It is a day for memories.
I was 15, in Calcutta and had ongoing final school exams.
When JFK died at 1230 CST on 22nd November, it was almost midnight in India and I had just gone to bed. I was first to wake up the next morning around 5am to do my last minute review for the days exams. But I always started by going through the sports pages and the comics in the papers. The news just made the headlines in the editions of the two newspapers we got – The Statesman and the Amrita Bazar Patrika. For a 15 year-old schoolboy JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy represented all things American and all things admirable. I woke my parents after seeing the headlines in a state of disbelief, as if they could somehow make the news disappear.
I cannot remember what exam we had that day but I do remember that we talked about nothing else. Within our little group at school we were in the throes of just becoming politically aware. Within our group we had staunch capitalists and die-hard communists (of the Soviet Union persuasion since India had had a border war with China the year before) and every shade in-between. But political leanings were irrelevant that day. There was a sombre, subdued mood among the entire class and the teachers. Few had much experience of violent death. We all knew that our final exam results would be decisive in the choice of which University we would get into and that our futures depended on our results, but there was an underlying realisation that this event, far away across the world, was something probably much more important and fateful than our exam results.
Of the 10 in our group, two have died. In reality and in hindsight, for each of us, the exam results we achieved has probably had a much greater direct effect on our careers over the 50 years since then, than JFK’s asassination. But something inside each of us, I think, changed that day. Whatever JFK may have achieved as a politician is fading rapidly as time passes. But the impact his death, and the manner of his death, had on those of his time will remain till they, too, pass on.
I cannot remember much about those exams 50 years ago. But I can remember with astonishing clarity exactly how I felt when I first saw the headline that JFK had been shot dead. It is a crystal clear emotional recall which I cannot fully articulate.
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