Saturday Evening Post
Making of the Encyclopaedia
From the Horse’s own Mouth
George Menachery
Four
At this juncture another incident
occurred. This I have narrated in my
introduction to the third volume in 2010.
“So I started writing the Introduction, full of
confessions, lamentations, regrets, and apologies,…..and also full of gratitude
and joy:
On the morning of July 3, 1970, while we were
all sitting in our drawing room, my father who was an addict of the Malayalam
newspaper “The Express,” which he was getting free for many years, read out an
item from it – an announcement that the 19th Death Centenary of
Apostle St. Thomas would be celebrated on a large scale in 1972. Then I said,
sipping my coffee, “I think I will bring out an Encyclopaedia on the Church in
India for the occasion.”
The Idea of writing a booklet on the Christian
Heritage of India was already in my mind, vaguely, ever since the 1969 national
seminar “Church in India Today” held at Bangalore. On and off I used to think
about that. But now I had fixed a date for its completion – not as a mere
booklet but a whole encyclopaedia.
Two months later, one day in September, I
thought of presenting this idea before Cardinal Parecattil. I was emboldened to
do this because I had interviewed His Eminence for a British weekly in 1969 and
on that occasion he had strongly praised my interventions at the National
Seminar and also spoken highly of my initiative in establishing in 1967
the first ever lay leadership training
institute in India. He even had provided me a cosy First Class Coupe in the
Special Train chartered to take His Eminence back from Bangalore to Ernakulam
after first returning from Rome as Cardinal.
Well, I wanted to give a blow by blow
description of my tedious journey that has now [then] lasted four decades,
giving importance to all those who had helped me in realizing my destiny. I
wanted to mention dozens of individual writers, scores of museums and libraries
in India, Europe, and America (and their curators and librarians), many
generous hosts and hostesses in different States and countries, and much more.
Then all of a sudden I realized that it would take up many pages to do justice
to all these matters, and a good deal of time which would further delay the
publication of the volume. So eventually I decided to restrict the introduction
to just one or two pages and to write a small separate book entitled the “Making
of the Encyclopaedia”.
But I am writing that small book only now, in
2023, thirteen years after I had made the promise to myself. These two
incidents, one the National Seminar experience, and two my announcement to the
family that I would make this encyclopaedia, and eventually to the public at
large, made me apply myself a little more earnestly and seriously to make the
dream a reality. And once I had made this decision public there was no escape,
and no possibility of going back on it.
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