A new Gandhi, 15 km from Gandhinagar

Vijaysinh Parmar TNN
Shertha (Gandhinagar District): For most NRIs, a visit to their roots in Gujarat is full of nostalgia. Seldom beyond that. But, for Prof Vitthalbhai Patel, this village, located 15 km from Gandhinagar, means much more. For the past four years, since his return from the US where he worked as a professor in mathematics at Humboldt State University near San Francisco, he has been sweeping and cleaning the village’s public places like the chowk, bus stand and school. Now 71, he wakes up at 5 am and go on his bicycle with a long-handled broom and is at work for the next two hours. Everyone knows him as Vitthal Kaka. He was the first person from his village to go abroad for higher studies in California in 1965. After four decades in the US, he retired from Humboldt. He always wanted to come back to Shertha but when he finally landed here, he was pained to find his village was just a pile of garbage. “I decided to do this work which people thought to be bhangi’s work.” Some embarrassed people even asked him to employ a couple of people to do the dirty work and he politely told them that they should honour the dignity of every labour. “Because of Vitthal Kaka, the villagers have become conscious about littering in public places,” says Vikram Thakor, who runs a tea stall. Vitthal Kaka occasionally writes articles on mathematics and the American education system in reputed Gujarati magazines. But he also goes to the same school he attended as a student to teach maths because the school has not had a maths teacher for years. Kaka says: “I want to teach until my death. I even wish to die in a classroom.” Kaka has a doctorate in mathematics from Berkeley where his research guide was Prof Hans Albert Einstein, the great scientist’s eldest son. Einstein Sr had said about Gandhi: “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” It is actually harder to imagine people like Vitthal Kaka exist today.