems — my interest in all of them was keen. Food is a vast component of the hotel business, and I excelled there too. I had to learn nutrition, catering technology, food and beverage management, French and Continental cuisine, and yes, bar training (including mixing drinks, an aspect that was to shape a major life-decision for me later). Then there were the recipes we had to know backward and forward, some fifteen hundred for sauces alone.
I loved all of it, and my grades reflected my motivation. At the end of the first term — to my surprise and everyone else’s — I stood at the top of the class. Every term after that, I consistently ranked first or second. I had never imagined that one day I would walk up to the principal’s office of my college and see my name at the top of the list and hear my friends congratulating me — “All right, Zach, congrats!” I played cricket for my college, I performed brilliantly in my studies, and I longed for Monday nights. Life had taken shape for God’s glory.
The program at the Institute was designed to take three years, with the idea that we would pursue a master’s degree in hotel and catering. That was the goal for each of us: to place in a master’s program at Cornell or in England, followed by a three-year internship at a top-tier hotel. With that visibly clear aim ahead of me, life suddenly looked hopeful. My heart was filled with the possibility that now I was going to make something out of my life. A very real career path had opened up in front of me, and I knew I would succeed in it. I had a role model in George Varghese, someone about whom I could say, “That’s who I want to become.” I had very high standing as a student. And, with my dad’s contacts, I had every reason to believe I would one day be general manager of a large five-star hotel in India.
Along with everyone else, I wondered how such a turnaround could have taken place, and so swiftly. The key was that now I looked at life through a window of meaning. And that was the one thing I had been desperately longing for: meaning. Now everything in my life was packed with it: my studies had meaning, my family had meaning, my friendships had meaning, my sports had meaning.
All the things I had thought were the causes of my despair — my failing studies, my senseless wandering, my hopelessness — had actually been the results of my despair. The Austrian concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “Without meaning, nothing else matters. With meaning, everything else falls into place.” If you can’t see the why, you cannot live for the what. And as soon as I was able to answer the “why,” even my failures began to make sense.
On weekend mornings at dawn, a buddy and I would go to the Raj Path to study for our exams. He would find one tree and I another, and we would plant ourselves underneath them for the duration of the day. We would arrive at six or seven in the morning and stay until five in the afternoon, calmed by the serene surroundings as we sat soaking up our college subjects. Early on, I would start itching to go home, but I would be too embarrassed to tell my friend, who was much more disciplined than I.
We fed ourselves with delicacies from the hawkers who came by, offering chicken kabobs, ice cream, nan bread, and certain “unpronounceables” in English. I was still pretty much at the mercy of friends when it came to spending money, but my college buddies were as wonderfully generous to me as my friends from the neighborhood had been. My friend and I ate during our breaks, watching the families come and go, picnicking or playing or renting boats to paddle across the long, shallow reflection ponds. Sometimes small bands would be playing, or a carnival would be held in the distance. As the sun made its way across the sky and morning turned to late afternoon, I was always struck by how very beautiful the place was. But even more beautiful was the change I sensed in me. I could lie on the grass and stare at the sky, with tears of joy streaming down my face. I knew the author of life!
The rapid changes taking place in me daily were beyond my power to describe. My father, especially, was astounded by the fact that I held a top ranking in my class. Yet, from everything I had learned in my life with Christ, I knew that He had not just changed what I did but what I wanted to do.
The love I had begun to feel within was of a depth that couldn’t be spoken. It approached something like the beautiful love music in Indian culture. Love songs in India are of the deepest level, not lighthearted at all, with the words for “love” very carefully chosen. When an Indian talks about profound love, he may use the word mohabbat. The closest equivalent is probably the Old Testament word yāda
, when it is said that a man “knows” his wife. It is a rich word, used in the most intimate way.
That came close to my feelings about the turnaround that had taken place in my life in such a short time. I simply couldn’t describe what had happened. One day, I had been a creature of despair, irresponsibility, and failure. Then I became a creature of hope, diligent and accomplished in the things to which I set my hand. To me, the reversal was staggering. Nobody fully understood the dramatic transformation on the inside. This was the work of God.
It was also a huge paradigm shift for me to suddenly see life — my own and others’ — through the eyes of God. For years, I had looked at life the way a kid might work through a puzzling, new toy, taking it apart but not knowing how to put it back together again. He wonders, “What makes this thing tick?” So he takes a screwdriver and tries to unpack it, but with each piece he removes, it makes less sense.
Only Jesus could legitimately explain the multifarious strands of human personality locked within me. He could explain my emotional life, my actions, and my reactions. He could explain why I longed for human touch, and why it was actually the touch of soul that I was ultimately after. Without Christ, I still would have the gnawing undercurrent that had run through everything in my life and that had led me to the tragic choice that very nearly brought me to an end.
Jesus wasn’t just the best option to me; He was the only option. He provided the skin of reason to the flesh and bones of reality. His answers to life’s questions were both unique and true. No one else answered the deepest questions of the soul the way He did. And because Christianity was true, it was emotionally experienced. There was no greater example of this than my own life.
It was still some time before I could fully articulate the depth of change. My life had been punctuated by one failure after another, and there was a great deal of shame yet attached to that for me. The story of my early days was that only God’s grace could have brought about this new life for me. This was a new DNA, a new birth. There simply was no other explanation. The songwriter George Wade Robinson said it well:
Heav’n above is softer blue,
Earth around is sweeter green!
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen;
Birds with gladder songs o’erflow,
Flow’rs with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His, and He is mine.
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His, and He is mine.